What people believe you need to do to be an independent game developer

Aspiring game developers are starving for advice. I recently attended a meetup of game developers where an individual gave a formal presentation about how to become an indie. The presentation was thoughtfully crafted and well delivered, and it was entirely structured around imperatives—the things that you, the audience member, need to do if you want to be a successful independent game developer. The audience ate it up and asked for more. They were looking for the golden key that would unlock paradise.

There are two problems here, one overt and one subtle. The overt one is that there is no golden key. There is no set of practices that, if followed, will yield success. I imagine most of the audience knew this and were sifting for gold flakes. However, it was also clearly a mixed crowd, some weathered from years of experience and some fresh-faced hopefuls. I hope the latter were not misled.

The subtler problem was made manifest during the question and answer period when it became clear that the speaker was not actually a successful indie game developer at all. Their singular title had been in development for three years and had just entered beta. They had no actual experience from which to determine if the advice was reasonable or not. The speaker seemed to wholeheartedly believe the advice they were giving despite not being in a position to draw conclusions about their efficacy.

Once I saw the thrust of the presentation, I started taking notes about the kinds of advice the speaker was sharing. 

•  Document everything, and specifically create:
• Story and themes document
• Art and design document
• MDA document
• Have a strong creative vision
• Be a role model for the work environment you want
• Consider these pro tips for hiring staff:
• Use a report card to score your candidates
• Look for ways to get to know what it would be like to work with them
• Try collaborating with them as part of the interview
• Always have a back-up candidate, not a top candidate but someone you know you could work with
• Being their best friend does not mean you should work with them
• Thank people for their contributions and efforts
• Use custom tools to help you work better
• Use the Asset Store in Unity
• Use tools to help you test
• Automate as much as you can to save you time
• Learn to prompt so you can use generative AI
• It allows an artist to be a developer by removing coding barriers
• LLMs can replace tedious use of YouTube, Google, Reddit, etc.
• When pitching to publishers, have two versions of your slide deck:
• pitch slides: the version you send
• pitch presentation: the version you present
• Take budgeting seriously
• Budget for specific deadlines
• Don't spend your own money if you can get money from someone else (e.g. publisher)
• Get a job so that you can support yourself until you can get funding from someone else for the game project
• Quoting one of his professors: "To make money, you need to spend money, and to spend money, you need money."
• Don't get distracted by others (e.g. on social media)

These aren't the things you need to do to be an indie game developer. These are the things that an audience believed you need to do to be an indie game developer or the things that someone with a modicum of experience thought would be worth telling indie hopefuls. It seems to me that this is the advice you would get if you spent an afternoon collecting advice by searching the Internet. It's helpful for me to have a list of what people are likely to believe from consuming popular advice. Sometimes advice is popular because it is accurate; sometimes people tell you to make your game state global.

Three other things jumped out at me about the presentation. First was the unspoken assumption that one would be using Unity. There was no indication from the speaker that this was even a choice, and none of the questions reflected on it. Second, the speaker acknowledged the importance of automation and automated testing, which was great to see. Third, no one pushed back regarding the use of CoPilot or other LLMs to help with coding, whereas I suspect there would have been a riot had he suggested using the same tech to generate artwork. There's a study in there.