The Independent View by Dan MacDonald

Independent takes time (November 08, 2006)

Have you ever been in a situation where you've learned about an indie game in development that really excited you? You began following the status of the game as much as possible checking back week after week to see if it had been released. Weeks, turned into months, and months into years, but still the game was not released. Chances are you have, and if you haven't you soon will. The reason for this is simple, games take work to complete, and good games take a lot of work.

From a project management perspective the concept of "work" can be quantified by how many hours it takes to complete that work. For the typical part-time Indie, this is 3-5 hours a day, for a full time Indie this number can be more like 8-10. A part-time indie would like nothing more then to be able to work on his games 8-10 hours a day, but in order to do that something else has to be paying his bills. For most full time Indie's that "something else" is a catalog of past games they've released in the past that provide a nice stream of revenue to fund their full time game development. So how does an indie who doesn't have any games work full time? The short answer is "they don't". Most part time indies will have to find a way to release a game or two to help fund a transition to full time indie game development.

So the only real answer for a part time indie wanting to go full time is to finish a game and have it sell well. To accomplish this goal efficiently there are a number of options. One is division of labor, this means splitting up the total work that needs to be done to finish a game across a number of people. This approach, however, can be problematic. How does a part time indie convince skilled individuals to work for free or future reward on their game when they haven't ever completed one? The classic example is indie game developers looking for artists. With so many would be game developers out there, artists have been burned time and time again spending countless hours making art for a game that never gets finished. As a result they are quite reluctant to do work on a project with a developer who has no proven track record of successfully completed projects.

Another option that many indie developers don't consider from the beginning is to use existing tools instead of building everything from scratch. Many new game developers think that making games is all about building level editors, implementing network features, and finding new and better ways of doing things that have been done a thousand times over. In my experience the only indie developers who have transitioned successfully into full time independents are the ones that have realized that game content and design and overall production values are far more important then any code they'll write. Unfortunately for most indies working on their first game this lesson will not become apparent until months or even years into their first project. This is just another reason why indie games can take so long to complete.

The only real solution to these conundrums is for the part time indie to make a simpler game (less work) and hope to make enough money from it to fund their future full time efforts. In most cases the low hanging fruit are games that require less technology, less content, and less time to develop. This reduces the risk of not finishing and limits the amount of wasted work if the game does not sell. In most cases this ends up being a casual game for distribution to the casual audience.

This leads to one of the great ironies of independent game development. Part time indies who wanted more time to work on their innovative and inspired game end up making casual games to transition to full time indie developers. The only problem is, once and indie is full time they need to be sure whatever they spend their full time hours working on has a very high probability of being profitable in order to sustain them full time. In most cases this involves repeating the successes of the past and working on casual games that help limit losses and mitigate risk.

In the end, innovative, content rich, deep gameplay, or any other combination of attributes that spell "risk" to a full time indie are the luxuries of the part time indie. So chances are if you saw an innovative or inspiring content rich game from an indie developer you were looking at a part time indie and because of all the issues described above it is going to take them a very long time to finish that game. Chances are, if they are able to finish it, it wont even make back the cost of development. The only reason games like this are finished is though the sheer determination and passion of their developers over a long period of time. So if you see a game that you really enjoy and meets this criteria do your part to support indies doing what is next to impossible to bring you games that you simply wouldn't find anywhere else.

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By: Dan McDonald
Posted: Tuesday November 07, 2006