How to Make it as a Professional Indie Game Developer

by Thomas Steinke on 04/09/13 11:21:00 am Expert Blogs Featured Blogs The following blog was, unless otherwise noted, independently written by a member of Gamasutra's game development community. The thoughts and opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Gamasutra or its parent company.

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My name is Thomas Steinke, if you are not aware of me; I am the owner of DigitalDNA games, arguably the most successful Xbox Indie Developer, and the creator of the all time best selling Xbox Indie Game CastleMiner Z. In this article I wanted to spend some time and give advice to people that have aspirations of being full time Indie game developers like me.

What some people might not be aware of is that I am an ex-pro game developer. Of the really successful Indie game developers this seems to be a reoccurring trend. Most people would say its because you already KNOW how to make games. Yes, that is definitely an advantage, but there are a lot of indie games with very simple technology that have been very successful. It definitely doesnt take a pro triple-A game developer to make the next Angry Birds. It isnt about learning some alien technology that only the high priests of gaming have; especially now a days with all the great middleware out there. However, there are some really simple ideas that the pros have been exposed too which may help you a lot and that are pretty easy to summarize in an article.

A long time ago, someone approached me speaking about an upcoming project. They made a comment like since this is a game you probably wouldnt play, you probably would not be able to make it... I was surprised as a pro developer as I was; I was often in positions where I was making

games that were not for me. It was interesting to me because it drove to the point what it means to be professional versus a hobbyist.

If you think about professional musicians or dancers they do this all the time. You may have heard stories about studio musicians who play back up on a rock album then an hour later play back up on a country album. This is the essence of what being a pro artist is all about. When you have to make a living by doing your art, especially if you are very talented, you learn to be flexible; it is main difference of being a pro from someone that is playing with their hobby. So if you want to be pro-Indie you have to start thinking like a pro, this brings us to our first item. Be relentlessly practical

Separate yourself from your work emotionally. Since you are set on being pro, you need to be successful despite yourself. This is by far the most important lesson to learn, not only in game development, but business in general. Your primary directive as a professional and a business owner needs to be being financially successful. Not making yourself happy, feeling good about yourself, becoming popular, getting people to write articles about you, winning awards, pushing an agenda or supporting a platform or idea. Now you CAN do any or all of these things if they still support your primary directive.

You realize right away that this will force you to make very practical and level headed decisions about what projects you work on and how you spend your time/money.

Lets stop here for a second. Before you go any farther, you may have decided that being a pro is not for you. That is totally okay. Game development is a beautiful art, and some people just want to be artists. It is very noble and respectable. There are a lot of opportunities out there that didnt exist even five years ago. I could totally understand just wanting to be a game developer by moonlight, like some sort of superhero with a hidden identity. If you are that person I applaud you and you may find some of my advice objectionable. However if your plan is to quit you day job and make Indie games your profession, my advice may be more relevant to you.

The reason I mention this is that this level of practicality is painful and difficult for some people that have romantic ideas about what the game industry is like. Maybe there is this really cool idea you have had for years, and that is what you really WANT to make. However it may not be the right thing for you to work on, or at least to start on. I can tell you there is this huge back log of games I would LOVE to make, but it just isnt practical. Pros get this because pros are constantly exposed to this idea of being practical about developing games. This leads very well to my next point. Be realistic about what you can do

As a pro, one of the greatest advantages I have is that I can VERY accurately cost projects in both time and money. When I take on a project, I usually know exactly what problems I will encounter and how much it will cost to solve them. You may not have the experience to do this but you can mitigate this by not biting off more than you can chew.

Even as a pro developer, if you look at our XBLIG catalog you can see that our first games were very simple, this was completely intentional. The first game that I intended to make was Avatar Paintball, the first FPS with Xbox Avatars. However, I made about five small games previous to that. Each game was meant not only to build out part of our engine, but to monetize the development and learning that needed to happen. This made it so that when Avatar Paintball actually came out, the huge amount of work building the engine was already paid for. Therefore the risk of making such a complex game was greatly reduced. This idea has been rooted in our DNA (no pun intended), and has continued. If we decide to implement an expensive feature we usually already have 2-3 future games planed that will take advantage of the tech.

The point is, it is okay to start small if you have a plan. It is far better than doing a ton of work and simply failing. Also releasing lots of things will teach you things about the platform and the marketplace. You may find yourself working on something completely different than you first intended based on what you learn.

However there is another way to mitigate this which leads to the next point. Leverage other people's work

It was very interesting to work in the game industry until about the early 2000s. We were figuring out new rendering technology, how to solve physics, collision etc. At some point in early 2000 or so these all sort of became solved problems. There really isnt any value in solving them again (back to point one). You might be really interested in how physics simulations work, but you need to decide if you want to play with a physics engine or make games for a living. There is tons of middleware out there, if it solves a problem for you, use it, instead of wasting your time reinventing the wheel. This is a great lead-in to our next topic. Account for your time

People starting small businesses often dont account for this. If you are going to leave your day job you need to make it worth your while. This is often a much greater problem for people that are passionate about making things or worse yet, passionate about making one part of something. Often I will see someone tinker with some part of their project for months or years, sometimes without even a project to focus on, while opportunity after opportunity passes them by. Here is a suggestion to avoid this:

Bill yourself for your time. Figure out what you make per hour at your day job, and keep that in mind when you make your projects. When your project hits the market, realize you will need to make enough money to make up for that. Your time is valuable and what you will realize very quickly is that you may not be able to afford to make some of the things you want. This is a GOOD thing. What you are learning by this experience is how to be profitable. This brings me to my next point. Pick the right projects. Be conscious of the marketplace you are competing in and the customers there. Remember you are not making games for yourself. You are making games for your customers. Look at the trends. What is succeeding and failing? Be quick and agile about your decisions to capitalize on current trends; this is your advantage as an Indie. Realize it is all about return on investment. For every dollar you put out there (including your own time) you should expect to get that dollar back plus some return. In the venture capitalist world, investors typically want to see a 10 to 1 return on investment for an investment in a small business. This is not an

unrealistic expectation for an Indie game company and actually is the rule of thumb I use for DigitalDNA Games. What you will realize is, this will force you to make some really hard decisions about what you work on and where you spend your time. Take the movie industry for example. People often wonder why they keep making those cheesy comedy movies. They never come close to out grossing the big summer blockbuster. The reason is, they are cheap to make and have a predictable and excellent return on investment. Spending $1 to make $10 is usually far better than spending $100 to make $11. The margins for indie games are huge even compared to triple-A games. This starts to be problematic when you scale this to very large numbers, but when this becomes your problem you will be more worried about what island you are going to buy for your secret lair. Be realistic about your expectations This is another important part of this process which is a corollary to the previous point. People dont often have a grip on this and it leads to poor decision making. If you plan to make a game but you see that ten other similar games have had dismal sales, it may be a stretch to think yours it going to be a blockbuster hit. On the flip side, people tend to get distracted by success stories and ignore the similar failures. The Angry Birds empire made something like $127m last year, so if I make a game like that I should expect the same right? This sort of logic is dangerous. There is probably some magic in picking the right project but experience and research will make you better and better with this over time. For example, I tell people that at this point with XBLIG, I can look at a box cover and not only tell you if the game will be successful or not, but instantly know almost exactly how much money it will make. This is the reason that our success rate for bestselling titles is the best on the system. Again making smart and conservative choices about what you make, wherever it may be, will let you build this experience up without going broke first. Be VERY selective about who you work with. Finding someone that shares your passion can not only help share the workload, but can augment you and create a magical energy. With that said, a good partner can make you a stellar success; a bad partner will undoubtedly sink you. If and when you decide to work with someone, make sure you are making the decision for the right reasons. I am lucky in the sense that working in the game industry for so many years has let me come in contact with the absolute best people in the industry which I have the fortune now of working with. I will only work with the absolute best people

now, and I am extremely selective. Dont get discouraged Failure is part of the game, you have to learn not only to deal with it, but to be 100% honest with yourself so you can learn from your mistakes and become better at what you are doing. If you try something and fail you have paid for an expensive lesson that someone else doesnt have, it just makes you that much more valuable; use it to your advantage. It is only a waste if you decide to give up. I often refer to these moments as Empire Strikes Back moments. There is nothing wrong with retreating and regrouping if you ultimately win the war. There was such an overwhelming response to this article I decided to condense a lot of my answers to questions in another article here ::

Response to "8 keys to indie success"

by Thomas Steinke on 04/15/13 02:45:00 am Expert Blogs Featured Blogs The following blog was, unless otherwise noted, independently written by a member of Gamasutra's game development community. The thoughts and opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Gamasutra or its parent company. Want to write your own blog post on Gamasutra? It's easy! Click here to get started. Your post could be featured on Gamasutra's home page, right alongside our award-winning articles and news stories. In the last week my article How to Make it as a Professional Indie Game Developer or 8 keys to indie success caused quite a stir. How to Make it as a Professional Indie Game Developer I wanted to take some time and address a lot of the comments and questions that people have raised in one concise place for everyone to see. I had thought about writing that article for a while, but was reluctant to do so. Not because I thought it would be highly controversial but because I thought it was too boring. To me this represented a set of abstract commonsense business ideas that werent really worth talking about in the limited detail that I could in a small article like this.

By far the most controversial part of the article was the Pick the right projects section where I advised aspiring Indies to pick projects based on

popular trends. This idea seemed to stab at the heart of what it meant to be Indie and highly offend some people. This apparently came off to some people as make games you hate for cash. Although it may be possible for someone to make great games that people love that they absolutely hate, it definitely wasnt the case for me. I loved making every one of the 15 games I have made as DigitalDNA Games, and as I said in my previous articles my time as an indie has been by far the most rewarding work (emotionally) that I have done in my career. First some Clarification Before I go any farther I want to clarify some things and set some facts straight. I talk a lot about being a professional in the article. People interpreted this in a lot of ways, some thought I was implying that being a professional was somehow a badge of superiority or success, coloring the entire article; this was not at all my intent. When I refer to being a professional I really only mean one thing. The activity is your primary source of income. The intent of the article was to give advice to people that aspire to quit their day job, whatever it is, and make their own games full time. The original title of the article was How to make it as a Professional Game Developer. Gamastura re-titled it in their news feeds as The 8 keys to indie success, that title ended up being used in the reposting of the article to other sites, and the original title was dropped completely. Although this is a subtle change, the meaning to me is very different. The original title is about helping people that want to sustain themselves on the income of being an Indie developer, the later implies that I am discussing how indie developers find success. As I have said in many of my articles, that success is something that people define differently and I respect and applaud anyone that feels the need to express them self though making games. People later asked why I would publish such a business centric article to indiegames.com. For the record I would like it to be known that indiegames.com approached me asking permission to post the article, which I gave them. Honestly I wasnt even aware of the site until this. Although I feel some of my thoughts may have been overstated and/or taken out of context, I am not apologizing for them or retracting them. If anything, I qualified most of my thoughts in the article saying that the advice applies to you if your particular goal is to make making your own games your primary source of income and I stand by that. Having the distinction of being the highest grossing developer on XBLIG, with a history of repeatable success, I am not postulating how I think one might become a financially successful indie. I am simply stating how it did it. Given that I would have liked to go into

more detail, especially how I pick projects, I intend to write another article in the future specifically about that. So let me take this opportunity to address some of the questions/comments specifically. You are only successful because of cloning Minecraft I usually start my articles with a synopsis of my success on XBLIG, simply because I am not making the assumption that most people have heard of me. This became repetative and seemed selfserving so in this case and only mentioned our best selling title CastleMiner Z because it has the distinction of being the best selling Xbox Indie title of all time. Because people accuse CastleMiner Z of being a Minecraft Clone, this detracted a lot of attention away from the message in the article and some simply dismissed the message of the article as Clone Minecraft and become successful. Although I will address this topic specifically, I want to stop here and point out that I was arguably the most successful developer on XBLIG before the release of the CastleMiner games. I realize that not everyone stays on top of this channel as much as I do so I want to spend some time talking about our other games. I have been developing games on XBLIG for about four years now and had multiple #1 bestselling titles before the CastleMiner games. Here is the complete list of titles that we have released on XBLIG. CastleMiner Z CastleMiner Avatar Laser Wars 2 Avatar Connection Avatar Superstar Avatar Paintball Avatar Laser Wars Voice Changer 360 Avatar Snowball Fight Avatar Avenue Guitar Tuner 360

Avatar Aquarium Avatar Alarm Clock Audio Diagnostics Ask Angela!

Six of these games ended up spending some time as the daily #1 best selling title; most of them have been in the top five, and some of them have been only second to our own titles. For a considerable amount of time we have held at least 3 of the top 5 titles simultaneously, at one point all of the top 3. If you take a look at the top downloaded games of all time from XBLIG you will see 6 of our titles in the top 20.

http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Games/XboxIndieGames? sortby=BestSelling

Cumulatively our games outside of the CastleMiner games have sold well over a million units. The CastleMiner games have made up about 50%-60% of our total income from XBLIG. This is admittedly a very large percentage of our sales, but by no means our only successful game. Since the release of CastleMiner Z, we have had the luxury of spending more time and money on our games, and have since moved to a philosophy of working on fewer titles overall and investing more in each one leading to less titles overall. Avatar Laser Wars 2 is the only title we have released since CastleMiner Z. On average, most of our titles have yielded a healthy six figure return and have been received excellently by our fans. You met a large portion of your success by cloning Minecraft This has become a very interesting topic that I have intended on writing an entire article on. Simple put I dont see CastleMiner Z as a Minecraft clone, but a creative expansion on a genre. This topic becomes even more interesting due to the fact that Minecraft is essentially a clone of a lesser know game Infiniminer. In Notchs own words But then I found Infiniminer. My god, I realized that that was the game I wanted to do. I played it in multiplayer for a while and had a blast, but found it flawed. Building was fun, but there wasnt enough variation, and the big

red/blue blocks were pretty horrible. I thought a fantasy game in that style would work really really well, so I tried to implement a simple first person engine in that style, reusing some art and code (although not as much as youd think) from RubyDung, and came up with this: http://notch.tumblr.com/post/227922045/the-origins-of-minecraft Here is one of Notch's first videos of Minecraft. the description reads. "This is a very early test of an Infiniminer clone I'm working on. It will have more resource management and materials, if I ever get around to finishing it." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9t3FREAZk&list=UU3XJRyvLD7rvsVFCFS1IX0A&index=35 Infiniminer had the misfortune of coming out in a time when it was much more difficult to monetize a game. I actually think of that developer a lot. I would imagine it would be pretty painful to see Minecraft become so popular in light of its origins. The story of Infimiminer is very interesting. Essentially the developer lost control of the distribution of the game after his sourcecode was leaked. After that, he stopped development. I stopped working on Infiniminer when the source code was leaked. It was totally my fault, as thats what I get for releasing an un-obfuscated .NET assembly, but it nevertheless enabled hackers to create hacked clients and players upset with my balancing decisions to fork and write their own clients and servers. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/01/20/proto-minecraft-abandoneddue-to-epic-error/#more-48303 There is no doubt that Minecraft is a brilliant game. The funny thing is that I had a very similar experience playing Minecraft as Notch did playing Infiniminer. In Minecraft I really enjoyed the first night where you were fighting to survive but after that the game was less entertaining to me than it was most people. The games I primarily like to play are military shooters and survival horror games (which also happens to be very popular with the Xbox crowd). I wanted to expand on the sandbox genre by bringing the elements of these games to a sandbox game; hence was born CastleMiner Z. I appreciate that people may not be able to understand how this experience is different from Minecraft from a few screen shots or videos, but assure you the reason that CastleMiner Z has outsold the other 20 or so Minecraft Clones on the Xbox is because of this. Also to clarify CastleMiner Z was not the first of these games there, it wasnt even the 3rd. Somehow expanding on an Idea that is not well known or monetized is

somehow more ok or more noble than expanding on one that is well recognized. Although I completely understand this from a PR perspective given a fan base that may not be aware of all the facts, it seems a little backwards to me. To me, expanding on a genre that everyone knows seems more respectable than capitalizing on an idea from someone that simply wasnt able to successfully monetize himself. This is even odder to me considering that cloning a game that isnt popular isnt met with such disdain, i.e. cloning an old NES era game, or a lost PC game from the 90s. Building an actual clone of Minecraft would have in fact been far easier. There is a complete existing work to reference. Of the other clones on XBLIG there are actually some that are much closer to Minecraft. Now there can be a lively debate about where the line is drawn between a clone and an inspiration but that is very subjective. Ultimately, if the intent was to copy Minecraft our game would have been a lot more like it. If you are going to be an indie purest and discredit me for expanding on a genre, that is fine but I feel you would have to lump Notch in there too. Some people want to fault me for not giving Notch due credit. After all, in the quote he basically came right out and said he cloned Infiniminer. Although the value of doing this seems a bit odd, like Call of Duty giving props to Wolfenstien 3D for having the idea of a first person view with a gun, but for the record Yes I was inspired by Minecraft, it was a brilliant game, thank you Notch. People were just playing your game because MC wasnt available on the 360 yet? It is true our games came out before MC360 was available on the Xbox. Since it has been almost as long since MC360 came out as the amount of time between the release of CastleMiner and MC360; I thought I would run some numbers. It turns out we sold about 1M units of Castleminer before the release of MC36 and about 1.5M units after. In fact, the last few months have had record sales for CastleMiner Z. 17 months after its release, CastleMiner Z is still the daily best selling Xbox Indie game. Doesnt making games specifically that sell well go against the spirit of being indie? Indie means a lot of different things to different people and like I have said in many of my articles, define your goals however you want, I truly respect that. However, when I started making indie games, it never even occurred to me to think about making games for other reasons besides making ones that were best sellers. The intent was to make games that people loved and in turn, make the best selling games on the system.

Personally, I dont judge my success by anything else except the sales numbers. To me, there is no better vote of acceptance than someone putting down money for your product. Some people accuse me of simply being a businessman that happens to sell games versus an artist. I would say that I never prescribed to be either and am a mix of both. Maybe because I have spent so much time in the game industry it is hard for me to think of games as something else besides a product. I dont find anything wrong with making a product that people love so that they will buy it, allowing you to make more and better products. However some people seem to take the idea of games as an art to an extreme. Believing that they are a pure form of expression and need to be completely unique and busting at the seams with creativity and design regardless of being desirable or even entertaining. To them, tailoring a product specifically to a marketplace seems soulless or even evil. These people should definitely NOT take any of my advice; we are not on the same page. The reason I wrote the article is that I see hundreds of Indies failing and often have them coming to me asking for project or marketing advice, which I am more than happy to give. I figured I would consolidate some of the basic business advice into one article. Isnt what you are describing a Job? Doesnt that defeat the purpose of being indie i.e. independent? I often make this joke I became Indie to make the games I wanted and now I am just stuck making games for the customer Yes what I do is a job plain and simple. I wake up every morning start making games, planning, having meetings, doing taxes, dealing with health insurance, payroll, usually working well into the night and on the weekends. It is having a job as much as running any other small business. However I would take it any day compared to the time I spent in the professional game industry. Running a business IS independence, and although I am constricted to making the games that appeal to the marketplace, I still can choose what I get to make, and decide how to make them. Better yet, I reap the rewards for my decisions and am 100% accountable for what I do. Our first big hit was Avatar Paintball. That first year I made something like $300k, which was more than I had ever made in a single year at any job I had ever had. Our revenue has nearly doubled every year after that. If someone has another job as good as this, please sign me up. Dont you feel bad sacrificing your creativity or passion?

Honestly I dont feel like I have done this at all and I am not advocating it. Coming up with ideas that would work in the marketplace is a very creative endeavor. For the most part, the games that we made represented things that had never been done before which is why they sold so well. For example, Avatar Paintball was the absolute first FPS with Avatars. Although that might not seem like such a big deal to people, Xbox users loved their Avatars and wanted more to do with them. Some of the most fun I had was making the little lightweight apps, and finding new unconventional uses for the Xbox, that previously hadnt been thought of. For example, VoiceChanger 360 was the first XBLIG to use the microphone. When I was little I had a crappy Transformer voice changer helmet, it sucked. I thought I could re-imagine this on the Xbox with a high quality Vocoder. People loved it, it was a #1 hit and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Putting your financial success first is a tool that will allow you to continue doing what you want to do on your own terms and I dont think that any indie developer should be shamed into not looking out for their best interests. I think the pure creativity that people desire is something that ultimately has to be earned. At this point in my companys development we have more flexibility than ever to take some accelerated risks which I plan to take advantage of completely. Anyways back to making games My best to all of you.

Thomas Steinke DigitalDNA Games