I got great news for everyone who likes to create his/her own games. As you might know I started this blog because I wanted to share my knowledge on creating games. Developing games by myself allowed me to give some practical advice. But now I have the opportunity to do even more for you. As you can read in my latest blog post, my game company Koonsolo is shifting it’s focus from making games to making a game creation tool. Yes, that’s right! So next time you can leave all the technical stuff up to me, and focus on creating your dream game .
A lot of myths exist about Linux users and the whole open source community. Because of these wrong assumptions, a lot of game developers still hesitate to support the Linux platform. As both a Linux user and an indie game developer, I want to educate everybody with hard facts about the advantages of supporting Linux. Read more…
I wrote my original article on game loops a few years ago, and it’s nice to see that it’s still popular today. Recently I stumbled upon some game loop lecture slides of Aaron D. Lanterman, and he seems to use my game loop article as a reference . He even has a video of his session online. So if you had a hard time understanding my article, maybe you should check out that video. It might make things more clear.
During the development of your game, you should already do some marketing. This way you line up some customers to buy your game once its released. But marketing means revealing parts of your game. And when developing an innovative game, your primary fear might be that someone is going to steal your idea, and… (Tune from Jaws here) daaa dum daaa dum daaa dum… bring out a cloned game sooner than you! AAAARRRRGGGG!
Well… I got news for you: nobody is going to steal your idea.
Take a look at Braid or Tower of Goo for example. Both are innovative games, both revealed their concept long before their release. And you know what? Nobody stole their idea.
Next to these two masterpieces, I’m shamelessly going to use my own game Mystic Mine as an example. To be honest I was indeed scared that someone would steel the idea of those impossible “Escher”-levels. But you know what? Nobody did! And if you think of it, this makes perfect sense. Why would you clone a game that hasn’t yet proven itself in the market? And if it’s already popular before release, people are waiting for the original game, not the clone. Besides, are you sure you will put the game faster on the market? It just doesn’t makes sense to clone a game that hasn’t been released yet. And your fellow indie game developers, they all have their own game ideas to develop.
So market the hell out of your game while working on it, and don’t worry about someone steeling your idea or concept. Now go do it! What are you waiting for?
As a kid I saw the animation movie Fire & Ice, and absolutely loved it. Back then I didn’t know the creator was successfully competing with a big corporation like Disney. You should definitely check out this video with the creator of that animation movie, Ralph Bakshi, on how to compete as a small studio.
Indie and casual game developers can sell their games through various portals. Unfortunately these portals offer very low royalty rates (about 25% to 35%). Some ‘developer friendly’ portals offer 40%. Remark that this percentage is not calculated on the game’s price, but on the ‘net revenue”, which means that when a game is sold, first some payment processing fees and other costs are deducted, and you will get the % of what’s left. And you know what, it doesn’t stop there. Portals make sure they stay in control by forcing following policies: Read more…
When developing a new game, the first thing you should consider is your high level game architecture. You’re probably going to use some 3rd party libraries, maybe you already have some in-house libraries that you’re going to use, or develop them for future use. How these things fit together seems obvious, but when you consider following architecture, it will save you a lot of time and frustration later on.
The Rampant Coyote has created a list of 19 general purpose 2D engines that you can use for you project. Now how do you choose the right one? Well, an indie game developer should consider following things:
To get as many customers as possible, use an engine that supports multiple platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux.
To make the best use of your time, prefer higher level scripting languages over lower level programming languages.
Paying for an engine doesn’t necessarily mean that you get a better product or better support.
So, you know how to create games, you have plenty of ideas, and now you want to finish one game and sell it. You’ve come to the right place to get started on that. The first and most important thing to focus on is marketing. Marketing comes before creating your game, it comes even before thinking about your game.
Most people think that marketing is about advertising and press releases, but that’s only a tiny part of it. Get this into your head: Marketing is everything, and everything is marketing. Marketing is the kind of game you create, for which platforms, your price, your customer support, your demo, the graphics, game loading times, … everything!
Marketing focuses on the customer, it’s how (s)he experiences your products and services. If you want to sell a game, you have to start asking yourself the right questions, marketing questions. I’ll provide you with a list of questions you need to think about, this is crucial if you ever want your game to sell.
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