How to Become Sustainable and Grow as an Indie Game Developer
A few days ago, I stumbled upon a tweet by David Jungnickel where he revealed that his indie game project did not perform well financially even though it had 80k wishlists at launch.
Then he asked the questions, “does sustainable game development exist?” and “what’s your Indie Dev experience?”. This got me intrigued.
Making games is hard, and there’s a lot of survivorship bias. Each dev has different circumstances. Even so, I believe there’re ways to minimize risks and maximize your chances for success and becoming sustainable.
So here we go. I am Kris Antoni, founder of an indie game development and publishing studio Toge Productions from Indonesia, and this is my indie dev experience.
Toge Productions is today an independent game development and publishing studio based in Indonesia with more than 40 games under its belt, including award-winning games such as Coffee Talk, Infectonator, and When The Past Was Around. We have employed more than 25 people in our studio and worked with many indie game studios across Southeast Asia. However, when my friend and I started the company in 2009, we were fresh out of college with no money (I only had <$300 in my savings) and no game industry experience. Game development was something that people had never heard of in Indonesia, and only a handful of people practice it in obscurity.
So, how can two guys with no money and no experience build and grow a sustainable indie game company?
Lesson 1: Start Small
We started by making small flash games in our spare time. Our first game was a physics puzzle game we did in 1–2 weeks, just to test the waters. The game was a flop, but it didn’t hurt much since we made it in less than two weeks. Surprisingly it scored 3.65/5 on Newgrounds.com even though it was a train wreck.
Try getting at least 3–4 small projects first, maybe game jams, and releasing them before thinking about doing a commercial project or resigning from your day job. This way, you’ll get a better picture of what it takes to create and publish a game before risking your entire life.
Lesson 2: Reuse & Recylce
After releasing our first game and getting a better picture of the business process, we quickly started working on our next game project: Days 2 Die. It was a bit bigger, a side-scrolling shooter where you build barricades to defend yourself from waves of zombies. We fail forward by reusing the physics code from our first game to cut down development time.
Reusing & recycling is a common practice, and even Disney did it. You build your tools library by intentionally creating codes or assets that you can reuse or recycle to make the next project more accessible.
Lesson 3: Fail Fast, Fail Forward
One of the biggest mistakes that new indie game developers often make is over-scoping. An even bigger mistake is thinking that your very first game will be a success if you put more time into it. You might say, “what about those indie devs that made millions on their first game?”. I tell you that those are outliers. In reality, 99.9% of early projects fail.
I’ve seen many indie devs spend years working on their games, trying to make a super ambitious but fatally flawed project on their first try. However, due to inexperience, their game is not shaping up as they want it to be. More time and money are put into the project as they try to fix their game. And when that doesn’t work, they add more, thinking they could save it. They don’t realize that they are now trapped in sunk cost fallacy, and the cycle continues. After working on it for years and investing their entire life’s savings, they finally released their game to disappointing results, and they couldn’t recover.
Fail fast is often associated with the lean startup methodology. It is a philosophy that values incremental development, testing, and validation to recognize failure as early as possible and avoid sunk cost fallacy. Failing forward is when you do fail, you learn from it and move forward.
So, keep experimenting and trying new ideas in quick iterations and learn from your mistakes.
Today, we implement an annual gamejam where everyone can practice their skills, experiment, and explore new ideas. We would try to validate these ideas through various methods, such as: posting a mockup to social media or releasing a prototype to the public. Coffee Talk was the result of one of those gamejams, and it is our most successful game to date.
Lesson 4: Know Your Audience
If you’ve heard about the pottery class parable, practice makes perfect. The best way to learn is to try things, and the more you do, the more you know, the better you get. However, you might get lost and confused if you do not know who your target audience is.
One of the reasons for Coffee Talk’s success is that we have a relatively good picture of who the audience is, their persona, what hooks them, and the experience they are looking for in a game. Knowing who you are making your game for is very important as it will give you direction. It will provide you with answers about what you should avoid and why you should do things a certain way for your game.
Lesson 5: Know Your Limits
Our 2nd game took around three months to finish. We didn’t have a big budget, so we tried to do our best within our constraints. We focused on a short but tight game loop cycle, cut and simplify everything. Even so, we had to eat Indomie for a while to stretch our budget (remember, my savings was <$300). I wouldn’t recommend starving yourself for your game. We were lucky that no one got hurt.
“How hard can it be?”, is usually a bad sign. We often get overconfident or underestimate things, even the most experienced developers can still fall victim. Making Coffee Talk almost killed our studio. We thought that Coffee Talk was going to be a short and simple visual novel game we’d finish in less than 6 months, in reality, we shipped the game after 2 years of development and nearly run out of money. We’ve never made a narrative game before and we underestimated the writing process, we thought “how hard can writing dialogues be?” and it almost killed our studio.
Imagine your BIG dream game as Mount Everest. Everyone knows that you can’t just climb Everest. Not only do you need preparations, planning, practice, but you also need to know your limits. What’s possible, what’s not possible to do, and the risks involved.
Lesson 6: Turn Your Milestones Into Steppingstones
Even with all the preparation and practice, the most experienced climbers can’t climb Mount Everest in one go. To get to the top, you need to reach several camps or milestones first. In games development, these milestones can be tech, know-how, assets, etc.
Creating milestones is not a new concept. But what if I tell you, instead of implementing these milestones in one big game, you turn each milestone into its own game.
One good example is from our game, Infectonator. We originally planned it to be this big zombie apocalypse simulation game with procedural geomap, bla bla bla… Because it was such an ambitious game for us at that time, we break it down into several milestones:
- AI pathfinding & behavior system
- Validate core game loop
- Procedural maps
- Resource management
- Scaling up the game
So, instead of working on one game for five years, we get 8–10 games. You’ll get more games, more experience/know-how, more fans/awareness, and more revenue over the same time.
We even managed to create “spin-offs” and new games by reusing the code and assets, such as in Necronator and Relic of War.
Our jump into 3D also went through the same process. Since our team never made 3D games before, we created milestones that will help lower the learning curve while staying productive. Starting with Infectonator 3 we implemented a 3D environment and dynamic lighting even though the game is essentially 2D looking. Later, we created a tile-based 3D-level editor that can be reused and in Necronator 3 we implemented a 2.5D aesthetic where we used the level editor combined with 2D pixel art character sprites. Now we are working on Kriegsfront Tactics, our first fully 3D game, utilizing the level editor that we’ve built and the know-how we’ve gathered from previous projects.
It is very important to have a clear direction of where you want to be and a roadmap to reach it.
Lesson 6: Be Nice, Make Friends
Don’t go alone. Not everyone can make it as a solo developer. To survive, you’ll need great people around you and hopefully, partners. However, finding them will not be easy.
Not everyone can be 1 man army devs. So finding great partners and building relationships are very important. Toge wouldn’t be here right now without the help from our friends and business partners, esp. during the Flash era such as Armor Games, Newgrounds, and Kongregate.
In our early days (2011–2013), even though we didn’t have much money, we forced ourselves to fly to events such as GDC and Casual Connect. Why? because it was the only way to learn (at that time Indonesia didn’t have a game industry), to meet fellow indie developers, and to build a network with the industry. From those events, I manage to meet with a lot of cool people and become good friends. It might not always lead to a business opportunity, but I always learn a lot from them, and often times gain mental support.
Final words
Your game dev journey might be different from mine. I hope that these lessons can help you minimize risks, maximize your chances of success, and be a guide in navigating your own indie dev journey.
Feel free to follow me on Twitter @kerissakti and ask me questions.
