Ey up!
After 11 years working in the AAA games industry I’ve decided to have a go at going small time. I’ve really enjoyed working on what I think are some really great games over those years.
I’m not stopping making games of course, I’m just going it alone in the big world. I’m going to make them by myself or with other indie game devs. This means I’m going to have to learn a lot of things including, but not limited to:
- How to setup and run a company
- How to manage company accounts
- How to develop a website (both the technical side and the content itself)
- How to use social networks effectively
- How to concept, design and prototype games
- How to use a whole new set of development tools professionally (Unity3D, Maya, Photoshop)
- How to do ALL of developing a game (not just physics, gameplay, platform integration or whatever as I’ve been doing before)
- How to get my games user tested prior to release
- How to get a game to market eg. via Steam, The iOS App Store, PSN or whatever platform I’m targeting at the time.
- How to market a game so people might actually buy it
- How to outsource parts of the game artwork
That’s a lot of stuff to think about.
Fortunately, it turns out that lots of developers before me have been travelling down similar paths towards their particular games being made.
So I’m going to write a blog of my experiences and what tools and other resources I find useful which will hopefully help me to get the concepts straight in my head (at least enough to write them down!) and possibly even help some future developers who are interested in doing the same.
So we can also add
- How to write interesting and useful blog posts
to the list :-).
I’ll also be sure to reference anything I find useful along the way.