There’s something about indie game development (or any form or independent artistic endeavour) that can breed an attitude that anything you do from a business standpoint is considered ‘anti-indie’. That you can’t combine artistic endeavour with business management is a massive myth and one that I think really does handicap a lot of developers. Let’s talk about a few of the areas where accusations and fears of ‘selling out’ are …
This misconception is all about Developers who think that sharing information about their game is a bad idea. It stems from a fear that sharing information about how the mechanics of your game work, either with players or just other developers, will lead to someone stealing those concepts and making their own game with your ideas. The problem is with this misconception is that it’s not completely unfounded. Rarely, …
Some news from Game Dev Ninja today! We finally have a proper website, including a little bit more information about some of the tools we’re working on for launch and beyond. It’s been just over two months since we came up with the core concept of Game Dev Ninja. In that time we’ve made plenty of changes and tweaks to exactly what our software tools will look like and …
Winter is coming, even though it might not feel like it here in the UK, where we’ve had some very un-British heat waves recently. The start of September marks the return of the Triple-A industry, who lay dormant most of the summer. For this reason, from September until January marks the worst period of the year to be releasing an indie game, if you can help it. Now, I’m …
Today I’d like to introduce to another project we’ve been working on for a little while: Indie Ninja One of our goals for GDN is to make an excellent product, but another is to keep close to what this is all about: the games themselves, and the developers making them. Sometimes we can write words like ‘market research’ and ‘press release’ so much, or spend all day in an …
This week, Discord announced they will be adding a storefront to their game focused chat and voice software. You’re probably familiar with the size of Discord already, but if not, the program has 150 million users and 19 million of those use it every single day. That means on full launch, the Discord store could actually be the first serious competition in the PC gaming space since GOG started …
Today we’re talking about budgets, joy! Marketing doesn’t have to be expensive. In fact, you can launch a game without spending a penny, providing you’re willing to really put the work in and make some sacrifices. However, even a small amount of money up from zero will give you more opportunities and advantages than spending nothing at all. For the sake of simplicity in this post, when I talk …
Unity recently surveyed 1,455 game studios asking all sorts of interesting questions. In case you don’t have time to sit through the entire report, here are some interesting observations. Well, hopefully interesting. A word of warning: this a very wide sampling of studios, and the numbers are skewed firstly by the inclusion of some massive, non-independent studios and secondly by the mobile market. Unity tries to fix this by …
This blog is part of a series on common pitfalls, myths and misconceptions focused on the ‘business’ side of game development. You can read the first one right here. Today, we’re tackling a combination of myths: That it’s ok to start marketing your game near launch That it’s ok to keep putting off marketing or announcing until the last minute That a shorter time spent marketing your game closer …
Hello! My name is Daniel and I’m creating the tools you will be using (hopefully!) on Game Dev Ninja. With that out of the way let me jump straight in and tell you: Development can be soul destroying. Hear me out: No matter what project you’re working on, you’re probably going to find yourself in a position where continuing to deal with the horrible mess you’ve created thus far …