
Three Tips For Getting Started In the Indie Gaming Biz - gcheong
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2010/02/three-tips-for-getting-started-in-indie.html
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patio11
I would add, for the benefit of sixteen year olds like myself: you will almost
certainly not ship a game as your first well-done piece of software. Get some
experience and come back later. ( _cough_ Or never. _cough_ Games are a
terrible industry to be in for the overwhelming majority of programmers.
Starting a business is hard enough without handicapping yourself that way and
competing with a virtually infinite population of people willing to work for
nothing. But I didn't want to hear that at sixteen either.)

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chipsy
Seconded.

If you're in gamedev(as I am), you're essentially going into it as your
lifestyle. You can make it a reasonably sane, healthy one if you can find a
niche and make it as an indie, but good money won't ever be the motivating
factor, and working in the studio environment is harsh and essentially
requires migrating to find new work every time you're taken off a project.
When new segments take off, like casual gaming did a few years ago, or social
gaming more recently, you have a better chance of money and stable employment,
but it'll fade away when the market saturates.

That said, the bar to make it is really high. It's not as impossibly high as
making it as a musician, I think, because the variety of situations and
skillsets is exponentially larger in the interactive multimedia context - so
you always have less competition for your particular skillset - but it's
definitely harder than "business programming" because you can add as many
technical challenges as you want(soft real-time simulations, physics,
graphics, audio, world persistence, networking, tools+scaffolding....) and
still have only scratched the surface on what the computer is potentially
capable of as an entertainment device.

If you take pains to avoid technical challenges you can make games more
quickly, but you have to take on at least one or two to have a game, and
adding more usually helps quality. Plus, the code alone doesn't make a game.
The final game is the result of code+assets+design+player feedback - and lots
of meticulous details. Game design isn't terribly different from business in
that you have to make tons of hard decisions with little information
immediately available. And like in business, you can get more info, but you
have to work at it.

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benologist
I would suggest anyone interested try their hand in Flash, it's quite a
powerful tool for rapid prototyping and even fully releasing games, and a good
platform to learn about rich interfaces on.

There's also a ton of tutorials, and if you're good at it you can make some
pretty decent cash upfront + residuals.

Failing that, Visual Studio + XNA is by far the best you're going to get your
hands on for free.

~~~
NickPollard
For those interested in learning, Epic now provide the UDK (Unreal Development
Kit) for free to those who wish to use it in non-commercial capacity. This
means that whilst you can't sell anything you make with it, you can get your
hands on the full Unreal 3.0 engine that powers many modern games (eg. Gears
of War, Bioshock 2), and do whatever you like with it. Great for prototyping,
experimenting and generally learning about game development.

