I’m an independent game developer. Independent from publishers, independent from bosses, from 9 to 5 work schedules and commutes and possessions and national boundaries. Since I went indie in 2011 I’ve lived in 15 countries and released five games, including the post-apocalyptic strategy series Rebuild.

I know my experience isn’t the norm but if you’re keen to do the same I can tell you the steps I took to get where I am now.

Step 1: Love Games

In 1988 I was 8 years old and saving up for my first big purchase: a NES with a light gun, Duck Hunt and Super Mario Brothers. One afternoon of smushing goombas and I was hooked for a lifetime. Forget TV and books (or God help me, sports or makeup). Give me my video games! In my awkward teens I got deep into the vast open worlds of pc games like Sim City, Civilization, the Elder Scrolls and Might and Magic. Through them I learned how to navigate DOS, connect soundcard drivers and write batch scripts. I loved computers because they were full of little puzzles and let me play games but I knew the games industry was a very exclusive club of brilliant and hard working people. I believed if I was ever lucky enough to become a game developer, that video games would lose their magic and the last thing you’d want to do after working on games all day would be to play one.

I was wrong…

…read the rest on Hardcore Droid

There are a lot of game ideas out there and it’s not obvious which ones are going to be fun. I have a file on my desktop called gameIdeas.txt which is a list of over 40 ideas ranging from “One button game: afghan kite fighting” to “knitting!…?”. Picking which game to start is easy, which one makes your mouth salivate the most? Picking when to give up on it is much much harder for me. Even when a game isn’t fun after months of work and exploring I still feel like just one change, one decision, could make it great. On the other hand, the only two of my prototypes that have worked out and been fun enough to finish were fun right from the start. Fantastic Contraption and Incredipede were both fun (for me) almost immediately and Sarah’s games, Rebuild and Word Up Dog, were fun right away. Is that a general rule? I wrote a psudo-random collection of eight games designers I know to try to find out.

I wanted to know if their successful game was fun right away, I figure if all successful games are fun right away then I can skip the months of grinding on ideas that seem promising but just aren’t working out. So without further ado, here is the data:

Derek Yu, Spelunky

Was it fun right away? Yes

“Spelunky was honestly the smoothest development I’ve ever had”

Justin Ma, FTL

Was it fun right away? No

“We felt the idea (which was very abstract) could be fun but the actual prototypes were not enjoyable for months.  We could see hints of interesting gameplay but it wasn’t really fun for a long time.”

Jonathan Blow, Braid/The Witness

Were they fun right away? Yes

“Braid was fun in the first week. The Witness probably took 2-3 weeks, if only because it is 3D”

“I do think this depends on one’s level of design experience, though. Part of being a good designer is being able to just home in on what is really good, without having to spend a lot of time slogging through mud.”

Jan Willem Nijman/Rami Ismail, Radical Fishing

Was it fun right away? Yes

“At Vlambeer, most games come together within a few days. If they’re fun, we work on them for a few weeks. If they’re fun to work on for a few weeks, we turn them into a project (or not).”

Dan Cook, Triple Town/Leap Day

Was it fun right away? No

“Of the prototypes I’m working on now, I’d say that the best ones convert over a few weeks and then we really know we have something fun after 2-4 months.”

Marc ten Bosch, Miegakure

Was it fun right away? Yes

“Miegakure was the third prototype in a series of ‘games in higher dimensions’ prototypes. Ignoring the first two prototypes, Miegakure is incredibly similar to its original vision”

Michael Boxleiter/Greg Wohlwend, Solipskier/Gasketball

Were they fun right away? Solipskier: Yes, Gasketball No

“I do think it’s important to get something down that’s interesting as soon as possible, something that you can play over and over, but there are a lot of games that I would never be able to make if it had to be fun in a few days or a week.  It’s really hard to gauge early on, and I don’t really have any good rules even now.”

Mike also mentioned that most games he’s worked on have been fun right away with a few exceptions.

Cactus/Dennis Wedin, Hotline Miami

Was it fun right away? Yes

“It was fun straight away from when the basic gameplay had taken shape, which took less than a week.”

So 5.5 out of 8 replies were “it’s fun right away”. Clearly not every successful game is fun in the first week but a lot of them are. And if you can make a great game without months of smashing your fists against the wall then why not! I like that Vlambeer has gone so far as to build this into their process, judging games by how quickly they become fun rather than how fun they might be down the road. Marc’s aproach of exploring the same design space with totaly new games is also very appealing. If I want to make “knitting!…?” it makes sense to try a bunch of disparate ideas in the design space instead of settling down with one and trying to force it to work.

FTL and Dan Cook are the counter-examples, and they are strong counter-examples. FTL won the Excellence in Design Award at GDC this year and I personally respect Dan Cook as a game designer more than just about anyone (Leapday is totally amazing). Standing opposite to Vlambeer, Dan has built the months-long search into his process and the resulting games speak for themselves. Clearly you can make great games by taking a rough idea and through teasing, exploring, and experimenting make it into something wonderful.

But that’s the thing, all that teasing… I hate stressing about whether I should keep working on a “promising” project or whether I’m groping in a blind alley. The fun-right-away rule takes away that stress entirely and maintains a good chance of finding a great game. It’s the way I’m going to prototype my next game. It’s all dim sum from here on out!

But it feels to me that most of the world is still waiting to discover Incredipede, because it’s yet to appear on the One True PC Distribution Platform: Steam. There’s no doubt about it: they won. Even I (Sarah) use their store to find new games, and often buy games through Steam rather than directly from developers. The most common question we get from people looking to buy Incredipede is “will I get a Steam key when the game is released there?”. The answer is yes. When!

As you’ve probably heard, Valve recently changed the way they accept indie games like Incredipede onto their Steam store. It used to be you’d email them directly and hear back yay or nay or (more often) nothing. It was obviously an understaffed and un-ideal system, and to Valve’s credit they’re trying to improve it. Incredipede has been one of the first games to use their new submission system Steam Greenlight. On Greenlight, games are voted for by the general public and the top 10 are accepted onto Steam every month. Being a relatively unheard of unreleased game, Incredipede had little chance of getting enough votes in time to launch with Steam. The onus is on the developer to bring players in to vote for their game, a challenge that IMO makes the controversy over Greenlight’s $100 fee seem downright silly.

Incredipede flew up the ranks after release and is hovering at #20, which means it’ll likely be accepted in a couple months. Colin’s planning some improvements for the Steam release and we may push it back to February or March to avoid the post-Holiday hole. We’re both quite confident that this is going to happen, but it’s been demoralizing to have to wait, checking that number every week to see if it’s moved.

So if you haven’t yet, please go vote for Incredipede on Steam Greenlight. And yes, if you’d like to buy it now, we’ll give you a Steam key as soon as it’s on there.