6 Lessons from 6 Year of Indie Game Development

Wishlist Alter Evo on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/22... Full Transcript: As we approach the end of the 6th year working on our indie game Alter Evo, we thought it was time to share a few of the most important things we’ve learned on our journey. Whether you are a game developer or just passionate about games, these six points will help you gain some insight into what it’s like making a 3d indie game with a very small team. 3D Level design – Use as few asset packs or modular kits as possible. The art of level design is doing more with less. More assets mean more headaches—whether that’s maintenance time, project size bloat, memory usage, or simply making everything cohesive. 3D Original art assets – Don’t matter that much (except for key art like main characters, enemies, or special buildings). Lighting, level design, gameplay, tone, story, good UI, and music/sound go a really long way in making your game engaging for the average indie gamer. It’s ok if you don’t have the time or budget to hand craft every single prop and vehicle. Sometimes kit bashing can be a great stand in for making an original prop without the overhead of concepting and 3d modeling. Visual references – Matter a lot for all aspects of design (photos, drawings, clothing and accessories for characters, video clips for animation). The more visual references you have, the better results your artists can give you. Communication – Can’t be rushed. Especially when collaborating over text, it’s better to write a clear, concise, and considerate message than to rush something out quickly. Learn the art of reading your own state of mind: if you’re feeling hurried or stressed, either have someone else or AI look over your message before you send it, or simply wait until later. Sometimes waiting before responding allows you to come up with better ideas, feedback, or solutions. Your brain will often solve things for you unconsciously if you give it time. Workflow efficiency – Spend time identifying which parts of your workflow take unneeded amounts of time and create shortcuts or pipelines to speed things up. Doing this at the beginning of a project can save you days in the long run. For example, our cutscene creation process involved clicking a bunch of buttons and assigning values to a timeline component—steps that were the same every time we made a cutscene. We built a menu shortcut that condensed 10 steps into a single click. This made the mental barrier and time to complete a cutscene much lower. Playtesting – Do it often, whether in person or over calls. It can be tempting to focus only on development progress, but going too long without outside eyes creates more work later when massive changes are needed. For us, we worked on the game for 5 years before multiple people finally told us to add a gun combat system. When we caved in, the game became immensely better. Had we added it earlier, we would have had a much easier time developing animations, marketing the game, and designing levels. Nothing feels worse than putting out a demo or sending a playtest and getting a lukewarm response—but that sinking feeling that your game isn’t good enough is really just a signal that you need to make changes. Playtests give you the information you need to find out what those changes should be. Thanks for checking out our 6 lessons on indie game development. If you'd like to support our journey, please wishlist Alter Evo on Steam.