There are a lot of people trying to become an indie game developer. Is it solo, or in a small team, we all aim for the same target: success. But success might be different than you think. When is a indie developer successful? If one finishes a game? But what if no one plays it? If one made a lot of money? But what if no one likes the game?

The difficulty of this problem lies within the game developer himself. He or she is only successful if he thinks so himself. I want to become a successful game developer, so I first have to answer this question for myself. If you are a game developer, is it full- or part-time, I suggest you read along, and plan your own Road to successful indie game development.

What is success to me?

First I will tell a little bit about my situation. I’m currently in my final year of school. I’m studying IT focusing on embedded application development. Due to the corona virus school is closed and teaching is continued online. This saves me a lot of time otherwise spent in public traffic. I hate wasting time, so I decided to try my hand at game development. It’s 2020 so YouTube is the best place to learn anything. After some video’s I got the gist. Scope is everything.

Now that’s out of the way, when can I consider myself a successful indie game developer. I don’t need to provide an income for my family or something, so that’s not important. Cross “make a lot of money” off the list. This makes the process a lot easier, because making money in any industry, but especially in games. The idea of people using something that I created has always intrigued me. And games can not only be used by others, but they can also be enjoyed by them. This may sound a little vague, so I will put a number on it. I want to have 500 people play one of my games before the ninth of July. “One of my games you say?”, yeah you heard it right! It’s planning time.

The planning

To plan something, we first need a destination to reach and a timeframe to reach it. The timeframe is established section above, from now till the ninth of July. In these three months I need to learn about game design, choose a game engine and loads more. This is quite daunting, and all GDC talks seem to tell me that I should start small, so that´s what I will do. The coming weeks I want to publish a small simple mobile game to the play store every other week. These games will all need a learning challenge so I keep developing my skills. Than I want to try my luck at a game for PC, but more about that in a few weeks.

The first two games are finished already, so I cheated my planning a little bit. I wrote blogposts about them here: (the post continues down below)

The first mobile games will probably be not that great to play, but after creating them I must say that they were very educational. Dike Bike Taught me a lot of the basics of Unity, how to use prefabs, exporting a game for the play store, all the different picture sizes that are needed absolutely everywhere.

The second game, Space officer, felt way easier to create. Of course there where struggles, but because I knew the process it felt smoother. There were less surprises. In this game I focused on the one game mechanic of the grappling hook that pulls in stuff. I learned about the line renderer, having multiple scenes and connecting them, level selection and creating levels fast using prefabs. I’m very proud of the little animation that plays when entering the scene. The game will be out soon, if google approves it.

To be continued

I am off making games. Please follow this blog if you want to be updated with game development blogs, status updates and other posts. Please share your plans about game development and what you want to achieve with it! That’s it for now,

Ruurd