Indie Games Rockstardom: A How-To Guide

The world of independent game development is exploding. There have never been more people making more games with more tools or for more platforms than at this point in history. If you want in on that action, there’s good and bad news: The bad news is that the market has been saturated with content, most of it entirely unremarkable. Your interactive fiction “game” built in Twine is going to have a real hard time standing out among all the other interactive fiction “games.” Your hastily crafted $1 iPhone distraction? It’s going to have an even harder go in a marketplace with over a million apps.

The good news is that there are steps you can take to ensure your project stands out. While not a guarantee of success by any means, these seven steps represent your best chance to have your indie game become a critic’s darling and financial success story.

Step 1: If you wear glasses, BE SERIOUS in photos.



This step won’t apply to everyone, but if it applies to you, it is in your best interests not to skip it. While it is generally good form for indie developers to be super serious about their projects and themselves at all times, if you have glasses, they serve as a sort of bonus amplifier: A serious public persona is good for photographs, but glasses + seriousness gives you the best chance at being fawned over by game journalists, which is a very necessary step if you are to reach the big time. (Examples will follow through the rest of this post.)



Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness)

Step 2: Ensure your project is not fun.

When we think of “video games,” we generally think of things that are fun to interact with and fun to play. But never you mind that the word “game” is in the name of the medium, we’re dealing in artgames now, and that means it’s time to get stuffy and serious.

One might reasonably believe that even a game tackling serious issues should be enjoyable to interact with, much as bleak films usually aim to be well shot and acted, or bleak stories aim to be well written. This is not so, and one of the best reasons to do your navel-gazing in a game instead of on paper or film: There’s an entire community of players willing to embrace your amateur sloppiness as “charming,” dozens of actual, paid reviewers waiting to grade the product of your self-absorbed, intellectual wanking on the steepest of curves. Truly, if you want your scrappy pile of janky, half-finished code to be placed on the same level as ballet, classic literature, and other assorted things that aren’t 1/1000 as enjoyable as a single round of Bulletstorm, make sure the mechanics, the ways in which a user actually interacts with your software, are as miserable as they can get. The good news for you, the aspiring indie developer, is that there’s more than one way to accomplish this. (There are two.)

Option A: Give your project shitty mechanics.

Perhaps the default option, as making a video game with a strong player feedback loop is a very difficult thing to do, something even AAA shops with bloated budgets regularly fail spectacularly at. By the by, did you read that last sentence and find yourself asking, “what on Earth is a player feedback loop?” Never you mind: The less you actually know about what goes into compelling game design or mechanics, the more the hipsters will fellate (*) you for bringing “fresh perspectives” to the medium. You’re on your way!

(*) If blowjobs are your end goal, don’t make a video game. Instead, learn to play the guitar, or have Vistaprint whip up a bunch of business cards for your newly incorporated modeling agency and hie thee to LA. Even if they like what you’re about and you personally, nobody in the games press is ever going to actually suck you off, because everyone in the games press would appear to practice an extremely rigid brand of sex-negative feminism where anything that might be pleasurable to a straight male is considered an atrocity on par with female circumcision.

Option B: Fail to include any mechanics at all

Yes, we’ve reached a point where games press hipsters will give non-games, artgames, and antigames very high scores, despite the player’s interaction with the software being limited to walking around, and perhaps clicking on an item or two. Great news for you on the face of it, but this is a trickier option, because it will require you to compensate for the lack of mechanics or skill element with something else, usually a twee art style or self-important narrative. Which brings us to…

Anna Anthropy (dys4ia, professional lunatic)

Step 3: Give your game a twee art style.

Games hipsters love to bemoan the fact that military and sci-fi shooters have a different, darker color pallet than Sonic the Hedgehog. This means they’ll love whatever stupid motif you come up with, no matter how far up its own derivative ass it is, or how incompetent the mechanics it masks (always be remembering step 1: you want the game to not be fun. You are living your own real life version of The Producers).

While many awful indie titles shamelessly pander to 8/16 bit nostalgia, the extent of flowery garbage you can get away with in this department is incredibly open-ended. Be adventurous! If you’re feeling lucky, you might even fail to create final art assets at all. Choose this path, however, and you’d be well served to…

Kellee Santiago (Journey, Flower, Flow)

Step 4: Make your project “about” something.

Here we have the most important step on the list. Any idiot with a trust fund can pound out a subpar twin-stick shooter or smartphone cash grab, but that’s not for you. You’re an idiot with a trust fund and a master’s in creative writing/gender studies/latte husbandry! Remember, you’re making art. Art has to have a message; it has to be about something. Therefore, make sure when the games press comes calling for an interview, you link your project to one or more of the following topics. Think of this hype-building stage as a metagame! The more unrelated things you link your game to, the larger your hipster hype multiplier will grow!

Human condition