This blog post accompanies a talk I gave at Develop: Brighton 2017 and EGX 2017 under the title “What doesn’t kill you makes you a successful indie studio”

Resources

The slides from my Develop 2017 talk, “From Bedrooms to Brighton”, are here. We hope to have a recording of the talk from EGX soon.

The slides from my previous talk, “Rocky Road”, about how the team recovered from a bad launch, are here, along with a detailed blog post by Lee, our community manager.

To find out more about GamesAid, the charity I mentioned at the end of the talk, or if you’re interested in donating game content to their new Digital For Good initiative, then please visit GamesAid.org.

Introduction

Five years ago we started the journey of a lifetime, one which would take us from the comfort of a fan forum through: rampant prototyping, forming a company, Kickstarter, Steam Early Access, a full release of a game, long-term support, and the sourcing an office in the heart of Brighton – all in pursuit of the single dream of a spiritual successor to Dungeon Keeper!

Over time we’ve faced our fair share of challenges in getting our game, War for the Overworld, to market. In this post I’m going to share the key points of that journey in the hope that our story will help you avoid similar pitfalls, and inspire you to turn your indie team into a well-oiled machine!

This is our story of taking our game from bedrooms to Brighton!