The indie game developer is filled with starry eyed, hoping to make the game of their dreams. But the game development is not easy, and has many snags along the way. You’ve probably heard this before, but many indie game developers either quit or fail to finish their game projects. There are literally thousands of failures you have probably never heard of.

Keith Judge, a programmer in the games industry for nearly 13 years and currently at Pitbull Studio in Guildford, working with Epic Games on Unreal Engine 4, shared his story of his experience as independent indie game developer.

Not a path full of roses

He was working with Lionhead Studios but had always in his mind to start a game development of his own. With more than 11 years of experience in gaming industry, he formed Razorblade Games and began work on a (still untitled) game.

He had a great idea, starting the project was fun and new, and everything seems smooth sailing. He was developing first person puzzle game for Windows Vista/7/8 featuring many mindbending puzzles, alternative realities and gravity manipulation. This didn’t last throughout the whole project. The simple fact is developing a game take a lot of time and work.

He had a simple formula for determining the development – to complete the project as soon as possible. The fact is there will always be something that you do not expect during game development. Even professional developers like Judge almost always over time and over budget, which is the cause of the much hated crunch time.

It’s important to remember that no matter what kind of game you want to make, initial investment is always important. Judge created the crowdfunding campaign at 8bitfunding.com asking for $10,000. In total he had made enough to pay the mortgage on his house for just two weeks – clearly not nearly enough to sustain development. And nothing kills motivation more than a game taking much longer than you expected, you start to get frustrated and tired.

Lessons learned

Evaluating your game from multiple perspectives and trying out many different ways to implement the same type of mechanic will often lead to much more time and money. While developing the game, indie developers obsessed over the look of the game and getting a number of advanced graphical features implemented, but in the end his time would have been better spent expanding the actual content of the game and not just making everything especially pretty. Judge was trying to build something the size and complexity of Portal, whereas he should have listened to people and built something small and simple with the limited budget he had.

“You need a good source of funding, or a lot of savings to make the indie adventure work. Relying on a crowdfunding campaign is a huge gamble that’s unlikely to pay off unless you can get a lot of press and/or are already well known,” Judge said.

Another mistake Judge and other Indie developers used to make spending many hours on their own game engine. Instead, making use of UDK, Unity or one of the other available game engines and got on with building a game is a much more simpler way.

Indie developers need to have a business model and at the first go try to avoid building own engine. It adds years to the process, it’s extremely difficult to get right, and the end result will be worse than using existing tools. If the game project sounds like it will be too long, using any of the above engines is a safe bet.

“I vastly underestimated the time it would take to build the game. My prediction of shipping my first game in September 2011 was, in hindsight, laughable. I actively avoided any detailed scheduling and management of the project, preferring to just get my head down and write code – this was a mistake, particularly given the slim funds I had at my disposal,” Judge said.

Unfortunately, there are developers that are carried out in this way, that in front of objective data continue to move forward until they slam their face against the wall and realize that they have failed.