How to create an innovative indie project

What the talk is about

Ivan Kovalev tells how he built an indie puzzle game on his own, combining a jigsaw-like puzzle with "telescopic" text to mimic how people with memory impairments recall events. The player turns levers to assemble an image-memory, while the text unfolds and shifts meaning as they get closer to the goal. His advice: constraints and tight deadlines push you to think outside the box; ideas come as a symbiosis or rethinking of existing ones; even a solo project needs documentation and study of screenwriting guides; controls must be polished at the prototype stage, or test feedback will be distorted. He also covers the pros and cons of working alone, the difficulty of designing shapes, text and mechanics in parallel, and his path through pitches and indie contests. Useful for indie developers and game designers working on a first original project.