Surviving the Indie bootstrap path

In this speech, I’m going to talk about everything we did right and didn’t do right as fresh enthusiasts Indie game developers. It started just the two of us, me and my cousin as we knew it was just a matter of time until we are going to make video games. So Just as I was honorably discharged from the army, we started working on our games. at first a mobile game, Airspace Defender, and after that, we started working on Warriors: Rise to Glory for PC, without any funds or prior experience specifically in Game Development. I was on the programming side and my partner was on the artistic side. Starting from there, we got our prototype to conventions and started getting followers. Later on, we found our first investor and started recruiting our first employees. It wasn’t much, just 40k dollars to get started, but it was just enough for us to reach the Early Access launch, which was quite successful due to good influencers coverage (with 7000 copies from China alone). Next years in short: at the top time we were 8, with over 30k copies sold and raised over 200K dollars from investors and accelerator. Sadly, the full launch was lackluster (Which I’ll explain in a quick post-mortem)
Among the things we did right: We never gave up – We knew opportunities await and you must finish what you started. The game was aimed at influencers, to begin with, and it worked. We got the right manpower – Each employee we recruited was with great passion and excellent work ethic. We listened to the community – We listened to feedback from the community and responded to each negative review. A lot of the negative reviews changed after we responded 🙂
Among the things we did not do right: Got too attached to the game – we didn’t think about releasing the game and moving on to the next one, which would have much better foundations and less technical debt and rookie mistakes. Too ambitious – we tried going too big with our first project (Fully fledged single player campaign and a BIG multiplayer mode) and that took us time WAY too much time and the game lost hype. Chewing more than we could handle – we were kind of a “yes” men and taking every opportunity we could, but sometimes some of them didn’t get enough attention and the quality was accordingly. Underestimated ourselves – We gave low values to investors because of fear they would pass the offer for being too pricy. In retrospect, they good very good deals and we should have asked for more 🙂 We did not know what we were getting into – Being an Indie developer requires much more than just programming and modeling, and I wished we knew that in advance.
Also, I would talk about maintaining the right ration between fast/strong technical development.