I ordered this book a week ago and a few days ago it arrived in the mail. It had heard about it a lot and read some very positive reviews about it, and many developers mentioned it on forums. Seems like it’s a very popular book. After flipping through it a bit and reading a few chapter, I can say this is justified!
So the book is about indie (or independent) game development. What exactly is this. Being “indie” means you aren’t financially tied to a publisher or investor. You don’t owe anyone money and you have complete creative freedom. This means independent games are usually low-budget games (not all of them, id software is independent but by no means low budget), but that doesn’t mean low-quality. Some indie games look incredibly impressive. The book starts out with an introduction about the indie game development scene.
The next topic is game design. A very important issue here is knowing your limitations and proper planning. Indie game developers probably won’t develop a cutting edge 3D engine or build a next-gen MMORPG, that’s something you’ll have to accept. When I first started thinking about developing games I actually thought I could do everything on my own: write a game engine, design graphics, write all tools and even compose music (what the hell was I thinking?). It took a while before I figured out that simply wasn’t realistic, so if you are like me and think you can do this all on your own, think again. Get a decent, working game engine and use that to develop games. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel!
Another issue is funding. Developing games costs money, even if you do it for a hobby. Computers and software cost money, a game engine costs money, and good graphics and sound effects usually aren’t free either. Most indie developers also have a day job, wich should be enough to fund their projects (it works fine for me), but sometimes it’s not enough, or people decide to quit their day job and become full time game developers. I myself wouldn’t even dream of that! The book contains a chapter on “creative funding”, wich deals with this sort of things. To my surprise, it also mentioned investors money. This goes against the entire idea of independence. After all, investors are part owner of your project and get to decide about it, limiting your creative freedom, wich is what indie game development is all about. In my humble opinion, investors is something to avoid like the plague!
And then there’s the development team. Building a game development team is not an easy task, and neither is managing one. It becomes especially difficult when you never meet each other in person and have to manage everything online. For now I don’t have to worry about that since I work on my own (the so-called lone wolf developer), but who knows what the future brings? Anyway, the entire process of recruiting, compensation, management and leadership is discussed.
The main focus, of course, is building the game. After all, that’s what game developers do. Like I said before, you can’t do everything on your own (And if you think you can, slam your head into the wall and say to yourself: “I am not John Carmack and I can’t write a cutting edge 3D engine”. Unless you really are John Carmack, of course). Good use of third party tools is essential. Other important elements of the building process are writing documentation, something that’s often forgotten until the last moment (that reminds me, I should get started on the game manual for Wasabi Defense) and project testing. Another thing you shouldn’t neglect is finishing the game. New ideas and features will probably keep on coming, but at a certain point you should say “Enough is enough”. You really don’t want a game that’s in beta for a decade.
And finally: publishing. There are lots of options for this. I have published only one finished game so far, so I don’t have a lot of experience in that area. You can handle everything yourself, wich can be a bit intimidating, or you can use a third party publisher, wich is what most developers will go for. There are lots of game portals that will take care of publishing, marketing and payment processing, and my advice is: use them! Every minute you don’t have to spend worrying about this is another minute you can spend developing games.
My final conclusion? This isn’t really a book about the technical side of game development, but more about the entire process from concept to finished game. I think this book belongs on the bookshelf of every game developer, even if you work entirely on your own. Project management and proper planning are essential for everybody, wether you work alone or in a team.