Martijn_TwoTribes

The approval process on Steam and consoles is very different. On Steam I can release a game without any approval (after the concept has been approved by Valve). Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony require the game to go through a checking procedure. This procedure might take weeks (or sometimes even months). They do this to ensure no crashing games ever hit their stores.

personally I'm not too fond of the word "indie". It has been used too much now and I think people tend to use it as some kind of measure. "You are indie? You are cool and make awesome games! You are not indie? The hell with you. Your games probably suck"

In the traditional sense, an indie developer is a developer that can independently create his own games. And independently means: without a publisher. But let's be honest; (almost) every indie developer needs to have a platform like Steam or PSN or App Store or whatever to distribute their games. In that sense I think Valve, Nintendo, Sony etc have become the new publishers. So unless you sell your own games on your website (like Mojang does), how indie are you really?

Question is: does it really matter? Does it matter if you're backed by a publisher or investor, by Kickstarter or by money you made from previous games? No! What matters are the games; their quality and the amount fun.

/end of rant ;)

Half Life 3 confirmed!

We don't playtest genres to test which genre we should develop for: we simply make games that we feel are fun to play. That's why, most probably, we haven't made a FPS or an RTS. Most designers here don't like those type of games. I think it is very important to make a game that you would enjoy yourself as well.

Once you decide in which direction you want to go, playtesting your WIP game really helps to determine if you're still heading in the right direction. We often invite people over to our office and we record their playsessions. Not only can we watch how they solve the puzzles, we also watch their expression on their faces. Are they happy? Thrilled? Sad? Frustrated? We changed a ton of things in Toki Tori 2+ just based on feedback we got from playsessions here at the office. Of course playtesting at your office is not always possible, that's why we asked if people would be part of the Toki Tori 2 development beta. Basically we gave them a beta version of Toki Tori 2 (obviously be careful not to give away too much!) and asked them if they would play a certain part of the game. We built an internal recording system that saves the gamestate, RNG seeds and captures all the input. Once the player is finished, they send us their recording file. We boot the game with that recording file and can watch them play the game! Furthermore since we couldn't watch them play, we asked them about their experiences. We ask for feedback and suggestions as well. This helped us enormously. Added bonus: you can potentially reach a lot of people, even before your game is released. I believe we sent out more than 7000 beta keys for Toki Tori 2+. It definitely helps you build awareness.

Finding the next Angry Birds or Temple Run or whatever is of course the holy grail. But we haven't found it either. In fact, I think a lot of those successes are based on luck as well. To give you an example: when Angry Birds released back in 2009, its initial success was quite limited. In fact its publisher, Chillingo, contacted me to see if there were possibilities to put an Angry Bird in Toki Tori to raise awareness of their game. Back then Toki Tori was a success for Chillingo, whereas Angry Birds (which was released on their B-label: Clickgamer), was not (yet). The idea was to put an Angry Bird in Toki Tori and they would then put Toki Tori in Angry Birds. But when I played the game, I strongly felt that it wasn't a right fit to put in Toki Tori. And I declined. A couple of months later, the sales suddenly picked up massively. The rest is history. In retrospect, it has been my worst decision ever :) Anyhow, the point is: it is very difficult to predict success. When AB released there were already a ton of physics based games on the App Store. When Temple Run hit the store, there were a lot of infinite runners on there as well. Why did they succeed where others failed? Part of it is being lucky. Releasing the game at the right time. Being featured at the right time.

The other part, and this is something you actually do have control over, is being vocal about your game. Make sure everyone and their pet dog knows about you and your game. Of course without being spammy or annoying. Make sure people understand what drives you. Keep them updated on the progress. Show them details on your development process. Be humble, not arrogant. Set up a Twitter account, Facebook and say interesting stuff. Gather followers. Post dev movies on YouTube. Try to see if you can attend a nearby gameconference to meet other developers and gamers. Also, try to get in touch with the platform holders (Apple, Google, Valve, Nintendo etc). If they know you and your game, they might just feature your game in their store. I think you get the point now :)

So there is no silver bullet to success. If there is, please let me know because I'm looking for it as well :) The only thing you can do is to go for it, completely. If it then still fails, bad luck, but at least you tried!

Good luck!

Perhaps it is a stupid idea, perhaps it is not. We don't have any experience with it