6 Indie Mistakes

This is old, but I completely missed it. Kuro5hin has an article up about the great common mistakes indie developers make when trying to create a game. It's insightful and well-written, but the debate that rages on in the comment section is equally worth the read. Debate aside, Chris (who himself has worked on published titles) is making some good points:

"I'm going to make an RPG with 3,000 enemy types, real-time combat, and a first-person shooter mode. And dancing, lots of dancing."

You have 2 designers, one coder, and a part time artist. You have the staff, in other words, to make Tetris. Be realistic about how much you can accomplish. Take your most basic game ideas, and make them smaller and smaller until they can't physically get any smaller. 3,000 enemy types? More like 3. An FPS RPG with an all-new engine? Make a top-down shooter in Flash. 100 hours of content? How about a game you can beat in 30 minutes?

-- The 6 Indie Mistakes

Much of his argument is, in fact, concerning resources - which is possbly the great divide between professional and garage studios. He goes on to add that doing things as a single individual is possibly the worst mistake on can make ... something I find a little humorous since ... I'm making that mistake myself. However in doing so, I can't completely disagree with him. In fact, were I doing this for actual profit instead of more as a hobby, then I probably not being going solo but rather hunting down at least a decent pixel artist and sound guy. So I'd say he probably makes his point a little too rigidly, but it's not off-base.

I saw a lot of this in the mod community. Plenty of idea men, very few implementers. Or as my old boss used to put it - lots of warriors, not enough weapons. Game ideas, design docs and even concept sketches aren't too terribly difficult to put together. Structuring that into a real project is a task that usually just leaves behind a handful of unfinished levels and some 3D models that still need proper animations.

With that said, I'll probably have a dev diary up later today.