Weâre about to release Frozen Synapse 2. In some ways, itâs the culmination of 17 years of involvement with indie games in one form or another. Th
We’re about to release Frozen Synapse 2. In some ways, it’s the culmination of 17 years of involvement with indie games in one form or another. This would seem like a good time to look back and write some kind of inspirational blog post in order to get 20 minutes of social media attention to leverage for marketing purposes…
I’m not really that jaded and cynical, but it’s certainly a challenge to find valid tactical advice to give to indie dev newcomers these days. There are no glittering secrets to success, only a dull brick comprised of luck and effort.
As the inevitable Rami put it recently, “Indie is bigger than ever and also it is dead”. Various talking heads (myself included probably) spent a lot of time since 2005 or so saying how indie games were going to be “just like music” eventually, meaning that we’d enter a super-saturated, super-stratified state where a few big players would get a lot of mindshare and everyone else would be left swirling around in the bowl of corporate-mediated distribution networks.
Well, we’ve basically reached that point now, so advice specific to indie games is now effectively germane to any creative endeavour. Things are demonstrably more challenging than they were when we started, but also there’s now a whole world of experience to draw from.
Since we started out, indie game development has ascended from being the preserve of back-room tinkerers to the lofty heights of an aspirational career path. This kind of cultural shift can lead to the rise of a meta-industry of advice-peddlers who do not have directly relevant experience of developing and releasing successful games. Watch out for this, and be wary of overly simplistic hacks and tricks: I never want to read another Gamasutra postmortem which laments the failure of a single press release to generate a raft of launch day reviews. Everything is a process: if anyone promises you success as a direct consequence of employing their advice then they are lying to you.
Another problem with very specific guidance is a short use-by date. For example, I could spend some time here expounding on the efficacy of Steam Wishlistsâ—âfocussing on them pre-launch has worked well for us and for some other indies who have adapted to this aspect of Valve’s infrastructureâ—âbut that could well change shortly after I publish this. My pre-2014 marketing articles have already dated horribly, so I’d rather attempt to write something which is going to be relevant over the next five years.
One thing that’s important to bear in mind is that the pace of the games industry is not a unified force: things change at different rates. For example, retail distribution is still clinging to life many years after analysts pronounced its imminent demise, whereas the “indie boom” on Switch lasted for just a few months. Unless you’re absolutely primed to take advantage of a situation on a specific platform, developing long-term strategies is the only shot you have at consistent success.
So, instead of secrets, I’m going to offer up some principles which might help you to think about your indie game dev trajectory. These will largely be aimed at newer devs but, if my own experience is anything to go by, those who have been around the block several times could still do with a reminder of some fundamentals.
Also, please feel free to disagree with me: I have my own built-in biases and misconceptions; you’re better qualified to spot them than I am.
I’d like to recommend two books before I get started:
Perennial Seller â—âRyan Holiday
The Hit Makers â—âDerek Thompson
These are both thoughtful investigations into the nature of creative work and how that work can find an audienceâ—âthey go into far more detail than I’m going to attempt here.
One final note: I’m not going to be prescriptive about the definition of indie games. I’ll be talking about success in commercial terms at times but I don’t want to preclude purely creative work which has zero commercial aspirations. Free games, art games, non-games, anti-games, trash games, interactive experiences…this whole exciting spectrum of work is valid, important and serves to bolster the contribution of gaming to culture as a whole. “What is indie?” and “What is a game?” are worthless questions for our purposes. Just take what you need and ignore my tone if it bothers you.
This is a concept which Derek Thomson develops well in The Hit Makers, but I’ll run with it a little here.
One of the common traits of popular media is that it contains a healthy dose of familiarity or nostalgia. The audience associates the work with pre-existing positive memories, and is drawn to it.
However, for a work to truly break out, it also requires a novel element: something that puts an exciting spin on the formula; something that differentiates it from the masses.
If your game is too familiar, it’ll be boring and obvious. If it’s too novel, it’ll be weird and difficult to parse.
I’d add an adjunct to the “novelty” component here: “solving a problem”. Blizzard are masters at taking existing gaming paradigms and making them more accessible and rewarding: look at Diablo as a reaction against classic RPG’s; Hearthstone as a distillation of Magic the Gathering and Overwatch as a response to Team Fortress 2. If you can genuinely identify and solve a problem with a popular existing genre, then you could be on to a winner.
Two notes of caution: the problem has to be significant, and your game has to stand up against other players in the genre on its own terms. Blizzard are positioned well to do this because they are a huge organisation capable of deploying immense resources, a small team really has to pick its battles.
Our 2011 game Frozen Synapse was a refinement of other tactical strategy games: its nearest neighbour was Laser Squad Nemesis. LSN is a classic game, but matches took a long time to play, it was multiplayer only and had a dated UI which was cumbersome by contemporary standards. When we released FS, there really wasn’t much other competition in terms of simultaneous-turn-based tactical games, so we were able to own this tiny niche for a while.
Familiarity and novelty can be difficult masters. Our 2015 title Frozen Cortex reminded people too much of a football game; it wasn’t familiar enough for sports fans and it was, in some ways, too novel for a particular group of gamers who disdained any sporting associations. It reviewed well, and people who check it out tend to get a lot out of it, but it didn’t get this combination precisely right.
There is one thing that every successful indie game has in common: it was released in some form.
Finishing projects is a disciplineâ—âit takes time to cultivate and it should not be neglected. If you’ve never finished a serious project before, I strongly recommend doing so before attempting to make any kind of significant game. It can be a small thing, but it must be a finished thing.
I am a perfectionist and a procrastinator: my natural tendency is to tweak small aspects of something, worry about it, and then stop working on it because I think it’s inadequate. Over the years, I’ve had to battle these tendencies by recognising them in myself and listening to others who have different traits. Getting over this is an essential part of your personal development if you want to do creative work, so find a strategy that chimes with you and stick to it.
If you don’t, Alec Baldwin will show up in your office and berate you in a decidedly non-PC manner.
Video games are, at the commercial level at least, a visual medium. Your first impression of a game is predicated on a screenshot, GIF or the opening seconds of a trailer.
One thing which astonishes me from younger teams in particular is the lack of impactful art, particularly in competitive genres. Players come for the visuals and stay for the gameplay, so every time you are pitching a game or showing it off, you need to front-load art, and that art has to be world-beating.
I’m not talking about realism or whizzy shaders here: there are other ways to compete. Here are some games that I think are beautiful:
Hackmud
Caves of Qud
Downwell
Cultist Simulator
Cogmind
Untitled Goose Game
The art for all of these games is fascinating: it directly implies systemic depth, or a unique kind of fun, and it makes me want to dive in.
Too many new indie teams set out trying to replicate glossy game art from big ticket games and overcomplicate things in the process. We definitely got this wrong originally: compare our first game Determinance and our second Frozen Synapse …
Determinance, with its “gimp-voiced characters” (PC Gamer)
Frozen Synapse, a game which Americans cannot pronounce (PC Gamer Strategy Game of the Year 2012)
We threw everything at Determinance but the result was a disjointed art style. To keep things coherent, we had to aim for something much more straightforward, so with Frozen Synapse I took my art direction cues from games like DEFCON and the motion graphics work of designer Mark Coleran.
Stylish, constrained art is always a thousand times more evocative than “my best stab at AAA”. If you do happen to have an insanely talented artist who is capable of gloriously photorealistic environment art, then use that to your advantage, but otherwise being tactical with art is almost always your best bet.
Make it good and shove it to the fore.
If your dream project can plausibly be executed with the resources you currently have available, then go for it. In 99% of cases, a game that you care about deeplyâ—âan expression of everything you’ve always wanted to make and an evocation of your love for the formâ—âis going to have a much greater chance of success than something you’re doing out of cynicism or pragmatism.
Outside of projects which are specifically part of a well defined learning process (maybe ‘learning to finish something’, as I discussed above), doing something “that seems sensible” is a dreadful idea. I’ve seen teams pitching for funding who clearly cobbled something together simply because money is offer, in the hope that they could pay themselves for a bit to work on something relatively interesting. Don’t do this: it’s a waste of everyone’s time.
Your sojourn on this plane of reality is incredibly short and your perception of time accelerates as you get olderâ—âyou will not have the hours, or the mental space, to work on everything that matters to you in your lifetime. If you can, spend your time creating a legacy that you will be proud of.
From the first line of code ever written on one of our games, it took us about 9 years to have a significant financial success with an original game project. I know devs for whom it has taken much longer, and many others for whom it has never happened. To play the game, you have to be willing and able to stick around by any means possible.
Games are expensive and time-consuming to make, so it can be tempting to throw everything at a single project.
