作者：Ido Yehieli

你可能听过许多有关成功的独立游戏（《以撒的结合》，《Fez》，《时空幻境》，《我的世界》等等）以及一些未成功的独立游戏的故事。在本文中我将告诉你我在中间道的经历，即创造一款获得适度成功的独立游戏。自从在2011年8月发行之后，《主教之旅》便支助了我一年的生活，并且在其发行2年后仍然能够往我钱包里添些钱。

总之，《主教之旅》最终在台式机，Flash授权和在iOS和Android的手机游戏销售中获得了6万美元的收益（我并未拥有所有的这些钱，因为也有其他人一起致力于这款游戏中）。它卖掉了2万份，在各种门户网站上期免费版本的游戏次数更是达到100多万次。同时其续集《主教之旅2》也即将问世。

然而，很多结果都是取决于我们发行游戏的时间以及那时候的情况，当然了，也有一些运气元素。所以我并不是真正在写“成功的秘诀”，因为有可能你按照我所说的一切去做，但却未能拥有与我们一样的结果，不过我认为你还是可以从我的经验中吸取一些经验教训并将其应用于自己的情况中。

《主教之旅》

自从在2000年代初期接触了《Angband》，《Tales of Middle Earth 2》，以及《DoomRL》，我便一直在玩roguelike游戏。然而，尽管我已经投入了许多努力去学习如何玩这类型游戏，但是当我从大学毕业时，我却没有足够的时间用于这些业余爱好，即我停止玩这些游戏了。

在最近，roguelike游戏好像开始复兴了，但当我开始在2010年致力于《主教之旅》时，这个领域已经被《NetHack》，《Angband》以及《ADOM》等大型且阴暗的立基游戏所占领。通过《主教之旅》，我想创造一个能够轻松进入并且能在短时间内游戏的线性且极其简单的roguelike游戏，并且即使不是硬核玩家也能够游戏。

你可能在Roguelike Radio以及他们对我进行的采访中听过许多《主教之旅》专注于快速且简单的游戏玩法的故事。

教训：选择一种足够受欢迎，已经拥有一些现有的粉丝但却还未具有许多竞争者的游戏类型。在过去很受欢迎但却有一段时间离开人们视线的内容是非常安全的赌注。拥有一些狂热的粉丝但却还未成为主流的内容也很棒。

开始

尽管在像roguelikes这类型强调机制的游戏中并不需要，但是了解游戏所发生的世界真的能够帮助你更加专注并让游戏整体更具有凝聚感。年轻的时候我是《龙与地下城》的忠实粉丝，所以《主教之旅》的设计很大部分是受到最早的《龙与地下城》的启发。尽管从未在游戏中说明，但《主教之旅》的确是发生在Mystara的已知世界中。拥有伴随着许多现有的材料和虚构内容的让人熟知的背景能让内容创造变得更加轻松，同时也能确保内容的一致性。

当我开始致力于《主教之旅》时，我已经创造了一些较小的roguelikes游戏，主要是为了每年的7DRL Challenge。然而，我却从未完成任何更具野心的项目，我总是会在几个月后便失去专注力和动力。

而这一次，我决定给自己一个严格的时限（15个工作日）和工作计划，并遵循Radomir Dopieralski的指南—-《How to Write a Roguelike in 15 Steps》。

关于《主教之旅》最终HTML5原型的最初发行只超过计划时间几天（大概是20天），而我也并未完全遵循Radomir的顺序，并未完成所有的步骤。然而，最后我也创造出一款较小且可游戏（也很有趣！）的游戏，就像是roguelike游戏大杂烩，让你能够体验到完全的roguelikes游戏的各种功能。

因为那时是2010年，拥有一款可游戏且并不平凡的HTML5游戏便足以帮我引起很大的关注，光是在Reddit和Hacker News上它就获得了15000次点击以及一些不错的报道。

《主教之旅》并未在短短几周时间里便被遗忘，它成为了我的第一款真正意义上的游戏！

经验教训：在开始工作前知道你想要做什么。先创造一个原型并快速运行，看看它是否能够与人们具有共鸣。如果不能，你可能需要考虑回到绘制模板。

那我们就试试看吧

在在花了几个月时间不断致力于《主教之旅》的原型创造后，我发现它的发展已经超越了我所选择的平台（要清楚那时候HTML5仍然不够成熟），如果我想要将其变成一款商业游戏，我们便是时候开始创造全新版本的游戏。

我想要寻找关于这款游戏的一些需求，并希望能够从最终产品中赚得一些利益。我在一个Kickstarter风格的网站上为独立游戏举办了一个名为“8位体集资”的活动，因为在奥地利我上不了Kickstarter。

在告诉所有人我能够通过这款游戏做到什么后，我通过离线和在线共筹集了4815美元，这也包含了我在创造一些音乐，音效，视频和遗漏图像时所需要的一些自由职业者的薪资。在这个漫长的过程中我还节省下了1万美元，我辞掉了原来作为游戏开发者的工作而专注于自己的新任务：靠创造独立游戏谋生！

经验教训：尝试着在你一头扎进独立游戏创造钱先赚些钱。集资是衡量别人如何看待你的想法的一种好方法，但你千万别奢望能在一开始就筹到大笔的数字。

艰难困苦

出于各自个人原因，在集资活动前后分别失去了一些最初图像和编码合作者。（在我开始致力于《主教之旅》之前，我一直是作为一名专业程序员与我们的编码员共同承担着编程工作。）

一开始这似乎带来了巨大的冲击，的确我花了些时间才从中缓过来。对于图像，我最终在tigsource论坛上找到一个可取代的自由插画师。寻找自由插画师的另一个来源便是Pixelation论坛。

我努力在年轻学生（正处于暑假期间）的帮助下完成大部分编程，而这名学生也通过几个月的帮助换取了适当的补贴。不管是这些工作还是音乐的创造都是由我在8位体集资活动中所筹集的资金进行支付。

不幸的是，在之后我用光了所有的集资费用，为了继续致力于这款游戏，我最终只能拿出自己之前的积蓄。在游戏最终发行时，我的银行卡上应该只剩下300欧了（比我每个月的租金还少）。

经验教训：拥有一个应急计划。如果有人退出，你是否能够接替他们的工作？你是否能够支付其他人的薪资？你是否能够重新审视游戏以确保即使没有这些人也能够完成游戏？

避免慌张

当我用光所有钱后，我不得不尽早发行游戏。因为游戏还具有很多漏洞，所以我真的是顶着巨大的压力，但只有这么做我才能够赚到足够的钱去维持生计，并且也可以继续完善游戏。如果你发现自己处于这样的情景，你需要做的第一件事便是不要慌张—-你需要想办法去改善情况。

不幸的是，我并未像自己所建议的那样做，因为我真的慌掉了。我遇到许多非常古怪的漏洞，尽管我尝试着去修改它们，但仍无济于事（不过我最终在Mike Welsh的帮助下找到了祸首）。这些漏洞最终得到修改，但这却让我的精神变得疲惫不堪。

最后，我通过发行一个带有漏洞的游戏版本而推动着我能够继续致力于游戏，因为它为我带来了一定的收益，所以我想这应该不是一个糟糕的决定。（然而如果从压力来看的话，在“游戏完成后”再发行会是一个更完美的决定。）

经验教训：不要恐慌，对于发行一款带有缺陷的游戏不要过多担心。在今天，一款虽然带有漏洞但却优秀的游戏可比一款完美的游戏好多了。你需要了解你的工具并找到能够带给你的想法反馈的同事，从而避免撞墙。

宣传

我注意到许多独立开发者在这里跌倒。从根本上看，你需要厚着脸皮去推广你的游戏，并进行宣传。包括IRC频道，Reddit，论坛，Twitter等等渠道能够帮助你邀请人们购买你的游戏。

在网络上搜索每个地方以及每个可能对与你的游戏类似（或者不是很相似）的游戏感兴趣的人。我浏览了我在谷歌上能够找到的所有roguelikes IRC频道以及RPG论坛，不断地告诉人们关于《主教之旅》的内容。你必须坚持不懈，因为你很难邀请那些知名博客博主为你的游戏写些内容。

所有独立游戏博客似乎都在复制彼此的内容，所以一旦你获得其中一个博客的宣传，你便等于获得所有博客的宣传。

经验教训：要做一个厚脸皮的人。与所有人谈论你的游戏。不要害羞；你所面对的第一个风险便是没人知道你是谁或者不知道你的游戏的存在。

销售游戏

在近几年，销售游戏比过去简单多了，因为我们拥有普遍的在线支付渠道（以及较高的宽带普及率）。你是否相信在20世纪90年代以及2000年代早期，你必须通过获得邮寄支票并在手机上收到信用卡号码才能够进行销售？然后你还需要邮寄一个磁盘给购买你的游戏的人！甚至与几年前相比，今天人们可以更自信地在网上购买东西。

销售PC独立游戏的前沿是来自Humble Bundle Inc.的Humble Store Widget。你可以看看它对于潜在玩家的意义。Humble Widget很简单，它允许玩家使用所有知名的付费处理器进行支付。BMY-Micro也是一些独立开发者喜欢的方式，它们同样也允许直接的信用卡支付，并拥有很棒的报告工具。

下一个选择便是像Steam这样的综合游戏市场。许多人喜欢将自己的所有游戏整合在一起，而这些商店已经拥有它们CC细节文件。尽管出现在Steam上并不是件易事，但是你们也可以选择较简单的Desura，这是面向独立开发者的一个平台。

最后，但同样重要的是像GOC（不再只是针对于早前游戏）或GamersGate等网上商店。虽然有很多选择，但我个人是GOG的忠实粉丝。

需要注意的是，在决定如何销售你的游戏前，不要忘记在每次更新游戏时，每个商店都会附加一些繁琐的工作，就像你在每次更新时都需要上传你的全新架构（游戏邦注：有时候还要使用神秘的用户友好型系统）。

如果你正在制作手机游戏，你的生活便会轻松些；从根本上看，你只需要将游戏置于卖主的官方商店便可：iOS上的App Store（年费是100美元）或者谷歌的Play Store（25美元）。

经验教训：尽管有许多双眼睛盯着你的游戏是件好事，但是将游戏扩展到许多会在你的更新过程增加许多繁琐工作同时还不能创造更多利益的小商店则不是个有益的选择。你必须更加谨慎！

创造你的知识产权

如果你的游戏获得了成功，你便能够通过使用其背景和基本框架去创造全新游戏和续集而获益。我现在的合作伙伴randomnine是在《主教之旅》发行后不久加入的，同时Joshua Day也将最初游戏移植到了手机平台上。

在经历了所有压力后，我几乎精疲力竭了，但是randomnine想要继续致力于游戏中。一开始计划更新内容，即名为《主教之旅豪华版》—-添加我之前没有时间添加的所有内容，就像让玩家能够消费收集到的金币的商店以及高分榜单。

然而，随着时间的发展，这一计划遭受了功能改变的打击，即在某种程度上我们意识到它将持续较长时间，并且最终产品将不会只是个内容更新。所以我们决定将其重命名为《主教之旅2》，并制定一个授权计划让randomnine能够使用我的知识产权（名字，最初的源代码以及资产）去创造基于早前版本的续集，并共享利润。

经验教训：一款优秀的游戏不应该是一次性产品。其他人也可以使用你所创造的基础，并且你们可以共享利益。

广撒网

在randomnine和Josh的帮助下，所有糟糕的漏洞都得以修复。在最初发行后半年，手机版本也终于出现在了iOS和Android上。一开始，大多数收益是来自PC上的下载，但随着时间的发展，我注意到手机才是长远的收益来源。尽管从整体上看PC上的销量还是较高，但是手机却带来了稳定的销量。

关于设计交叉平台游戏存在一些劣势，也就是说你不能完全利用硬件的独特性（鼠标vs触屏，倾斜控制和通知等等）。如果你的游戏是源自行动转变，那么问题也就迎刃而解了，因为我对回合制策略游戏很感兴趣，这是非常重要的内容，它让交叉平台开发变得更有意义了。

对于我们来说，另外一个有趣的市场便是Flash。与可下载的PC和手机游戏不同的是，Flash赞助商会预先提供给你较大的资金，而不是陆陆续续的收益来源。这在一开始真的是个巨大的恩惠，特别是当我在游戏发行时用光了所有钱的时候。但同时，因为Flash市场已经接近饱和，这将不再是一些新游戏的最佳选择。

经验教训：更多市场=更多收益来源。你从来不知道游戏将会在哪个市场大放异彩，不同的市场具有不同的销售曲线。

准备好走弯路：不要害怕

在游戏发行后一年，我用光了3次钱。但不知怎么的我总是会在最后时刻被销量，捆绑销售，全新的Flash授权以及一些合同所拯救。

然而，收入的不稳定性让我们很难事先进行规划，这也是我的问题的主要来源；因为害怕不能支付下个月的房租和伙食费，我感到非常恐惧。看来2012年并不益于我的心理健康。我觉得自己应该开心点，因为我已经创造出能够养活自己的独立游戏，这就说明我的梦想成真了，但事实上我却并未如此。

我只是觉得精疲力尽。每天醒来都觉得很累，没有斗志，并因为缺少生产力且收支未能相抵而充满压力。我开始嫉妒那些能够发行非常出色的游戏的开发者（但是我却不知道他们也曾遇到过和我同一的情况）。因为充满内疚，我根本不敢去玩其他人的游戏。

虽然我最终从这种不健康的情绪中走了出来（换了新环境真的起到很大的帮助），但我却毫无理由地浪费了一年多时间。不过似乎许多处于创造性领域中的人都会掉进这样的黑洞中。

经验教训：不要害怕，不要对自己太苛刻。花些时间让自己放松下，不要一直都处于战争的状态。最重要的是：不要拿自己与别人作比较！

结论

这便是我创造第一款独立游戏《主教之旅》的故事。我经历了许多艰难的时刻，但最后，我真的很高兴自己做到了。我希望这一故事能够帮助你们清楚该做什么以及不该做什么。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转功，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Cardinal Quest: How I Made $60,000 From My Indie Game

by Ido Yehieli

You probably hear a lot about wildly successful indie games (The Binding of Isaac, Fez, Braid, Minecraft, and so on) and on occasion also about unsuccessful ones. In this article I’m going to tell you about my experience on the middle road: making an indie game that achieved modest success. Cardinal Quest financed my humble lifestyle for about a year after its August 2011 release, and is still occasionally making me some decent pocket money more than two years after its release.

All in all, Cardinal Quest ended up making just shy of $60k in desktop sales, Flash licenses and mobile sales on iOS and Android (I didn’t get to keep all that money, as other people worked on the game too). It sold about 20k units, and the free Flash version got about a million plays across several portals. It also eventually spawned a sequel that should come out soon, Cardinal Quest 2!

However, a lot of what happened depended on the situation, the time I released the game at, and of course a bit of luck. So I can’t really write a “recipe for success”, since you could do today all the things I’ve done and still not end up replicating my results, but I think there’s still a lot you could derive from my experience and apply to your own situation.

What Is Cardinal Quest?

I have been playing roguelikes since first being exposed to Angband, Tales of Middle Earth 2 and later DoomRL in the early 2000s. However, even though I already invested the efforts required to learn how to play several such games, once I graduated from university I simply didn’t have as much time to invest in my hobby and found I stopped playing them.

Roguelikes have had a bit of a revival in recent times, but when I started working on Cardinal Quest in 2010 the scene was dominated by huge, obscure, niche titles like NetHack, Angband and ADOM. Cardinal Quest was my take on a streamlined, minimalist roguelike that would be easy to get into and could be played in short intervals, including by people who aren’t already hardcore fans of the genre.

You can hear a bit about how unusual Cardinal Quest’s focus on quick and accessible gameplay was at the time in the very first Roguelike Radio episode and the interview they did with me a bit later that year.

Lesson learned: Pick a type of game that is popular enough to have some existing fans but not so popular as to have lots of competition from other devs. Stuff that used to be popular but slipped off the radar in recent decades is a fairly safe bet. Stuff that has a cult following but hasn’t penetrated the mainstream is also good.

In the Beginning

Even though it’s not required in mechanics-heavy games like roguelikes, having a good grasp of the world the game takes place in can really help keeping you focused and give the resulting game a much more cohesive feel. Being a huge D&D nerd in my younger years, a lot of Cardinal Quest’s design was very much inspired by the old Basic D&D (back when D&D and AD&D were two different games). Although never stated in-game, Cardinal Quest takes place in Mystara’s Known World. Having a familiar setting with loads of existing material and fan-fiction made creating content much easier, as well as keeping things consistent.

By the time I started working on Cardinal Quest I’d already made a couple smaller roguelikes, mostly for the yearly 7DRL Challenge. However, I never managed to finish any of my more ambitious projects, on which I always ended up losing focus and motivation after a few months.

This time I decided to give myself a strict time limit (15 workdays) and work plan, and decided to follow Radomir Dopieralski’s guide, How to Write a Roguelike in 15 Steps.

The first release of the resulting HTML5 prototype for Cardinal Quest ended up taking only a bit longer to complete (about 20 workdays) and I didn’t follow Radomir’s exact order, nor did I even complete all steps. Nevertheless, at the end I had a very small but playable (and fun!) game that was kind of like a smorgasbord of roguelike games, giving you a little taste of every feature a full-fledged roguelike game might have.

Since this was 2010, simply having a playable non-trivial HTML5 game was enough to get me a bunch of attention, and as the game hit reddit and Hacker News it received about 15,000 hits and some good press.

The die had been cast: Cardinal Quest wasn’t to end as just a couple weeks’ worth of fiddling with JavaScript, it would become my first Real Game!

Lesson learned: Know what you want to do before you begin working. Get a prototype up and running quickly and see if it resonates with people. If it doesn’t, you might need to consider going back to the drawing board.

Let’s Give It a Shot

After spending a few more months of on and off (but mostly off) work on Cardinal Quest’s prototype, I decided it had overgrown my platform of choice (remember that HTML5 was a lot less mature back then), and that it was time to start a new version of the game if I was to make it into a commercial game.

I wanted to find out a bit about the demand for this game and hoped to also get money for some freelance work on the final product. I set up a campaign on a (since defunct) Kickstarter-style website for indie games called “8-bit funding”, since I couldn’t get on Kickstarter from Austria (my country of residence at the time).

After telling everyone I could about it, both offline and online (more about this later) I eventually raised $4,815, which ended up just about covering the freelance work I needed to get made for some music, sound effects, video and missing graphics. I also had an additional ~$10k saved up over a long course of time and quit my job as a game developer at mipumi games to embark on my new mission: to make a living off of my indie games!

Lesson learned: Try to get some money before you dive in head-first to minimize the chance that you’ll have to stop working on your game and get a day job. Crowdfunding is a good way to gauge what people think of your idea, but don’t expect big Tim Schafer-like bucks as a first timer.

Trials and Tribulations

For various personal reasons, shortly before and after the crowd funding campaign I’d lost my original graphics and coding partners, respectively. (The coder and I shared the programming responsibilities since I’d also been working as a professional programmer before starting Cardinal Quest).

At first these seemed like critical blows, and indeed it took me a little while to recover from them. For graphics I eventually found a replacement freelance artist on the tigsource forum. Another good source of finding freelance artists is the Pixelation forum.

I managed to do most of the coding with the help of a young student who was on a summer vacation and helped me for a couple of months in return for a modest stipend. Both of these, as well as the music, were paid for by the 8-bit funding campaign.

Unfortunately, pretty much none of the funding remained after that and I ended up eating through all of my savings in order to afford to work on the game until its release. I believe that at release time I had 300 euros in my bank account (less than my monthly rent).

Lesson learned: Have a contingency plan. If someone quits, can you do their work? Can you afford to hire someone who can? Can you re-scope the game to be doable without them?

Kick It Out

As I ran out of money, I had to release the game a bit early. I experienced a lot of stress over this buggy release but it got the money to start trickling in and kept me alive while fixing up the game. This first thing to do if you find yourself in this situation is to not panic—you’ll need your wits about you to improve the situation.

Unfortunately, I didn’t heed my own advice and panicked. I had a bunch of really weird bugs that defied my attempts to fix them (although I eventually tracked down the main culprit with the aid of Mike Welsh). These all eventually got fixed, but it was a huge drain on my mental well-being.

Ultimately, releasing the buggy version ended up enabling me to continue working on the game due to the money it brought in, so I guess in the end that wasn’t exactly a mistake. (However, having the option of releasing the game “when it’s done” would have been preferable in terms of stress.)

Lesson learned: Don’t panic, and don’t worry too much about releasing a flawless game. A good but flawed game today is better than a perfect game never. Know your tools and find colleagues to bounce ideas off in case you run into a brick wall.

Getting the Word Out

This is one area where I notice a lot of indies stumble. Basically you need to be utterly shameless about promoting your game and getting the word out. Some possible avenues include IRC channels, reddit, forums, Twitter, and even begging individual people to buy the game.

Search the Internet for every place and every person that might be interested in games similar to yours (and even not so similar). I visited all the roguelike IRC channels and RPG forums I could find on Google, telling people about Cardinal Quest. You have to be really persistent, as you can never tell who the one person is that might write that cool blog post that will trigger RPS or Kotaku to write about your game.

All the indie game blogs tend to copy each other, so once you get on one of them, you tend to get on all.

Lesson learned: Be a shameless hustler. Talk to everyone and anyone about your game. Don’t be shy; your number one risk is that nobody will know who you are or that your game exists.

Selling the Game

Selling indie games has become a lot easier in recent years than it used to be, now that we have ubiquitous online payments (and high broadband penetration). Can you believe that in the 1990s and early 2000s you’d actually have to get cheques in the mail and credit card numbers read on the phone to make a sale (that is, if you were able to take on CC payments at all)? And then you might need to send a disk in the mail (as in actual postal-service, not email) to the person buying your game! Even compared to just a few years ago, people today are much more confident about paying for stuff online.

On the forefront of selling PC indie games directly is the Humble Store Widget, from Humble Bundle Inc. You can take a look here to see what it looks like to potential players (it’s the gray box at the top of the page). The Humble Widget is sleek and simple, and allows easy payments with all popular payment processors. BMT-Micro is another favorite of some indies (cliffski swears by them), as they also allow direct credit-card payments and have nice reporting tools.

The next options are integrated game markets such as Steam (and to a much lesser extent, Desura). A lot of people like having a library with all their games, and these stores already have their CC details on file. While Steam is not easy to get on to, Desura is much simpler and is very much indie-oriented.

Last, but not least, are web-shops such as the venerable GoG (no longer just for old games!) or GamersGate. There are a ton of these to choose from but I’m personally not a fan of any except GoG.

Beware! Before deciding on how to sell your game, don’t forget that each store adds some amount of tedious work every time you update your game, as you need to upload your new build in each (sometimes using arcane and user-unfriendly systems).

If you’re making mobile games, your life is easier; basically you just need to put your game on the vendor’s official shop: the iOS App Store ($100/year fee) or Google’s Play Store ($25 fee).

Lesson learned: While having many eyeballs on your game is good, it is possible to overdo spreading your game on many minor stores who will add up tedious busy-work to your update process while not bringing in a lot of money. Choose wisely!

Build Your Intellectual Property

If your game becomes successful, you might be able to benefit from it in the long term by using the setting and basic framework to create new games and sequels. My current partner randomnine joined in shortly after Cardinal Quest’s release, as well as Joshua Day who ported the original game to mobile.

After all the stress, I burned out a bit on the game, but randomnine wanted to continue working on it. At first we drafted up a plan for a content upgrade called Cardinal Quest Deluxe—it was to have all those little things I didn’t have time to add to the original, like shops to spend your accumulated gold in and high score boards.

However, as time passed the plan suffered feature creep to such extent that it became apparent it would not end soon, nor would the end product really be just a content upgrade. We rechristened it Cardinal Quest 2 and came up with a licensing scheme in which randomnine could use my intellectual property (the CQ name, original source code, and assets) to build a sequel on top of the old foundations, in exchange for a profit share.

Lesson learned: A good game isn’t a one-off thing. Someone else can use the groundwork you’ve built for both of your mutual benefit after you’re done.

Cast a Wide Net

With the help of randomnine and Josh, all the terrible bugs were fixed. The mobile version came out on iOS and Android about half a year after the original release. At first most of the revenue came from PC downloadables, but as time went on I noticed the long tail is much longer on mobile. Overall the majority of sales summed are still higher on PC, but mobile brings in a nice constant rate of sales.

There are some disadvantages to designing cross-platform games, namely that you can’t take full advantage of the hardware’s unique characteristics (mouse vs. touch, tilt controls, notifications, and so on). However, the further your game is from a twitch action game the less of an issue this is, and since I’m mostly interested in turn-based strategy games this was less of a big deal and it made cross-platform development more sensible.

Another interesting market for us was Flash. Unlike downloadable PC and mobile games, Flash sponsorships give you a (relatively) large lump sum up front, instead of a recurring continuous revenue stream. This was a huge boon at first when I ran out of money by the time the game released. In the mean time, the Flash market has dried up considerably, so this may no longer be a viable option for new games.

Lesson learned: More markets = more revenue sources. You never know which market a game would really shine on, and different markets have different sale curves.

Prepare for a Bumpy Road: Don’t Panic!

I almost ran out of money three more times during the ensuing year after releasing the game. Somehow I was always saved in the last moment by a sale, bundle, random new Flash license, some contract work, or similar.

2012 was not a good year for my mental health.
However, the volatile nature of this income made it hard to plan ahead, and that was the main source of my mistakes; the fear of not being able to afford rent and food next month paralyzed me and made me lose a ton of time, so I panicked. 2012 was not a good year for my mental health. I felt like I was supposed to be happy since I was making indie games for a living—my dream come true!—but I wasn’t. Feeling like I should be happier was probably a big factor in why I wasn’t (which sounds weird, but if you’ve experienced this before you know what I’m talking about).

I just felt drained and worn out. I’d wake up tired and unmotivated, and in turn get stressed about not being productive and not making ends meet. I started becoming jealous of other developers who seemed to have had it all figured out and releasing awesome games (little did I know that many of them were dealing with the same demons as I was at the time). I couldn’t bring myself to play other people’s games due to feelings of guilt and inadequacy.

I eventually got out of it (moving to a new environment helped), but I lost a good year or so to this cruddy state of mind, and there was really no reason to—I would have been a lot better off trying to not worry so much and let stuff unfold as it did. It was really all downside and no upside, yet it seems many people in creative fields fall in this hole.

Lesson learned: Don’t panic, and don’t be too hard on yourself. Take some time off and don’t try to be super productive all the time. And most importantly: don’t compare yourself to other people!

Conclusion

So that’s it: the story of my experience making my first indie game, Cardinal Quest. I had a lot of rough times but in the end I’m really happy I did it. I hope my story has been educational, in showing both what to do and what not to do.(source:gamedevelopment)