My 10 most important tips for new teams getting started in game development
If I was to start over, and make a new game company from scratch, with 0 experience and a whole lot of energy, this was what I hope someone would tell me:
1: Agree on paper
Talk things through, you and your partners. Make clear agreements on who owns and does what, and what happens if you disagree, break up or get lucky. Write down your agreements. Even an outline in an email is better than nothing.
2: Reduce Risk
As you’re just getting started, and have little to no money and little to no experience, your mindset should be anchored in reducing risk. How can we make sure that our likely failure has minimal negative impact on our finances, health and opportunity space?
3: Get Experience
You need to accelerate getting experienced as individuals and as a team. You do that by making products and completing full production cycles. You gauge how your product performs, how players react, and you actively seek to learn from it.
4: Make Something Small
By making something small you A) reduce risk, and B) accelerate your own learning. It’s more important to ship, than to ship something amazing. Make a really small game, ship it, learn from it and build from there. Dare yourself to make it smaller.
5: Launch Quickly
If you’re not super embarrassed about your game when you launch, then you’ve launched too late. Launching quickly will let you learn directly from the market and players faster. Launching quickly speeds up the experience loop and reduces risk.
6: Repeat
Launch the first thing. Then build on top of what you have. Launch another better thing. Build on top. Iterate on the thing you made. Consider your development process and ongoing chain of experiments. Test what works, emphasise and magnify what works before you add new things.
7: Focus on the First Minute
Your audience will judge your product extremely fast. Focus on getting the first few seconds right, then the first minute, then the first five minutes etc. When you have something that will keep players on board for 10-20 minutes, you’re in a good place.
8: Let People Pay You
There is no reason to wait until you have 6-12 hours of polished gameplay before you let people pay you. Start with a tip jar. Make small instant games with ads. Pre-sell your full game at a discount. Start a Patreon. At the very least give people a way to “pay” by giving you their email address.
9: Show Your Work
Share what you make on whatever channels you have available. Figure out where your players are, and show them bugs, failures, fun, great looking stuff, ugly stuff, warts and all. Show your work and humanity. You attract people who share your values by expressing your values.
10: Keep Going
You do not need permission to get started. Just go. Then make sure that you can keep going until you make something that works. Keep the band together. Work day jobs if you must. Keep going until something sticks.
Bonus: Get (Make) a Mentor
Lots of people have walked the path before you, and many of them are more than happy to help you out. It never hurts to ask. Don’t ask for a mentor, but ask for advice on a specific thing, go do it, then later tell them what happened and ask another thing. Slowly you’ll turn them into mentors.
Put it On the Wall
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