15 Years of Indie Dev In 4 Bits of Advice
It’s rough in the games industry at the moment, and a lot of folks are spinning up their own thing. So I thought now might be a good time to boil down what feel like the key things I’ve learned in 15 years of running an indie games studio.
If you’re just arriving, we are Suspicious Developments. We did:
- Gunpoint (2013) – 10k reviews, 98% positive
- Heat Signature (2017) – 6k reviews, 94% positive
- Tactical Breach Wizards (2024) – 10k reviews, 98% positive
I’m the game designer and writer, I do some code, and until recently I ran the company (I now have help).
As you might be able to tell from the list, our games are all over the place in development time and genre. But they all sold great and reviewed great, and to the extent that we controlled that at all, I credit it to prioritising sustainability.
That means definining success not in total sales or accolades, but in how sure you can be of making another game at a happy, comfortable pace. All our games made more than twice their money back, and we’ve never been closer than 2 years to running out of funds.
The biggest factor in getting to that position, of course, was sheer luck: we made our first game in our spare time, with no budget, and it came out at the perfect time: 2013. Indie games had started to make real money on Steam, but the scene wasn’t flooded yet, so a small-scope thing from first timers had much easier time selling. That kickstart from zero to game-budget-money is ultimately why we’ve never needed a publisher.
So I’m not the right person to ask about startup funding. But we weren’t that rare in our first success, and we are increasingly rare in our still-being-here, still-making-stuff, still-independent. So I can at least advise on how to make what you have go as far as possible.
Looking back, this is what feels like the highest-impact, most-copyable aspects of that. I hope it can be of help.
Why four?
Look, I’ve only been at it 15 years. It’s gonna take me til 2030 to learn a fifth thing.
Contents
- Stay as small as you can
- Pick something prototypable
- Testing is the magic bullet
- Price is a solved problem
- A timeline, to illustrate
1. Stay as small as you can
I hate to say this at a time when it would sure be nice if there were more jobs, but I say it to encourage more stable jobs. Staffing up doesn’t really create jobs if it leads to layoffs or closure, and it fucks with a lot of lives along the way.
I think we only get to a healthier industry for workers when more studios are sustainable, and more jobs are stable. And things get unstable very fast as you grow.
The maths of how team size affects your chance of success is brutal:
- Success is making more money than you spent
- Doubling your team size doubles the amount of money you need to make
- But as the numbers go up, vanishingly fewer games make that much money. So it’s not just half the chance of success, it might be a tenth
For reference, Suspicious Developments’ average burn rate is about 3 full time salaries. I think if we had scaled up to 8 after Gunpoint, we would have made a bad game next, then no games at all.
Heat Signature was a tough game to figure out, and if we’d had less than 3.5 years of runway to test and iterate, we would have just had to release it in a bad state. If we’d had only 3.5 years of runway, I’d have been stressed as hell and the company would have collapsed if it wasn’t a hit.
We haven’t been consistent because all our ideas are golden, we’ve done it by staying small enough to keep testing and working until they’re good. And that’s a more sustainable kind of success, because rolling with punches is built in.
A lower burn rate is a superpower. There’s nothing else that’s fully within your control that can so dramatically increase your chances of success.
2. Pick something prototypable
This didn’t really work, which was useful to know 6 years before launch.
By ‘prototype’ I mean a playable build that meaningfully shows what’s good about your game – a proof of concept.
A prototypable project is one where you can build that in an amount of time you can afford to lose. If you can make a prototype but it’s gonna take 3 years, it can’t serve the main purpose of a prototype: to check this game idea works while there’s still time to change tack.
Being able to do this quickly is crucial for two reasons:
1. If the prototype ends up proving your idea doesn’t work, or is beyond your means, you’re gonna want as much time as possible to do something about that.
2. If your prototype proves the idea can work, how much time you have left directly determines how good the game will actually be.
It’s also just incredibly motivating and clarifying for the whole team to be able to play the game they’re working on, and see where it’s headed.
So:
- Choose your project based heavily on which seems the easiest to prototype.
- Pick stuff you can prototype with the people you already have.
- Don’t obsess about anything until you have a prototype: you don’t know what’s important yet.
- Assume everything you do before you have a prototype might need to be scrapped or redone.
3. Testing is the magic bullet
How did we make Wizards good? We asked players which bits were bad, then fixed them.
You are going to take an exam that costs all of your life savings to sit. If you ace this exam, you’ll win 2-10 times your life savings. The games-playing public already knows all the answers to the exam, and will tell you if you ask them.
It is incredible how many devs don’t ask them. Or don’t ask enough of them. Or don’t ask them early enough, or enough times.
Testing can be a fair bit of work and time, but nothing is as expensive as launching without it.
This phase of development is called ‘making the game good’, and if you don’t have time for it, that’s as big of a problem as it sounds.
4. Price is a solved problem
On a pretty real level, your sales are a function of:
- How many people arrive at your Steam page
- How much your Steam page makes them want to buy it
- How much it costs
The first one is famously hard. The second one heavily depends on making the game good, which you’re gonna spend 90% of your time on.
The third one is just a single number you can change in 30 seconds, and you can find out the correct value for it in one round of testing.
We just ask people how much they think the game should cost, and every time we’ve gone with the price most people chose, and every time they’ve sold great and reviewed great.
A timeline, to illustrate
I’m a visual thinker, so I laid all this out on a timeline. The positions are arbitrary, of course, but there’s no realistic place to put those five lines that doesn’t make doubling your headcount terrifying for your breathing room on both quality and stability.
Obviously most of this post is broadly aligned with conventional wisdom. But the thing I want to yell about, that people don’t seem to internalise enough, is how dramatically and reliably having more time, with a testable build, converts to your game being better and your studio being safer.
But does making a good game guarantee a hit?
Nope! But at the indie scale, making a bad one sure prevents it. And staying small helps again here: if you need to sell a million copies at launch, quality alone can’t ensure it – marketing and other factors all need to align. If you only need to sell 50k, you can get a lot closer to that with just good word of mouth.
Again, this is not a guide to selling the most copies. It’s a guide to making whatever funds, talent and good fortune you have go as far as possible, and keeping you better insulated from whatever bullshit happens next. And that comes down to giving yourself as much time as possible, and checking in with players to make sure you’re spending it well.