The Indie Game Development Survival Guide by David Michael
Published September 2003
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Charles River Media Price: $31.96
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Amazon Sales Rank: 86,874
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Summary The Indie Game Development Survival Guide details the process of designing, developing, and self-publishing games for the PC. Whether you are a programmer, an artist, a sound engineer, etc., this book teaches you how to lead an independent game project. It explains how to take a unique and innovative game idea from design, planning, scheduling, development, and testing, to publishing it on the Internet. You’ll find out about choosing the best technology to get the job done. You’ll learn how to manage your team so that you can finish your game on time, and you’ll discover new and innovative ways to use the Internet to market, test, and deliver your game. Everything you need to know for small–to no–budget game development is explored, including determining which type of genre works best, planning, scheduling, budgeting, building a team, and selling the game.
KEY FEATURES
* Provides all the information indie game developers need to create a game on a shoestring budget
* Details the entire design and development process
* Helps both programmers and non-programmers bring their game vision to life
* Provides in-depth instruction on project and team management
* Showcases proven Internet marketing strategies to get sales for your game off the ground
Highly highly recommended. Everyone else above this wrote it all. Just buy and read it if you're a new indie developer - it's helped me get my project back on track (I just wish it came out when I first started my project).
I found this book to be a great reference for not only game development but also the business of running your own indie game company. There are plenty of resources and links, along with anecdotes and examples of real companies and their experiences.
For some unknown reason I read this book, why is it unknown? Well let's just say I'm not in any real position to be starting indie projects of any significant value at this current time. I'm young, rather amature in my coding skills and for other such reasons I questioned why I was reading this book.
I do have a big interest in business however, so this book gave me a feeling that maybe, given a few more years self training I could be an indie and make money making the games I love, not what other people want to make money out of!
The book starts at the very beginning (that shouldn't really come as any shock) giving the facts to the reader straight; while Indie development can be fun and rewarding it can be hard work and may often give you little financial reward.
As the book progressed I was told of real life situations, through the use of case studies, this made me actually believe what I was reading wasn't just general business theory.
The book then goes through the development process detailing how an Indie should treat the phases of development, from design to marketing and selling.
I was then treated to a list of resources to use in my projects, 3d / 2d engines, libraries, tutorials and more.
The Indie Developer survey which runs throughout the book gives you an idea of what the Indie market is like today which is usefull in deciding what you want to do with development, should you follow the norm or go another way?
Overall an excellent book which I enjoyed reading even though I knew that what I was learning wouldn't really have been of any use at the present time.
I've always enjoyed watching documentaries about independent filmmakers. One of the most famous (and certainly the most prolific) is Roger Corman, who's got 50 years and 350 low-budget films to his credit. Corman decided around 1970 that he was a better producer than director, so he started seeking out young talented directors to direct his films. A great number of Hollywood elite, like Ron Howard, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, and Jonathan Demme got their start doing low-budget films for Corman. In a recent TV special about Corman, several of his alumni described the "Corman Pep-Talk" that all new directors get when they're first hired. Corman would schedule a two-hour lunch with the new director, and he'd give 'em a rapid-fire course in how to get a film done fast and on-budget. This talk was full of specific "in the trenches" tips that you don't learn in film-school like:
If your camerman says the shot was perfect, don't do another one. Further shots won't be as good.
If you're doing outdoor shots and you're losing daylight, move the production uphill (so you keep the light) and tighten up the shot (so nobody notices you're in a different place)
Several directors said they learned more from that lunch that they learned from four years of film school. Ron Howard said that at the time it sounded like a pile of cheesy penny-pinching tricks, but he admitted that he did the "climb the hill" trick during the filming of his megabudget Far and Away.
Unfortunately the game industry's got a paucity of Roger Cormans who are willing to hire upstarts to produce quick profitable titles. But, with the release of The Indie Game Development Survival Guide, we do now have the game industry equivalent of the "Corman Pep-Talk". The Indie Game Development Survival Guide is a 350-page information-dense guide of exactly what you need to do to produce a game. If you consider yourself to be a beginning game developer, a prospective game designer, an up-n-coming game producer, or any of a dozen other buzzwords that reduce to "wannabe", you need this book.
You'd better prepare, though, to check your ego at the door, though. If your game development experience consists of reading a C++ book and playing lots of death-matches, and you've got grand designs on being a game designer who'll be producing the Next Big Hit, this book's first piece of advice will be to lower your sights.
This book's strength, however, lies not in showing you what you're incapable of doing, though, but what you're capable of doing. While it does gently deflate those who have grand designs on making the leap from high school into professional game design, it also does a good job of showing you the skills you
need to produce a low budget game. And it does ask the immortal question that I've always asked myself when I hear of people making demos to present to potential employers.
"Why make a demo showing that you're capable of writing a game. Why not just write a game instead?"
The Indie Game Development Survival Guide keeps things on a pretty high level, ignoring best-compiler discussions in favor of discussions of the development process, how to ensnare a team that shares your vision, how to keep the team, how and what to document, how to test, and (most importantly) how to know when it's time to stop developing and start shipping.
During the trip, you'll read plenty of case-studies from many independent businesses, the lion's share of which being the author's own Samu Games. The book also cites a slew of industry surveys to support its conclusions, so it's pretty far from a "one man's rant" from an industry veteran that you often see as convention keynotes. The appendix contains the actual design document for Paintball.Net, a shipping game which is a frequent example in the text.
Is The Indie Game Development Survival Guide a good book?
Yes, it's a terrific book.
Do I recommend you buy The Indie Game Development Survival Guide?
No, I don't.
Because if you purchase, read, and take to heart the information in The Indie Game Development Survival Guide, you'll have a very good chance of successfully creating marketable and profitable games. And if somebody buys one of your games, they are potentially not buying one of my games.
So by all means, avoid this book. Continue down the path that you're currently following. Blaze your own trail. Don't learn from other peoples' mistakes.
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