Starting indie adventure ! What's your best advice ? Thread

Hello everyone !

I'll will be working on my personal projects for a year at least. My goal is to release a game and an album before this deadline.

I am :

- A former game designer by degree (3 years)

- Half a programer (i did only 2/4 years)

- Semi self-taught graphist (during my formation as a game designer and afterward)

- Basic 2D animator (i took drawing and 2d animation evening classes)

- Self-taught music composer/producer (my soundcloud but i didn't post for a while now)

My game is already advanced because i've been working on it now and then for a year already, but it's far from over. It's a small scale game, 1 room, 1 character, maybe less than two hours long, don't think i'll sell it for more than 2 euros.

I use :

- Unity as game engine

- Adobe illustrator/photoshop for the graphics

- Spriter pro for the animations

- Ableton live for the music

I'm looking for every advice i can get from you guys, feel free to share your experience with me and talk about how you started working on your own projects and how it ended up. I'm actually kinda confident for the game itself. My biggest fear is communication. I'm really not a natural to the process and i'm not confident in getting my game noticed once it's done. I'm really looking forward advices on this matter.

I posted a similar topic on reddit and i've been adviced to start communication right now, to build a community up before the release of the game, which make sense. But how should i properly do that since i don't have much more than a concept and some screenshots/arts to show the world.
Should i get to people like "i have this game about this theme with those artworks, share it if you find it intresting" ? Seems a bit thin to me but i might be wrong. Tell me what you think !

Thanks in advance and have a nice day !

Research research research. I spent a good amount of months only reading stories, tips & tricks and watching documentaries as well as conferences. It really is the alpha omega in gamedev, I mean, half of the work if not more is the research and documentation itself.

I would register on every game forum there is, Gamedev.net, indiegamerguy, TIG etc etc. Read the posts that are there and then start thinking about the idea itself. Asking simple questions before working on it more, what is the game about? what is the narrative and story behind it? Do a high concept document where you use screenshots from similar games to see how it can look like, then do a mockup where you write a section of the game, if not the full game like this "I use "W" to walk to a door, I get 2 options, Open (lockingpicking), I use "E" to lock pick, a new window appears" etc etc, you get my drift. It will help you blocking out certain parts you might not have thought about making it easier down the road.

You want to focus on what you can do first before sharing it, have something to share for sure. There are 1000 of "I have this great idea" which actually is the first mistake, never share your idea on of a game on a forum without having created something first, "Legal" stuff. Who knows, you might be sitting on a gem and you would not want other people to take that idea before creating something right?

Also make personal milestones, most indie project fails or gets abandoned within the first 6 months, so having milestones weekly or monthly is a good idea.

Don`t go for a rev share model with 10+ people if you ever get that far. It will be a disaster, always try to keep the team as small as you can.

Hope this helped, this is just my personal advice's, I`m sure you can find some better out there, hehe.

Good luck, and I`m excited to see if you ever post something here!

You're on the right track and know really well what you're doing: to ask people for their opinions, to build the community don't just share your art works and screen shots, ask people something about it cos people just love to show their opinions, when you have enough people and artworks think about posting your project to KickStarter or Indiegogo, maybe not for money but a lot more people will know about your game