Thanksgiving for the Indie Developer blog - Gamieon

It's the day after Thanksgiving, but not too late to reflect what I'm thankful for as a one-man-shop Indie developer.

Contract Help - I'm pretty much a jack-of-all-trades at Gamieon, but I contract help on a need-to basis. Jeff Gordon modeled the pinball field for Hyperspace Pinball. He did in hours what would have taken me at least a week. I'm thankful he was willing to help out a small minnow in the ocean of game developers.

My Dominoze game has never gotten past beta, but Eric Barth, Jeff Gordon, Jordan Pelovitz, Yisroel Goldstein, Helder Gomes, Russ McMackin, Bryan Taylor, and Mick Rippon were an amazing help. I can't thank them enough.

If you have a team of good developers who care about what everyone is doing, cherish it! Show your appreciation for each other from time to time. If you're all friends in real life, get pizza this Friday!

 
Beta Testers - I'm thankful for everyone who beta tested my games. Seth Miko, Adam McDonald and "Dark_Link" were extraordinarily helpful, and found some real showstopping bugs that would have ruined the release. Honorable mention also go to "User201" for the great feedback from iBetaTest. 

Google - If I'm stuck with a programming issue, or just want to find information, I know where to go.

Blogs and Articles - I learned a lot just by reading other developers' anecdotes, stories, tips, and instructions. There's just too many to cite (though you can see them in some of my previous blogs). I'm thankful for the free flow sharing of knowledge I've seen, and I hope my blogs will perpetuate that in their own way.

Dedicated Indie Websites - Sites like IndieDB.com and pixelprospector.com make it easy to find fellow indies and to see what's going on out there. I'm thankful to be part of a community of game developers.

Game Development Tool Developers - As much fun as it was writing my own game engine instead of a game, I'm finally over that. I'm glad I chose to continue game development using the Unity engine to power my apps. What used to take months can now be accomplished in days, and I just don't have that kind of free time anymore.

I'm thankful to be in an era where game developers can focus on writing games instead of the deep internals that power them. Instead of spending days trying to add a new feature to my video engine, I can let Unity developers worry about that. Want to write your game for the XBox and the PC? XNA is there for you. Oh, and you can use both for free (though conditions apply)! This is not to say one should be totally ignorant of the internal workings of game engines. One must be cognizant of writing good, optimal code on top of the engine, and understand the features and limitations of the underlying engine as they pertain to the project at hand.

Canned Content - If you need a generic bit of content for your game, sites like pixeljoint.com and turbosquid.com have resources to help you, even on a $0 budget. I'm thankful for all the free and cheap content I got from those sites in just a few clicks.

Those are just some of the things I'm thankful for. Go ahead and post some feedback; what did I overlook to be thankful for?