One of the main traits that an indie developer must cultivate is that of wearing many hats. All indie game develepers will tell you about it, and it is the first thing you will realise when going indie. Wearing many hats is usually the result of small budgets. Small budgets mean less heads, but equal amount of hats. What I learned through the course of developing my indie game is that your success depends on how well your head fits those hats. Your game will simply be as good as the worst fit.
One of the hats I had to wear for the development of “Pop Corny” was that of the game designer. The closer I had ever come to game design before this, was playing games with a little more inquiring spirit than most players do. This can definitely be interpreted as a bad hat fit. It was clear that in order to have a successful game, I had to find clever ways to improve the fit. This of course could be done by adjusting the head (becoming a better game designer) or by adjusting the hat (adjusting the problem itself to something that I would handle). It was obvious that I had to do the first as much as possible, but without the later I was not going to go far. Read the rest of this entry »
