Going Indie

I've graduated, left my old job, and now guess what...

I'm going indie! :D

I'll be making my own Flash games full-time, finally.

I'll be using this as an opportunity to experiment and learn - about design, about programming, about collaboration, and about monetization. And I'll be focusing on rapid development cycles, to learn as much as I can in a short period of time.

As the great Daniel Cook once said,

Experience comes from finishing multiple times. By doing shorter projects, you get more finishes under your belt.

Starting projects is easy. Getting into production is easy. Spending other people's money is easy.

It is only when you go beyond that to wrapping up a project and trying to make money does reality hit and strong lessons are learned.

This is really an opportunity to put many of my ideas to the test - not only game ideas, but ideas about process and how to do things. I'm especially eager to test some ideas about using micropayments and metrics in online games.

To start with, I'm working on a project with brontosaurus, a talented pixel artist and map designer. We're trying out a new process for "doodling" a game, one piece at a time. Every day, brontosaurus will come up with a new concept, like a procedural tree, or a movement animation, and the next day I try to implement it in code. We're hoping that this will allow us to organically build a game out of pieces, and quickly try out ideas, in a similar way to how you might create something spontaneously awesome by doodling.

You can expect to see updates soon. :D

Wish me luck! ;)