The biggest mistake for first time game devs (who are already coders) is thinking that making a game is a programming problem. It's not. It's an art/music/sfx/design problem. Unless you are crafting some crazy new shader, there is no new cutting edge code to write in a game. You use a commercial engine, third party libraries, etc. to the point that your game code is nothing but a collection of scripts essentially. The heavy lift for making a game is entirely in the creative side.

Why not both? Back in 2006 I helped someone complete a Flash puzzle game. The whole thing was a an interesting programming experience. His lead developer had family issues to tend to and I stepped in. He would come up with game-play ideas and I would prototype them while also working completing the whole game. It was a blast. The ideas that he would bring to me were greatly influenced by what he thought I could pull off in the alotted time. After I was done, he later hired some other devs and told me he found himself limiting his ideas because those guys weren't as good at implementing them. In that respect he definitely hit technical limitations even though he was working on non-technically challenging games on a well known platform.

Similarly, there was no state-of-the-art coding in this game:

* http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html

They had plenty of technical challenges pushing the performance of ActionScript in browsers at the time in order to keep the game moving smoothly.

While I generally agree with the sentiment, there certainly are some good counterexamples of games that are almost purely programming problems. Games with mostly procedural content and/or novel gameplay - Minecraft would be a good example.

I'm not sure how true that is; procedural games I think tend to come up with a core formula once, and stick to it pretty hard. The rest is just playing with numbers, and presets. Like for minecraft, there's a bit of complexity involved to it's procedural generation, but in general I imagine it hasn't changed much since its inception, with possibly two, maybe three, rewrites to its map generation logic.

Most of the "real" updates to minecraft are in regards to enemies, item recipes, "biomes" (which presumably don't change the generation logic much, just the spawn rates), etc.

Roguelikes I imagine are also in the same vein; it's all just fiddling with the numbers, for balance and "fun"

Simulation focused games on the hand are probably a better candidate for "purely programming" programs, but even then, the complex stuff is probably in the vein of emergent behavior; something you don't at all strive for in normal programming. And they still presumably make a large chunk of their decisions based on "fun" instead of reality. The harder you strive for reality, the less a game it becomes... Maybe Grand Strategies then; they pretend to simulate a pre-generated complex environment, but avoid emergent behavior for the most part.

Really the only thing I could safely call a "pure programming" problem is a tech demo that happens to be a video game, ie Carmack's stuff. But even then...

I think it might just boil down to that very few video games are both good, and disinterested in player enjoyment. The key distinguishing feature of video games as a media is human interaction; it's difficult to imagine a good game where this is not the predominant motivator. Even Dwarf Fortress keeps it in mind pretty strongly.

Spot on. I would add that there seems to be a focus on original ideas. This makes it harder to sell. Sticking with proven ideas and then slapping a creative twist is a safer sell.

Yeah, and don't get too creative with your characters either. Have a cool anime-inspired protagonist with a unique look? Don't use him. Your name isn't Hayao Miyazaki, and the player base can't relate. There are probably hundreds of Joe McBuzzcut models in your favorite asset store you can tweak to purpose.

Also, don't forget to hire a sweatshop full of eager kids fresh out of high school or junior college and make them work 60-80 (or more) hour weeks for peanuts to hit those Christmas deadlines. They probably know more about the ins and outs of the third-party middleware you licensed than you do, since it's literally all they do, morning, noon, and night. Granted, this bit may be difficult on a $85,000 budget -- if you plan on hiring developers from the first world, that is. You could probably hire a team twenty strong from China or the Ukraine for less than half that money and keep them busy for a year. After which you'll have a beta with a few bugs, some of them showstoppers, but still good enough to ship as the final game while you ready a day-one patch.

I mean if we're going to regurgitate "industry best practice" into this thread, why not go whole hog?

You forgot to include loot boxes. The game better include loot boxes that turn users into mindless casino players.

I've delivered one small game to Google Play and am working on two more. I wrote a unique engine for each. I'm also doing all the art (I learned to draw so that I could make decent looking games). Building a game with a licensed engine feels, to me, a bit like drawing a character by starting from one of those pixel-art "dollbases". Yes, it's what the industry does now, but I didn't start writing games to join the industry; that'd be like taking up woodworking so I could work for IKEA. I started writing games to write games. It's relaxing, when programming is to me normally a cause of stress and strife.

If you are getting into the indie scene hoping to have a million seller, then unless you are a rare genius (e.g., Notch) your $85,000 is better spent on Powerball tickets. Do it for love of the craft, whether you use your own or a licensed engine. And for God's sake start small.

I agree with the sentiment but this guy quit his job to be an indie developer. This changes things a bit since he needs to now feed himself with this work.

Indeed, and I think that was the true mistake #1: going all in on a hobby without even knowing if it'll pay the bills.

Is 1 really that big of a mistake? I understand that it's a mistake to build a fully functional game engine to then use in production but building just enough to better grok the internals seems like invaluable information to me

Well, he says "custom engine" in the article but, he used XNA. When people hear "built an engine" they tend to assume the person spent years building it from-scratch. XNA is hardly from-scratch.

I think, in this case, the author meant he didn't use one of the big commercial engines. Aside from all that, I also agree that it's not a really big mistake.

It's a great thing to do if you want to learn. Not so much if you want to release a game and make money. Even if you want some very special engine-level feature, you can find an engine extendable enough and just add what you need.

It is valuable if your goal is to learn to make games and invest in yourself. But it is not valuable if you want to make money and be successful in your indie venture.

It is possible the knowledge he gained from writing his own engine, will allow him to get a better paid job down the road for example. But most likely those $85 000 would be better spent on education.

Yes, absolutely. The world has standardized on Unreal for big games and Unity for small to medium sized games. These come with enormous ecosystems and ready-made asset pipelines, which will dramatically decrease your time to market. Unless you're sitting on a fat pile of cash and free time that you can afford to never see again after you commit it to developing some experimental new engine and tools for the same, the smart thing to do is license Unreal or Unity.

That is, of course, assuming that you think sales are THE thing that matters in indie game development. In which case you are probably better off attaching yourself to a large studio such as EA, than going indie.

What about 2D games? It seems GameMaker may have the advantage there. I've completed six game jam games and am looking into moving towards a slightly larger project and am currently considering Phaser and GameMaker, but if the 2D has come along in Unity maybe it is worth trying.

Unfortunately "invaluable information" doesn't translate to sales. At all.