There are the quick answers, and then there are the right answers. The quick answer for a lot of people is “make what the market is buying”. So the hopeful indie looks around, sees that there are these portals and lots and lots of people are buying these games, and decides to make a casual game because this will make them money, and of course, that’s what they’re after.

The casual game dev explosion DID make a lot of people a lot of money. It still does. But… this is the wrong answer.

The real answer to the question “What do I make?” is another question.

“What do I want to make with all of my heart?”

But how can that be?

The best video games are made and designed with passion. The developer(s) pour their heart and soul into the game, and it shows. Everything just fits together like a fine watch. The middle part of the production, while always a slog, is something they’re willing to go through to get this game finished because they love the game. They’re not willing to take shortcuts that make the game less than it could be. It is a piece of art, and the player can tell. And when people can tell that you cared about your product, they will buy it.

And I hear you asking, “How do I know if it will sell?”

No one ever knows, really knows, whether sales will meet expectations of any piece of entertainment. But if you don’t care about the game enough to be able to go running to every person you see and shove it in their face and say “Look at this really great game I made!!” no one will ever see it, and no one will buy it.

However, if you make a game that you really love, and it’s uniquely yours and it shows and you’re as proud of it as of anything that you’ve ever done, you’ll want to show everyone. Marketing won’t be as much work. People will see that, and will start coming to you, and it will be even less work. You will have people asking to sell your game for you. You’ll have portals, or whoever you’re selling through, putting your screenshots in their newsletters and advertisments, not because it’s just new, but because it’s something you poured your heart into.

You have one more question, I can see. What if you pour your heart into something and it fails? Yeah, that’s a risk. Let me ask you this, though. Wouldn’t you rather have something you’re proud of completing, something you can say “I gave it everything I have”, a product you like, than to have a product that you half-assed because you didn’t care, you don’t want to play it because you don’t particularly like that type of game and have it be a total failure? If you make something you truly love, the only failure that can possibly happen is lack of sales. You still have a game that you like and that you’re proud of. If you make a game that you don’t care for and it tanks, you have nothing except the knowledge that you could have made something you liked instead.

However, and this is a really big however, Emmanuel Marty has taken the PTK interface and rewritten everything on the inside to make Kanji. It looks like PTK. It runs like PTK. It isn’t PTK. It’s better. It supports DX8, DX9, and OpenGL on Windows, and has added the iDevice (iPad, iPod, iPhone) platform to the platforms that are supported. It’s also got batch drawing support, render to texture support, better text handling, improved sound capabilities, gamepad support (had gone missing in PTK because of issues on OS X). If you have a game based on PTK, on Windows, it will literally port from PTK to Kanji with just changing the libraries that are pointed at, and the header path. On OS X, it will need a new project, but the code will still work just fine.

Emmanuel is super responsive right now with getting bugs fixed (if you find them – it’s pretty damned solid) and the price is good for what you get ($299). If you’re making games with C++ and using SDL or SFML or some other “free” library, you owe it to yourself to check out Kanji and see just how easy cross platform 2d development can be.

A “Real” indie, by my definition, is someone who makes their own games, and get’s the vast majority of their income for their products directly from the buyer, and not as a royalty from a publishing house or portal or other entity. Someone who isn’t limited in what they create by the editorial limits of the channel they’re publishing through.

You could argue that everyone is limited by their customers, but that is really only a personal limitation, and  a problem successful developers have. If you are trying to get your games on a portal, the genres and styles of games they will take are limited to what they think they can sell, which is an external limitation, and is something “Real” indies try to avoid.

It may sound like I have something against independant development studios that publish through major channels, but I don’t, really. I just am not that interested in what they have to say as, at least the business portion of it doesn’t pertain to my business (such as it is). I’m not interested in creating a big team, or making casual games, or fitting a perception.

I, and others like me, want to make the games we want to make and sell them directly to customers and build relationships with those customers if we can. We’re not interested in growing teams or making hits for the sake of making hits or any of the other crap.

And with that said, a list of my heroes.

• Positech Games
• Hamumu Software
• Spiderweb Software

If you are one of those people that make, or are going to make games with the intention of selling them on portals, you’re welcome to read along, of course. Obviously, there are some people that just like making those types of games. It’s not my bag, and this isn’t the place where you’ll find information on how to do it.

Anyway, welcome, and I hope we can turn IndieGameDev.com into the place to be for “real” indies.