I just created a basic Indie FAQ and posted it here:
http://www.dexterity.com/articles/indie-faq.htm

Let me know what you think.

Nice work, just make sure that there is a extremely visible link to it at the top of the "developer forum". :)

An index (with links) at the top of the FAQ would be great, maybe it´s not necessary now, but when it grows...

Yes, I'll add a link to the new FAQ from these forums (probably as a sticky thread). I just want to get some feedback on it first, and perhaps some suggestions for additions. I'm sure the FAQ will grow over time, but I wanted to get something online for starters. There are a lot of newbie questions that can't be answered well in a FAQ, such as "Which is the best registration service?"

Great FAQ.

I found a small typo. Under the section "How Much do Most Indies Make?", the sentence: "How many actors and actresses can you find who don't can't earn a living from their careers?" has both "don't" and "can't".

Thanks, fixed.

Great FAQ steve, i think you summed things up concisely.


How about a question dealing with the topic of "What type of game should i make?"

or "What type of game will sell well?"... the market research angle of things seems to come up a lot.

How about a question dealing with the topic of "What type of game should i make?"
I'd say: any kind of game you are SURE to finish.

What type of game will sell well?"...
Hehe, well this is a complex question. Anyway you can't give a general answer to this. After Doom went out, FPS were selling 1000% more than other games. Nowadays this kind of market is pretty overloaded.
So, while there are some "evergreen" like card games, puzzles, ecc. it is hard to give a answer to this question... unless you change it once per month :p

In the section about order processing I think it would be good to add a note about relative difficulty. Setting up a merchant account can take a month even if you are diligent while most registration services are usually set up within a few hours. Most times you also need a dedicated web server to be able to use a merchant account adding to the initial overhead. Merchant accounts are also hard to aquire in some parts of the world, while registration services are quite global.

IMHO sound advice to beginning developers would be to go with a registration service initially and change it later on if volume and other considerations require so.

Another common question to add would be "Do I have to pay taxes? Do I have to form a company?". The answer depends but the budding developer should pay attention to local legislation anyhow.

I love the price for game ideas. :)

Good FAQ to start building from. Thanks for the effort Steve!

I don´t know if this belong in the FAQ, but what about a section with book recommendations in different subjects (time management, marketing, game design, maybe even programming). Questions about book recommendations seems to be quite popular.

I kind of missed Retro 64 below the "Who are some successful indie developers?" headline, but I guess you can´t list everyone.

Maybe a link to www.gamedev.net below "Where can I get more help?". Gamedev can be pretty good, especially if you have a programming related question.

I don´t know if this is a good idea, but a section with info on where to buy/find royalty free sound-effects (webpages, cd:s) and maybe where to find people to hire for making sound, music or graphics and a few thoughts about how to decide what their work is worth (what to pay them).

You might add a section with info on what hardware you can expect from your customers,
alot of newbies may want to do a 3D game, advantages and disadvantages with that.

A few thoughts from me, choose what you want and ignore the rest. :)

How about some info (links) about copyright and trademarks.

This is great feedback. I'll make some additions soon. It's hard to answer a question like "What kind of game should I make?" in a FAQ, since the answer will be different for everyone. I might include that question with a link to a relevant article though.

I'll add links to retro64 and gamedev.net. I didn't mean to leave anyone out -- it was just a list I quickly made up off the top of my head. I'm sure I'm missing many indies. I think anyone who's supporting themselves full-time as an indie should be on the list. The bigger the list, the better. Anyone here who's making a full-time living as an indie and wants to be added to that list, just email or PM me, and I'll add you.

Also, I'll be adding a recommended reading list to the site soon.

Without specifically answering an open-ended question like "What kind of game should I make?", you could perhaps provide tips on how to conduct the market research necessary to get a good idea yourself. Like your tips I've read before about going ot download sites and finding something with alot of downloads that you think you can do better.

Gamdev.net and Gamasutra both have a ton of articles that you might want to link to as well.

A few more to choose from...

Anti-cracking info/links.

Maybe a few thoughts about recommended max-size of demo/fullversion.

Info/links/books on webdesign.

Dedicated server links (maybe even info/price and bandwidth cost).

Some links to a few publishers.

There was someone who posted a good link about publisher, answering a thread I started before the "big crash" :p

However the most useful thing would be to put a list of reliable publisher: those with bad reputation don't need to be listed in my opinion...

Excellent FAQ, well done.

Someone mentioned something about anti-cracking. I'm probably going to use molebox (www.molebox.com). I've tried the demo version and it workks really well.

It will compress, encrypt and pack all your data so it's in one exe file. It doesn't need any code changes at all.

Scott

Ok, I added several more items to the FAQ.

Anyone know of any good links/references about copyrights and trademarks?

I saw a couple of good ones over in the thread about copyrighted landmarks.

Anti-cracking is a huge topic, and I don't see how I could do it any justice in a FAQ, unless there's a good site that covers it in great detail that I can simply link to. I only recall a couple sites like this, and they were extremely dated.

Originally posted by Dexterity
It's hard to answer a question like "What kind of game should I make?" in a FAQ, since the answer will be different for everyone. I might include that question with a link to a relevant article though.


You gave it the treatment that I was expecting. Thats the basic answer that we end up passing out over and over again on these boards. I think it's perfectly valid to say that there is "no hard and fast answer" in a FAQ :)

Dexterity
Anti-cracking is a huge topic, and I don't see how I could do it any justice in a FAQ, unless there's a good site that covers it in great detail that I can simply link to. I only recall a couple sites like this, and they were extremely dated.

You´re absolutely right, unfortunately their ain´t alot of good websites about anti-cracking.

This site is from around 1999-2000 but I still think it is one of the best.

http://www.inner-smile.com/nocrack.phtml

Yeah, I know about that site and agree that it's one of the best. The problem is that it's fairly dated now and doesn't look like it's being updated at all. Most of the best anti-cracking discussions I've seen have occurred in the ASP newsgroups, since those groups are private, so crackers don't read them. Anything posted online about anti-cracking methods is available to the crackers as well. Many developers simply won't discuss their best anti-cracking measures publicly, since keeping such ideas private is more secure. You can learn a lot of stuff in the ASP newsgroups and at conferences like SIC that people don't post in public newsgroups.

Great FAQ Steve.

Just a couple of things which sprung to mind. You might want to add a sentence in to the conversion rates paragraph explaining that sales can take a month or two to start coming through and 'not to panic' that you have an initial conversion rate of 0.0001%.

Also, another though was to maybe make a brief mention to programming languages 'What should I use?', also mentioning kits like MMF and the like.

-Z-

One interesting anti-cracking article was this one from the Ask Midnight Q&A column at flipcode: http://www.flipcode.com/cgi-bin/msg.cgi?showThread=04April2001-SoftwareProtection&forum=askmid&id=-1

I suppose you could also mention Armadillo and ASProtect as possible tools.

Suggestions: Add anchors for the individual questions. It would be valuable to be able to redirect someone directly to a specific answer, especially as the FAQ grows.

I think adding a question like "How much time will marketing and running a business take?" would be good. The answer could outline the alternatives: having a publisher (difficult to find) or making it all yourself (more freedom but requires you to learn new skill). This is something that most people asking me about indie development are surprised by, that I spend 50% at most doing actual game development and the rest on a lot of other tasks. In general the mental side and practical side of running a small business full time. The FAQ already touches on it in the "How much money can I expect .."

Another common question or mindset is the "I want to make my dream game, how do I proceed". Something about making games for other people (customers) not yourself. Even if you enjoy the game yourself.