Get Energized and Stay Motivated with Slides from my April 18th IGDA Des Moines Presentation

Most indies pay little attention to their purpose, mission, and vision, but then again, most indies don’t have sustainable businesses. The vast majority don’t make $500 in a year.

Rolling the dice and hoping for a hit, or at least something that earns enough to fund the development of another game, is not a serious strategy.

And there are a lot of new new indie game developers struggling with motivating themselves to work on their projects for more than a few days at a time before the pain of the creative effort overwhelms any enthusiasm they had to be a game developer. There are always posts online asking for tips of staying motivated.

At the most recent IGDA meeting, I presented an updated version of my 2014 talk Playing the Long Game: The Vital Importance of Purpose, Mission, and Vision to Your Indie Game Development Business.

I’m running my business part-time as I have a day job, but doing a poor job of running GBGames as a full-time independent game developer from 2010 to 2012 taught me some major lessons about running a business. Other indie game developers could benefit from my experience.

While there is no video of the presentation, I uploaded the slides with notes in a few formats:

• Open Document Format: LongGame-IGDA_DesMoines_2017-04-18.odp (923 k)
• PDF: LongGame-IGDA_DesMoines_2017-04-18.pdf (500 k)

Knowing who you are and what you stand for will go a long way towards reducing the stress and pain and fear that can otherwise be a regular part of running your own indie game development business.

At the very least, it will give you the energy and motivation to keep working on your projects for the long haul.