IndieGuide:About

From IndieGuide

On April 10th 2008, The Indie Developer's Guide, inspired by the DIY music scene of the 1970's, the Scratchware Manifesto and the Independent Gaming Scene, was founded to gather together the vast knowledge of the indie community in one spot in order to help enable others to follow their dreams and create their own games for a living.

If you want to read more about the early history of this site, read the thread in the Indie Gamer Forums that started it all.

The Goals

1. To become THE starting point for new developers (or experienced ones) and to deliver a step by step guide to game creation and the business side, through the eyes of an independent game developer (Indie).
2. To cover not just the technical aspect of game creation but to walk a lone developer (or small team) through the unique choices that an Indie will encounter. The tasks of "doing it all", from coming up with the ideas, deciding what aspects you can do on your own, when hiring someone else is the best option, whether to go after portals and all the other unique situations an Indie runs into.
3. To cover the business side of an independent; marketing, promotion, advertising, websites, press releases, getting reviewed and everything else an Indie must do in order to help their business succeed and to create games for a living, independently.
4. To provide complete coverage of all topics and areas relevant to game development.
5. To deliver all the information in an easy as possible to understand formats, either explaining the more difficult information or having links to where the information is explained.
6. To be a platform for sharing experiences and knowledge among Indies, so that overall quality/satisfaction/success of our game creation processes and outcomes may increase.
7. To enable people the freedom to create whatever they like, to bend, expand, change genres, and experiment with that freedom. Whether that information is on this wiki or an outside source, the goal of The Indie Developer's Guide is to get the answers to the developer's questions.

In other words: we want to gather the different and sometimes unique pieces of knowledge each of you has in one place and make it available to the Indie community. Everybody can contribute in the areas he or she was experience in, be it small or large contributions, everything is welcome.

We know that quite a number of wikis for the Indie scene exist already. We didn't aim at just being another one or at competing with them or taking their place. We rather aimed at completing or complementing what already exists, filling out the gaps, and mapping it all together. Therefore we also tried to cover all aspects that relate to being an Indie.

As we are continuously learning which things are working for this site and which aren't, we have created a thread in the forum to discuss the lessons we have learned so far.