Welcome to week 6 of the module indie game startup.

A quick reflection

There was a lot of work to do during this last few weeks, researching the market, writing the marketing plan and business plan, and so forth.

This warrants further study, but it feels to me like there must be a sweet spot of

• number of developers
• price point
• game length
• game polish

…where anything outside certain bounds are just not worth it for a developer to attempt.

E.g. for a game which will be a minimum length so as not to peeve the “game is too short - refund!” Steam crowd, it’ll take too long to develop, unless you have a small team assembled. If development takes too long, you risk missing the current Zeitgeist, or getting depressed during development as you’re not releasing soon enough.

Or, you might deliver 6+ hours of content in 6 months, but the game is not polished enough (bugs, clunky controls, inconsistent art, etc), and the few we bought it asks for refunds, and otherwise it gets ignored or forgotten.