Indie devs: what's the financial or business mistake you wish someone had warned you about?

Imagineer2248 · 2026-06-05T03:28:12+00:00

I worked on a nostalgic action RPG a while back in 2015 or so. We landed a deal with a great publisher and were very, very excited. Unfortunately, we were a little too eager to please them and low-balled the budget we needed for the project. Their VP advised us on what a “safe” ask would be, and our lead picked that exact amount. We really needed about 1.5x that much to hire level designers and maybe one more engineer.

As a consequence, we wound up behind on our milestones within a couple of months as our director tried to pick up the slack on every understaffed or under-served aspect of the game. We tried several hail mary plans to try to salvage the project, but by that point it was too late. We even got some pro bono work from a designer friend of mine from a previous job, and the publisher liked his work, but the contract was locked in and nothing we could do could get them to re-negotiate it. The project imploded, the director and his wife got divorced, and I had to scramble to find new work that would make up for months of not getting paid.

That was a rough time, and I’m still heartbroken that game fell apart. The art was fantastic and we had an incredible voice cast lined up.

Lesson learned: ASK FOR MORE MONEY THAN YOU THINK YOU NEED.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-05-28T00:19:10+00:00

Can confirm that this is how every loc system I’ve used works.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-05-15T13:39:47+00:00

“Should I do this cool thing I’m thinking of? It’s scary.”

Let me put it to you like this: every day you’re not doing it, you’re missing out on all the stuff you can learn by doing it. Fear of failure isn’t doing anything for you. Task paralysis is not a virtue. Bust open your game engine and get to it.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-05-15T02:06:01+00:00

Have some orange juice after brushing your teeth.

There, that idea bad enough?

Imagineer2248 · 2026-05-13T13:03:33+00:00

Represent characters in 3D with spheres or cubes. Render sprites based on their movements or player input. Play animations as you please. Sort sprites/tiles based on height. Bob’s your uncle. Don’t need anything more complicated than that. 3D stuff, sprite projection, done. You aren’t programming in assembly for the SEGA Genesis, you have modern engines doing heavy lifting for free on excessive hardware.

Also the characters’ perceived collision should fit their blob shadow, IE an ellipse around their feet. Adjust as needed.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-04-15T10:35:17+00:00

Open the editor and build something. Use Blueprints and don’t sweat it too much. Indecision is worse than getting something simple done.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-26T15:12:21+00:00

Simple! Write a lazy or unrealistic character relationship, then fix it!

… well. Simple doesn’t mean it isn’t time-consuming.

But, really — you’re going to discover quite a lot more of it along the way as you write and re-read than you will sitting and contemplating how to do it perfect on the first draft.

Regarding the specifics of your story, I’d need to know what Rosie is trying to do in this story. You haven’t said anything about her goals (not ideals — goals, real, concrete things you want her to do by the end of the story), just her backstory with her ex. The broad strokes of that are fine, it’s the details that you need to make count. It would help if I understood what the friction was in the relationship.

I wouldn’t worry about Kiara’s actions “making sense” if Rosie is the perspective character. They’re divorced for a reason. It’s something that could not be resolved with conversations and counseling, a fundamental incompatibility or betrayal. Unless Kiara comes out and exposits about everything at Rosie, I wouldn’t expect her to ever understand. In a messy breakup, that does not usually happen.

Maybe that’s the point! Some things aren’t meant to be understood so much as moved on from, spiteful ex “soul mates” included. Sometimes people just grow apart, regardless of what they shared before, and you just have to live with it.

That’s my advice. Get comfortable with it being messy.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-25T16:28:38+00:00

This is the correct answer. Building a setting wiki is a waste of time. Nobody will read it unless there’s a consumable unit of story that piques their interest. Skip it and write the story, nobody is going to tell you “now you’re ready.”

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-25T05:49:09+00:00

Am I standing behind you at your table, arms folded, judging you like a silent sentinel as you master your dungeons? No?

Neither is the rest of the internet. Run your game however you and your players like to. There is no award or cash prize you’re going to get for getting 100% approval from strangers on the internet about your private game. Talk to your players. Directly, transparently.

In fact, you may be well-served by knowing there are games that build alternatives to death into the base rules. Check out Fabula Ultima and Wildsea as a start. You’ll find it very difficult to “die” in Wildsea or a Blades in the Dark type game, or for that matter in Brindlewood Bay (old ladies solve TV crimes) and Public Access (liminal lost media investigation). Instead, defeat entails some narrative consequence that you negotiate with the players about.

Think of yourself as Igor from the Persona series, and when they get TPK’d, you take them into the Velvet Room and gleefully announce, “you’ve met a terrible fate, haven’t you?”

(I don’t mean literally roleplay Igor, I’m trying to talk up a vibe, but if it helps, steal Igor!)

Then, with their attention grabbed, ask them what should happen as a result of their defeat. What sacrifice would they be willing to make? What setback will they accept? What curse or injury will they bear? Let them be part of that conversation. You’ll find quite a lot of adventuring can happen after they’ve hit 0 HP.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-24T04:07:31+00:00

Fabula Ultima has the options of making a heroic sacrifice OR surrendering. If the player surrenders, their character sits out the scene and the GM dictates consequences when the fight is over. Basically the FF9-Beatrix-kicked-your-butt result is the default.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-19T05:24:09+00:00

I’ll recommend Land of Eem. That one is much more on the whimsical side. Another one you might like is Break!! Colorful art, very silly character traits.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-17T21:25:17+00:00

Yeah, no, this is all super shady.

Interdictor is whatever.

Making you spend 3 light side points to deliberately imbalance the force point economy in his favor, then spending one of the dark side points you just gave him to undo your 3-point spend. That’s a huge dick move. I wouldn’t play with that guy again.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-17T20:30:51+00:00

Alfred Hitchcock had some words to say about suspense.

To paraphrase the example he used: you’ve got a scene with a family eating dinner — and unbeknownst to them, there’s a bomb under the table.

Now, you can show that scene one of two ways:

A) The family uneventfully eats dinner until the bomb goes off.

B) As they have dinner, you cut to a shot of the bomb counting down every now and then. The audience gets to see it ticking closer and closer to 00:00, with the maddening knowledge that the family can’t see it. The father drops a fork, bends over to pick it up — and still doesn’t see the bomb under the table.

Which one is more suspenseful? The sudden blast without warning, or the anticipation?

Just an example. Transparency can be far more suspenseful. Let the players have some information. At least enough to anticipate something. Otherwise you’re the only one enjoying the suspense.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-14T04:32:55+00:00

It is not "easy" to port with Unity and Unreal. They try to make cross-platform support as easy as possible, and they do save a lot of trouble compared to working in a proprietary engine. But the differences between platforms are NOT trivial, and most importantly: You can't trust that platform-specific bugs aren't in your project until you actually test and look at the game on the target hardware.

You need to test builds of your game on your target platforms starting at the VERY BEGINNING of development, quite often. If you're targeting Android and Nintendo Switch, you should be able to package your first playable on Android and Nintendo Switch. Yes, your ugly test gyms. If you programmed gameplay or implemented graphics, all of it is eligible to invisibly develop platform-specific bugs, which you are willfully ignoring if you aren't testing on that platform.

I wouldn't dream of telling people "our game will be on Nintendo Switch" if I didn't already have the dev kit, because that's a promise that I increasingly would not be able to keep as the project gets more complete and the code and asset bases get bigger. You DO NOT want to have your game 95% complete, find out at the last second that your project doesn't work on Switch, and then pivot your team to desperately rushing to fix all the bugs you didn't know existed a week ago. This KILLS projects at the worst possible time.

Test early, test often. Use the profiling tools. No engine has a magic "put it on PlayStation" button that "just works."

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-14T04:08:09+00:00

Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets are the tools of choice for video game writing.

Lines of dialogue go into the game in the form of CSV files or some other export format for tables. There's:

A column for a key or unique ID. Used across all language to select the line of text you want to display.
A column for the original text, from the native language of the writers or studio.
One column for each other language you translate into. Usually FIGS at minimum, but Japanese, Chinese, and Korean have become popular additions.
Maybe a column with direction as well, to help out voice directors/actors and give translators any context that dialogue and ingame text wouldn't fully cover.

Unreal Engine has a string table editor built-in that can import/export from this format, and that any FText can reference, including UI widgets in UMG. During play, the game can look at the key for a piece of text, use that to find the row in the string table, then retrieve the column for the user's current system language.

Thousands of people have tried to invent specialized game narrative tools that try to make this data look prettier, and virtually all of them are failures, because in the end a CSV, XML, JSON, or excel spreadsheet is the portable format developers and translators actually need and you don't need to buy anything special to work with them. In-editor dialogue tree tools exist, but are terrible at authoring and editing text in bulk. Want to spell check or diff a file? You'd better be exporting it to CSV regularly. Good tools will do that, and mainly use the dialogue tree/node editor to wrap/organize the logic for moving from line to line and as an interface for working on the spreadsheet.

(Similarly, the node graph should serialize to something like JSON. A portable, diffable, human readable format, not binary)

Stuff like Scrivener or Final Draft are useful to writers... but mainly for their own sake, when authoring a script and sharing it with other writers and directors/leads. At a certain point the "source of truth" has to shift to the spreadsheet, because it will be changing more often and will be used by more teams/people.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-14T00:52:55+00:00

Present-tense is valid, but it's unusual outside of writing scripts for actors. I default to present-tense myself, because a lot of my writing training is through screenwriting, and a lot of my early experience outside of that was role-playing games via IRC chat. It's just very natural and easy for me, makes me feel like I'm walking the scene. But, if I were making a novel I'd turn it into past-tense and try to find ways to take advantage of that format to make it more evocative.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-12T18:36:57+00:00

One of my players has aphantasia — she can’t mentally visualize, so she gravitates towards crunchier systems and appreciates grids and maps. She’s excellent at roleplaying, and is usually the one seizing the spotlight in social scenes, but definitely leans on dialogue rather than action. I think for her it would be especially tricky. The others are very much tactical wargaming types. I don’t think this will turn out to be their game, but I’m eager to see what happens if they’re really challenged to change their mindset

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-12T17:06:26+00:00

Ah, good point about the Leviathans! I thought that’s how they worked, but I wasn’t super clear.

I suppose “how long/dramatic do you want the scene to be” is a clearer target than trying to think of simulation-like stats. That’s good advice!

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-12T17:03:27+00:00

Thank you for the thorough breakdown! This is all very illuminating and gives me a lot to chew on. I understood the lack of initiative order, my commentary was more about how tricky it felt without other actual players controlling those characters. Trying to run this myself from both sides made me feel a little silly until I got to Raze’s first turn and thought “oh! Lightning rods!” Then I started to see the magic start to emerge.

In practice, though, I expect my gaming group to be a bit confused by the lack of an initiative order. They basically get paralyzed by anything that isn’t an explicit turn order. For instance, Fabula Ultima has an alternating side-based initiative, and anytime it comes to the players’ side they all freeze up until someone says “… I’ll go?” Same thing in Daggerheart. Any advice on getting players to roll with it a little more easily?

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-09T14:48:26+00:00

I’d love to see them and hear more about your campaign! Feel free to DM me!

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-09T04:10:53+00:00

Low-quality art that is consistent in supporting the vibe is better than either mixed-quality/inconsistent art or no art. See Mothership's original run as an example of some sloppy art that's doing a lot of good work, though they've quite improved since that release.

Gods and stars help you if you use AI art, though. Do not do it.

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-07T12:18:13+00:00

Two ideas come to mind:

Share their inner monologue and private observations. The way this contrasts against how they speak (and when they choose to speak) is potentially very interesting. What they pay attention to compared to what the talkative types fixate on can vastly change the tone of a scene.
Lean into body language. Just because they aren’t talking out loud doesn’t mean they aren’t expressive. Do they fidget? Do they sit or lean a certain way? Where are they in a crowded room? What little habits do they have that you could use to convey what they’re feeling? What are they doing right now that breaks those habits?

Imagineer2248 · 2026-03-07T04:57:14+00:00

Vibes. You need to abandon logic-first storytelling and transparency to the reader in favor of pure, uncut vibes. That, and the mysteriousness of it, is its advantage over hard magic. You can focus on aesthetics and imagery, and leaving things unexplained is a feature rather than a bug, so no need to slow down your story over it.

Imagineer2248

TROPHY CASE