Thread by @FuturLab

1. Want to stay in business as a small indie? Here’s our “15 years and counting” Top Tips thread. #gamedev

2. The day you sign a game, work up your next two ideas on paper. Spend no more than a week on each. Shop them around immediately to gauge interest. If you get traction, make a prototype long before you’re at Alpha on your current game.

3. Your goal should be to sign the next game before you finish the current one. Never rely on game sales. Ever. If sales revenue shows up, bonus. Welcome to the 1%. Put it in the bank for a shitty day, because it’s out there circling you like a comet.

4. Take a blue-sky day away from work at least once a year. The goal should be to examine opportunities and come up with plans on how to address them with paper concepts. This is a permanent hustle industry because it’s always in flux. Complacency kills.

5. Don’t throw all your resources at hot trends. By the time you get there the tide will have turned. Instead look for opportunites that specifically suit your strategic goals.

6. Have some strategic goals. Find a mentor or three to help you figure out what they are.

7. Cultivate a split personality of extreme optimism & worst case pessimism. You’ll miss great opportunities without the former, and you’ll get burned without the latter. You need to grow a thick skin whilst keeping your heart vulnerable. But also bullet proof :-)

8. You need to keep your heart vulnerable because creativity completely dies in a jaded mind. Figure out a way to keep yourself passionate. A hobby outside of games is best. P.S. I love synths!

9. Never ever complain publicly about a bad business experience. If it’s serious, just seek legal advice in private.

10. Be good to people.

Note that being Good is very different to being Nice. You can be nice to someone's face and still harbour ill-intent fuelled by envy or insecurity. Being good means genuinely wanting the best for others. Get your emotional intelligence buffed by doing good to others.

11. Recognise that people who make decisions about whether to green light your game have probably never run a business themselves. Most don't know how critically important and powerful their words are. You can't afford to take their word. It's never their fault, it's yours.

12. In a hit driven business like games, the best you can hope for is the opportunity to keep doing what you love. Achieving fame or fortune doesn't bring freedom, it just brings different problems. My method: keep personal joy as one goal post, and providing value as the other.

13. Everything leads to something. This is a giant poster on our studio wall. It includes all the games we've worked on, and all the games we had shit-canned. The point being that it communicates to our team that life goes on after a canned game, and canned games can be reborn.

14. Relationships are everything, and people who stand guard at publishers and platform holders enjoy playing, so play with them a little. Some of the strongest relationships we've built have been the result of taking well calculated risks with a tongue in cheek sense of humour.

15. Same goes for the press. When you need people to notice your game, use a personal touch that goes above the robotic chanting of your game features, and connect on a human level. We invited press to save the world not review a game. My god I cringe at the art now :D

16. Ask for advice, not help. Help is a heavy word. It sounds like hard work. Advice is light and breezy. Who wouldn't want to share advice? Within minutes, someone who has sat down to give you advice is now suddenly offering help.

Here's how we did it: blog.eu.playstation.com/2010/05/06/fut…

Regarding point 14 above, this is one of two big examples we can share: blog.eu.playstation.com/2010/05/06/fut…, the other is in the Special Features of Velocity 2X: Critical Mass Edition :-)

17. Be extremely careful with your hiring. Here's our policy.

18. Don't crunch. Patience is the most valuable resource in our industry. Patience allows everyone to keep working and smiling together through the final push; to keep improving the product long after the novelty has worn off. Crunch destroys patience.

19. Obviously, make awesome games. A big part of the reason we've survived this long is that all our games are very simple at their core. We get the mechanics locked early, and then add layers and polish. Our guide on how to design awesome games is here: gamasutra.com/blogs/JamesMar…

20. Play the long game, treating every tough moment as a chapter cliff-hanger in your story. When there's a fork in the road, pick the road that will give you the most interesting story to tell. Your team, partners, press and ultimately your players will invest in a good story.