Graduate Games Blog

I’ve been working as an indie developer for almost 4 years now and over the years I have visited a lot of websites, downloaded a lot of software, and tried a lot of different things to get my site more traffic or allow myself to work more efficiently.  Without further ado, here are the 10 tools/resources that I cannot live without as an Indie Game Developer:

10. Open Office – If you haven’t realized, Microsoft Office is freaking expensive. As an Indie, I need to be able to churn out spreadsheets, design documents, etc. but why pay hundreds of dollars when I can get all the functionality of Microsoft Office for free?

9. InstallJammer – Every indie game developer needs a nice installer for their games.  There’s a lot of people out there that pay for premium installers (Software Passport etc.) but they are hundreds of dollars.  A lot of people swear by NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) but the last thing I want to do is learn another script/code language at the end of a project.  There’s a few other freebie installers out there, but I have found Install Jammer to be the most feature rich and easiest to use.

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8. Google Docs – Google Documents are more than just a way to read your files online or in your gmail.  Their free forms allow you to setup a survey and spreadsheet in a few minutes.  You can easily send players to the link where they can take a survey about your game.  All the info from your form is automatically compiled in a spreadsheet so you can optimize your game and demo.

7. Fences – Is a program that helps you organize your desktop and can hide your icons when they are not in use.  I found this in a list of the best free software of 2009, installed it and absolutely love it.  I use my desktop constantly to save temporary files or create small text files with notes, to-dos, and bugs.  When you add all my shortcuts to the desktop, you’ve got one messy area.  Fences has allowed me to organize my desktop and keep it looking clean and uncluttered.  Much obliged Fences.

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6. Pivotal Tracker – Is a great collaboration and project management tool.  It’s a free website that allows you to setup a project and assign tasks, responsibilities to your team.  It tracks when tasks are started, submits them to you for approval/rejection, and saves files and attachments to the tasks.  Pivotal Tracker takes time to setup and stay on top of, but it is a great tool to use with your contract work.  It keeps composers and artists responsible and on top of their work and tracks all the communication, revisions that go along with it.  It may add a few minutes to your workload, but it keeps art assets coming in and reduces potential conflicts.

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5. Google Analytics – If you’re an indie developer and you’re not using analytics, you won’t be successful.  This tool is crucial in analyzing your website, traffic, and customers.  Once you know where your customers are coming from, you can market and advertise to them and google analytics can integrate ecommerce conversions and more.  It can pretty much do anything.

4. Tweetdeck – Twitter is a great networking tool.  It lets you easily converse with other indie developers, customers, or the media.  Twitter may be the one social networking site right now, but how do you choose the right tweeting software?  I’ve tried a bunch of different twitter software and have found tweetdeck to be the absolute best.  It allows you once central place to do all your tweeting and following.  Sign-in once and have access to multiple twitter accounts – making it easy to create a personal tweet or a tweet by your company/website.  I use this every day.

3. Thunderbird – Email is an important tool for an indie developer since it is the primary way that you stay in touch with your customers.  Thunderbird is free and has all the features of Microsoft Outlook plus a ton of free plugins.  I highly advise indies check out the quicktext plugin.  It allows you to create templates to quickly respond to the same commonly asked questions.

2. Dropbox – The great thing about being an indie is that you can collaborate with anyone around the world.  Even if your artist, composer, and team is local, you likely can’t afford a centralized server to store/share all your files.  Enter Dropbox, you’re eternal savior.  Dropbox allows you to create a folder on your computer that is synced and backed up online.  That’s great for protecting yourself from a spilt coffee or late night coke, but what’s even better is it allows you to share your dropbox or specific folders in your dropbox with anyone.  This gives your team the ability to share folders and files like you’re all sitting in the same office on a server for the price of $0.  Just the other day, my artist dropped in 3 new pngs into our shared graphics folder – a few minutes later I have them in the game and they’ve been backed up online.  Fantastic tool.

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1. WordPress – the most flexible blogging solution can do anything with the right plugin.  I was a fool to start my blog on blogger years ago, but have discovered the ease and power of wordpress and will never go back.  It’s plain sick.  Even if you don’t know HTML, PHP etc., you can easily install wordpress on your domain for free (with any decent webhost) and get a professional looking website up with one of their free templates.   With minimal PHP knowledge you can customize templates, add plugins, and get a really slick and functional site.

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Did I forget any great tools out there?  Was this helpful?  Let me know in the comments.