Strange Days Down under

After much hard work, disappointments and a roller-coaster ride of highs and lows, our family-based indie studio has been thrilled to watch our first game, "Run Fatty Run" zoom up the Aussie charts during the past few days.

It was a pretty awesome moment to hit the top ten but we were dumbstruck to see it settle at a respectable #3 on iPhone and #2 on iPad, just underneath Angry Birds Space HD.

And then, late last night, just for a few special hours we overtook Angry Birds and the icon representing the "Games" category on iPad in Australia was an overweight man in a pink shirt.

We like to think there's a big red panic button at Apple, just for when things like that happen.

 

For us the catalyst was a feature on the awesome Aussie video game show, "Good Game: Spawn Point". People seemed to like the fact that we press-ganged our kids and made them work for us.

http://www.abc.net.au/abc3/goodgamesp/transcripts/s3590467.htm

 

DO
- press-gang your children into working for you (This one might be particular to us. )
- be nice to your fellow indies, even the cranky ones
- play a lot of games. It's surprisingly easy to forget this.
- learn about marketing
- learn about accounting
- learn about business
- find someone else to do the marketing, accounting and business
- realise that 90% of marketing is making friends and keeping them
- find someone to tell you that your ideas suck when they suck.
- find someone to tell you that your ideas were good when you can't remember that they were.
- get some sun every now and then.

DONT
- leave the marketing until the end, even though you'll really want to.
- be mean. This is a rule many people forget.
- compromise your vision for money. There are a lot of people out there better at making money than you but your vision is yours alone.
- complain that life is unfair. Everyone already knows.
- ever, EVER give up