Getting Started
Working on your first game?
Heathen's guides are here to help, no matter where you are on your game development journey. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned pro, we’ve got you covered:
Enthusiast: Passionate about tech and learning more.
Hobbyist: Developing for fun, not profit.
Amateur: For the love of the craft, without the pressure of making it your full-time job.
Professional: Full-time game development, earning a living from it.
Understanding your goals as a developer is key. The list above isn't exhaustive and can overlap. For example, an enthusiast might quickly become a hobbyist or even an amateur. Recognizing where you are—and where you want to go—is the first step toward success.
If you’re serious about turning game development into a business, dive into the sub-articles under this section. We'll cover the core concepts you need, reset your expectations to reflect the realities of the industry, and help you create a practical plan for success.
Amateur and Professional Startups
So, you want to be a professional game developer? That’s fantastic! We need more passionate creators in the industry, but let's make sure your expectations are grounded in reality.
You may have heard that game development is easy these days—that with minimal learning, anyone can build a game and find success.
Unfortunately, that’s not true.
Game development is challenging.
Before you start, here are a few things to keep in mind:
Learning is essential at every stage. Whether you're a solo developer or part of a studio, you’ll need to constantly develop your skills.
Even a “solo” developer relies on a range of tools and support to get the job done. The idea of building a game alone with no resources is unrealistic.
The term "zero budget" typically refers to the lack of outside investment, not that the game is without costs. Every game has expenses. Be prepared for them.
If you’re still here, that’s great! The game industry, like any creative field, can be incredibly fulfilling for those with the passion and drive to succeed.
Choose a career you love, and you'll never work a day in your life. (Probably not Confucius, but it’s still good advice.)
Indie Checklist
Your roadmap to a professional indie game development journey. No matter your background, building a game that’s both creative and commercially viable means tackling real-world challenges. Use this checklist to ensure you’re covering all the bases.
Registration and Administraiton
In many regions, you are legally required to register a business, even if it's just you. In most cases, it's strongly advised that you incorporate and not simply "DBA" (doing business as). The specifics of this are highly dependent on region, deal with legal matters and are not appropriately advised on via a community forum or even this article.
Go see a professional who deals with Company Formation in your region and understand what your obligations are, and seek advice on what options might best work for you. Finding a local advisor or partner to help you here is key. Most regions will have state/government-run programs and initiatives meant to support new businesses, which is particularly common with new arts, technical and consequently game businesses. This is a HARD requirement if you want to publish on any reputable platform, such as Steam, which will require a legal identity and tax ID information before you can use their platform as a developer.
Accounting
If you're going to be buying anything or making any money, then you need an accountant. You will always need an accountant, so whether you staff this or partner, this will be a permanent relationship for you and your company. It's worth noting that many accounting firms also handle company registration and can advise on administration aspects. This is also highly specific to each region and deals with legal matters, so taking the advice of some community forum or even this article is insufficient. Seek a local professional for advice.
Legal
As a game developer, even before you have a game ready to publish, you will be creating and using other people's creations. Making sure you're complying with any legal requirements and registering any IP, names, marks, etc., as required by your local regulations is critical and often overlooked. This is usually something that your Registration and Administration and/or Accounting partner may handle; that is you can usually find a partner that is suitable to advise and guide on all three of these aspects.
Platform
We strongly recommend Steam as your first and core platform. Steam is the gaming platform for PC, It has a low barrier to entry, and you build your game on a PC, so it's the most native to the project. There is no reason not to launch on Steam.
How will you distribute your product? This is something you should think about early. It will dictate many other aspects of your organization and likely have a significant impact on the design and implementation of any apps/games you create.
You will need to choose a trusted platform or multiple platforms. While it is technically possible to distribute your games and apps yourself, platforms do much more than just distribution. A key aspect of choosing a platform is the "Trust and Security" aspect. Why should a customer trust your app? How do they know it's not malware? Simple, if it's on a trusted platform, it's "safe" or at least there is recourse if things go sideways.
For "PC" games (that is, Windows, Mac and Linux games), the Steam platform is the largest and most dominant by a very long shot. If you plan to release a game on PC, then you should plan to release that game on Steam. Steamworks is a feature available freely to all Steam games and can add a lot of value to your game for your players. Heathen, of course, provides great tooling around Steamworks.
Do be careful of the platforms you choose, especially if you're considering exclusivity.
Our biased opinion is that you should treat Steam as your primary platform and then add additional platforms to your supported list as your bandwidth (skill and resource availability) allows. This recommendation applies to console games and "major" mobile games as well. PC is the most "native" platform for any bit of software, and Steam is king on PC. There is little to no reason not to release on Steam, and in general, your Steam release should be the easiest to accomplish.
Small studios can often land some much-needed funding via exclusive deals; however, some platforms, especially when you are available exclusively on them, can be harmful to your project and organization. In general PC gamers have an active hate of "exclusivity" to the point that some do track this behaviour and actively avoid developers and publishers that avail of it.
Marketing
Another commonly outsourced aspect of game development is the business, especially for small studios and solo developers. Marketing requires time, expertise and scale to be effective. The marketing needs of small indies are unique to the needs of other businesses and even other forms of game development (mobile, AA and AAA). Be sure to consider the unique challenges of marketing and understand that developing your marketing strategy should generally happen before the production of your game.
Marketing for note involves much more than advertising your game. Your marketing strategy will include an assessment of the market, audience targeting, and other factors that will influence your design process, and in particular, will influence any potential investors. Engaging a professional marketing firm early to help establish a sound marketing strategy doesn't cost as much as you might think and will greatly improve your chances of success.
Community
Community is an ever-evolving requirement of game development. In the early days, games were a matter of "fire and forget", released into the wild and not so much as a post-release update. One-way community management via "Blue Posts" ... looking at you, Blizzard ... is likewise no longer viable. The current market effectively demands rich community engagement. A happy community can prop up a small, scrappy game, and a pissed-off community can tank a AAA title with ease.
Classically, community management has been handled by a "go-to-man" in each studio acting as a sort of "frontman" like one sees with rock bands ... and that is a major problem.
Good business will tell you that having any system depend on a "go-to-man" is a critical point of failure that will go wrong, it's only a matter of time. Treat the community and its management as you would any other important part of your business, and project and invest in it wisely.
Production
These are the major aspects of production that you simply cannot get away with cutting corners on. As "indie game dev" has grown in popularity, some tools, guides and articles might have led you to believe that you can just buy the solution on the Unity Asset Store or DIY with some magical tool that trivializes it. This, however, is not reality. In reality, each of these areas is a skilled creative function that involves more work than the uninitiated realizes, and so requires consideration on how you will source these needs.
Design Having a "great idea" is not game design, game design is devising all those little hidden and often obscure factors that work together to create an experience that the user wants to pay you money for.
Engineering SO MUCH more than just typing words into a compiler, so no visual scripting doesn't mean you can skip this.
DevOps A collection of practices and the tooling to support them. It defines and enables the creation of your "content" be that source code, art assets, audio files or anything else for that matter. It defines how they will be logged, backed up, reviewed, tested, built and deployed.
Visuals Art assets on the Unity Asset Store and similar marketplaces are wonderful placeholders, inspiration pieces or even as a base or bash kit to work from when creating custom works. UAS Art Assets, however, are not production-ready regardless of what is said on the store page.
Audio As with visual assets, grabbing some royalty-free SFX and music off some asset store, while perfectly fine for that passion project you did as a hobby, just isn't appropriate for a professional game. Audio assets tend to be even harder to hide or mask in your project, even infrequently played sounds tend to be very memorable to players. Couple that with the comparatively smaller pool of assets to choose from, and the risk of using off-the-shelf audio assets is high.
Testing No, community testing and public beta are not even close to sufficient.
This is one of the factors that separates the hobbyist game from the professional game. Nothing wrong with being the passion project of a talented hobbyist, but a professional game is held to a stricter standard.
Localization Much more than simply translating, and do yourself a favor, DO NOT use auto-translate. If that is all you can afford, just skip that local.
Operations
So much more than keeping the lights on, but often thought of that way. Operations cover the factors of, well, operating whatever it is you do. In your case, that is operating your games (post-release) and your studio while it is creating new games.
LiveOps "Live Operations" deals with the processes and tools you employ to operate your released game. What exactly this includes depends on your game, and truly standalone games have a very minimal "LiveOps" requirement, whereas something more "live service," such as an MMO or MOBA, would have a very complex "LiveOps" requirement.
Mainteance The 90s are gone, your game, if professional, will require post-release patches, updates, announcements and general "maintenance" while it is "operational". This will incur a monetary and time cost on you so be aware that you are not "done" when you press the big green "Release" button ... you are just getting started.
Support Then number one issue that you will deal with in support is "PEBKAC" (Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair). So even if your game is super simple and bug-free, you will have support requests. You need to think about how you are going to engage those, release patches, etc.
Sunset (End of Life) At some point, it will no longer be feasible to continue to operate your game, so you will need some sort of plan for how to end that support. If your game uses live service features you will want to disable them so the game can be played without them and similar. This, of course, assumes you thought about that ahead of time and built the game so that you could disable it.
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