Indie RPGs - Different Words of Advice

In a blog on Gamasutra Folmer Kelly has a different take on the several articles with the list of things Indie Devs should be aware of that have popped up in the past and which he thinks are false.

I know, I know; you're getting this a lot right now.

"10 tips for aspiring indies!"

"15 hard truths about being an indie dev!"

"8 things they don't tell you in video game school!"

I guess maybe it comes with the time of the year. Best Of lists show up all over the place, the IGF nominations are in, we start looking back and I guess that means we also start looking forward.

Before I released my first game, I used to eat that shit up. I read all of them and I believed every word simply because they were written by people who had done the thing I wanted to do but hadn't. These people were better than me by virtue of having done what to me seemed to be the impossible: They had made a video game. They were gods.

I wasn't going to question gods.

It wasn't just that though. The second part of it is, pretty much all of these articles list the same fucking things. And every time I read them, they became a little more true in my head. The facts cemented, then hardened, then they were stuck. Universal truths.  

And that messed me up for a long time. Which brings us to the reason I'm writing this, and I'm hoping that anyone who is looking for "ASPIRING INDIE ADVICE" reads this because I refuse to believe I was the only one who ever fell into this poison mind state, or the only one who ever will. 

It messed me up because after I released my first game, and then my second, and then my third, most of the shit I had "learned" turned out to be false. BUT: Because it was all written by people with experience, and because so many of those bullet points and snappy one-liners had been on a constant loop in my mind, I thought the problem was me, the problem was my games. Oh shit, I was making games wrong!

But then after I made my fourth, fifth... I started getting suspicious. And eventually I smashed the shit out of those cemented facts.