Jeff Vogel - Innovation is not the only Path

@GamesIndustry Jeff Vogel shared his thoughts at GDC on how to survive making indie games.

In his 24 years of continuous indie game development, Spiderweb Software's Jeff Vogel has learned a few things. In a talk at the Game Developers Conference Independent Games Summit today, he shared some of those things, with the caveat that they may only apply to him and his career, may not be true forever, and may not even be true now.

"Video games are young," Vogel stressed. "Nobody knows anything. We're still scrambling to figure out, 'How do we design these things? How do we create these things? How do we test these things? How do we sell these things? How do we market these things? How do we add loot boxes to our $100 million project without causing it to blow up on the launch pad?'"

Vogel framed his talk as a walk through his personal career in game development, including the creative genesis of his very first video game project.

"It didn't take me long," Vogel said. "I came up with an idea. I loved these games as a kid, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to every single game I liked as a kid, and steal the single best idea from every one. And in my crasftsman way, I'm going to amalgamate them into what I hope is a cohesive and satisfying whole."
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