所有独立开发者都适用的4个小技巧

作者：Dave Toulouse

在这里你找不到如何赚钱，如何变得受欢迎以及如何经营一项成功业务等技巧。即使我认为自己知道这些技巧，我也不会将其说出来，因为有可能这只是我欺骗自己的一种方法。

我在此所列出的内容并不只是针对于独立游戏开发，因为其实许多内容都只是一些常识。

学会搜索

如今，我们总是很容易获得所需要的信息。在你之前可能已经有无数人创造出了某些内容，所以并不需要你费心去做这些事。

就像我们不该无视法律那样，我们也不该无视在谷歌上花30秒时间进行搜索。而学习识别关键字能够帮助你进行更方便的搜索。同时你还应该根据数据去识别编辑内容和事实。想办法找到多个信息源并进行比较以寻找真正有帮助的内容。

我不记得上一次我在网上找不到某种技术挑战解决方法是在什么时候了。在像http://stackoverflow.com/等网站上我似乎能够找到一切问题的答案。我也发现通过网络进行学习能够剩下不少时间。

不管什么都不存在捷径

你是否对自己的上一款本来默默无闻但却突然得到拥有大量订阅者的俄罗斯YouTuber的注意感到困惑？当然会有这种事情，但在我看来这是极少可能发生的情况。我从未听说过这样的故事：“在我收到一封来自我从未听说过的人的邮件后，我的游戏突然获得了成功。”

在将我辛苦创造的作品免费发送给网上任何陌生人之前你需要花点时间去明确你所面对的对象。也许收到一封询问你的游戏的邮件能够很好地满足你的自尊心，但如果有个你完全不认识的人在这么做的话，很有可能他是在利用你和你的游戏。虽然这很让人郁闷，但你必须清楚一旦你发行了游戏，便会有很多人前来打扰你。例如一些虚假的YouTuber，市场营销公司或业务策略者等等。

如果存在捷径的话你以为还会等你来告诉我们吗。难道你不觉得并非所有人都在为了获得Greenlight上的投票而去销售免费游戏很奇怪吗？也许你应该好好想想为什么你会觉得只有自己能够想出这样好的想法。

与人交谈

的确，有时候我们很难找到有关特定问题的答案，或者这样的答案隐藏在无数信息中需要你花许多时间去探索。这种情况下你为什么不去询问那些可能知道答案的人呢？通常情况下其他独立开发者都非常乐意回答你的问题并与你分享自己的经验。甚至那些你以为会忽视你的成功人士其实也很容易相处。

而你可能做出的最糟糕的决定便是在花时间去搞清楚问题前选择忽视它。你不仅应该从别人身上获得学习，同时也必须学会筛选人们告诉你的一切。如果你因为某些事情来问我意见，那么我最不希望你去做的便是绝对服从地去执行我告诉你的一切。毕竟我的经验并不适用于所有人，所以你不应该认为我所说的就是真理。但或许我的经验或观点仍然能够带给你帮助。

警惕那些假装自己什么都知道的人

当然你也要警惕本文。如果存在某些方法能够帮助所有人获得成功，那么我们所有人肯定都不会放过它的。每种情况都是特殊的，并且都必须符合某个人想要做，能做或者将要做的事。

我已经不记得有多少次我在看到别人都知道该如何做某事时我却觉得自己就像是个愚笨的独立开发者。如果你事后再去分析你那未能获得成功的游戏，你便会发现许多人会告诉你哪里做错了以及这些错点有多明显。通常情况下这些人其实根本就没有游戏发行经验或者他们自己也未创造出成功的游戏，所以对于这些人的观点你可以持半保留态度。

你可能会希望能够获得来自成功独立开发者的建议并将非常看重他们的观点，但其实成功是很难解释清楚的，很多人都不能有效地解释它到底是怎么一回事。成功往往能够带来更大的成功，但如果你真正获得了成功你将很难跟别人解释你到底是如何获得的，因为有可能你的性格过于外露或者你只是遵循着一个特定的计划。

这就像我所说的如何在Twitter上获得粉丝一样。这并非是从Twitter本身着手。首先你需要先获取一些成功，然后你便能够通过你所获取的Twitter粉丝去推动更大的成功。你是否曾经因为出色的Twitter策略或因为自己之前的成功吸引到大量粉丝而取得了成功。在这里界限也开始变得模糊了。只有当我们拥有足够的粉丝能够创造一个有效的策略时，我们才能够轻松地提供给别人如何利用Twitter的建议。

Twitter(from chinabyte)

没有人拥有一根能够解决所有问题的魔术棒，因为如果真是这样，我们所有人便都能成为魔法师了。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转发，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Simple tips all indie devs can use

by Dave Toulouse

No you won’t find here tricks on how to make money, how to find that great idea that will become hugely popular or how to run a successful business. Even if I thought I knew these things I wouldn’t even bother posting them as chances are I’d only be fooling myself thinking I’m right.

There are however a few things one can do to feel a tiny bit clueless. Things that are not even exclusive to indie game development. Very little of these things I actually figured because of game development in fact and most are just common sense.

Learn to search

Information is so easily accessible these days that there are very few things you actually have to figure out of thin air. Thousands of people have gone through before you whatever you are going through so there’s no need to try reinventing the wheel.

They say ignoring the law is not a valid defense, well the same could be said about ignoring what is easily accessible through a 30 seconds search on Google. Learn to identify keywords that will help you to search. Learn to spot editorial content vs actual facts backed by data. Find multiple sources of information and oppose them to try to find the useful bits.

I can’t remember the last technical challenge I had to face that didn’t have a solution on the web or at least hints that would tell me that maybe I was doing things the wrong way to start with. I never posted once on websites like http://stackoverflow.com/ because it seems all my questions are already answered there. The amount of time I save by learning from what I find on the web is incredible.

Nothing too good to be true is true, there are no shortcuts

Don’t you find it strange that your last game that completely went under the radar suddenly is noticed by some Russian YouTuber with millions of subscribers? Well it’s always possible for such thing to happen I guess but in my mind it raises a very big red flag. I can’t recall any story that goes like this: “My game suddenly became a success because I received an email from someone I never heard about”.

Before sending your hard work for free to any stranger on the web just take a few seconds to check who you are really talking to. Receiving an email asking about your game might be good for your ego but when nobody you know is legit is doing the same then chances are that someone is just trying to take advantage of you. It’s sad but the moment you release a game there are many people who are only interested to mess with you. Fake YouTubers, marketing companies, business strategists, etc.

If there were shortcuts then we’d all be taking them. Don’t you find it strange that not everyone is trying to trade free copies of theirs games in exchange for votes on Greenlight? Well maybe you should research why it would appear you’re the only one with this great idea.

Talk to people

It’s true that sometimes it’s harder to find an answer to a specific question or that this answer you’re looking for is hidden in a sea of information that would take too long to explore. In that case why not ask others that might know the answer? More often than you’d think other indie devs are more than happy to answer you and share their experience. Even these highly successful people you might think will ignore you are often quite easy to reach.

The worst possible thing you can do is to ignore what happened before your time. Learn from others but also learn to not to take for granted everything they tell you. If you’d ask me for advice on some matter then the last thing I’d want you to do is to just take everything I say without questioning it. My experience can’t be applied to everyone else so trying to pretend that what I’m saying is the absolute truth would be a mistake. But maybe my experience or my point of view can still help to figure what’s right for you.

Be careful with people pretending to know it all

This includes this post as well otherwise I’d be contradicting myself. If there was some recipe everyone could follow to get to a given state of success, then once again we’d all be following it. Each case is particular and must be adapted to what one likes to do, can do or is willing to do.

I can’t count the number of times I felt clueless as an indie dev while everyone else appeared to know how to do things the right way. Well, they often don’t and are often as clueless as me. If you do a postmortem about your not so successful game then you’ll see many people commenting on your story telling you what you did wrong and how obvious it is. Too often these people don’t even have any experience releasing anything or didn’t have any success themselves and while it doesn’t automatically dismiss their opinion it should at least be a sign to take what they say with a grain of salt.

It’s tempting to take advice from a successful indie dev and consider what they say is pure gold but success can be particularly hard to explain and many people do a very bad job at trying to explain it. Success often have this effect of bringing more success so at some point it might be difficult to figure if you’re successful because you’re an exposed personality or because you have followed a specific plan.

It’s like how I like to describe how to get many followers on Twitter. It doesn’t start with Twitter itself. First you need to have some success and then you’ll have an easier time fueling more success through the Twitter followers you’ll have gathered. From there are you having success because of your great Twitter strategy or because you gathered enough followers to have a decent impact due to your initial success. From there the line starts to blur a bit. It’s easy to start giving advice about how to deal with Twitter once you already have the followers to make such strategy a valid one to start with.

Nobody has a magic wand to solve all your problems as once again, if such thing existed then we’d all be sorcerers.（source：Gamasutra）

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