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Check out Overcoming Procrastination by Steve Pavlina. It's a nice article (the guy is a shareware developer-turned-motivational speaker) and it gives a very simple solution, which can be surprisingly effective. Set a timer and just work 30 minutes on the task. Work on any aspect of it, do whatever you can/like/want, but work on this task. After 30 minutes go eat a cookie. Repeat. Do it 10 times and you've just spent 5 hours on the task, which was probably enough to do a lot of progress.

I came to realise recently how horrible it is to be a perfectionist. I can at least feel happy that I don't hate myself for not being 100% perfect, but because of it I dropped out of a M.Sc. program - I just couldn't force myself to do crappy projects, to go to exams not knowing the subject perfectly, etc. So I didn't go to exams and didn't finish the projects. Meanwhile, the rest of the group (95% of whom were much less capable than I was) didn't have any problem going to the exam and trying to fake knowing the subject and making some crap that often passed for a project.

It can be really sad. I can be really productive as a perfectionist, but not all tasks/projects are equally suitable. There are many things I just can't force myself to work on.

It's been my experience that Indie developers are, as you say, eager to share resources that benefit the game development community. This might include marketing strategies, source code, or tools. However, as businesses, small studios have to have something to sell; traditional business models suggest that it makes sense to retain control of certain assets.

One scenario where a business might open source an entire product is an MMOG where the client and server are under an open license, and revenue is generated by unique, pay-for-play quests. I'm sure that the optimal level of open-sourceness varies from project to project.

(As a sidenote, /. did a thread about all 81 IGF submissions earlier in the week.)
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Inago Rage - An Independent Game About Building and Shooting Things

I used to think the same.

I am the owner of an old and battered Palm IIIx and I read lots of documents on it via Plucker. I somehow "got it" reading "e-texts" on this model's small screen and I sure can relax while reading it. I have to take compromises with just 8Mb, but I guess someday buying another Palm will become priority on my shopping list.

I've read lots of documentation, HOWTOs and manpages with it.

I've read lots of books. Cryptonomicon was a splitting festival.

I've got a nice Perl script + cron which fetchs and parses Advogato and Planet GNOME daily in a nice HTML, so I can catch up with all unread posts any day later.

I'm recently reading Google News with it.

Whenever I find an interesting interview, article or post of Joel Spolsky, I use Plucker and read it at any convenient time (bank, lunch, queues, even bathroom, yes).

I carry lots of interesting productivity articles on my Palm everywhere.

I think you get my drift. Carrying the equivalent of all this material on paper is prohibitive. Having it all in one convenient plastic case is way cool. Don't get me started on printing everything I've ever read with Plucker.

Oh, and I can search.

There's a thread about this in the Dexterity indie developer forums. Some of these folks are from the industry, (i.e., having left development of commercial titles to work on independent titles) and are familiar with Hook/Pyrogon. Another developer offers a different perspective on Pyrogon's closing, here.

So it's not about protectionism, it's about restricting immigration. If the demand for work has dried up here, then what's motivating the immigration? And if immigrants aren't better off here (because of "indentured servant conditions"), then why aren't they staying in their homeland?

Take this with a grain of salt... but it may be possible that your weltanschauung isn't at the same level as your programming skill. You could have the technical acumen of Linus Torvalds, but if you didn't have his ambition, drive, optimism, or charisma, you might still languish. Being a foreigner also has its downsides. You make it sound like being a greybeard is an insurmountable handicap. There are successful people in the software world who've overcome bigger hindrances.

Try reading the "personal productivity" section of this website and see if it doesn't change your outlook. Joel (from JoelOnSoftare.com) recommended this site, and it motivated me out of the doldrums.

That said, there are a few well managed ones and/or developers with big enough hits that they can stay around a long time - Stormfront Studios is still in business I believe, and id Software isn't going anywhere any time soon. Some of the more successful developers deliberately decide to be absorbed into a big company, too, like Blizzard or Westwood - and didn't Valve do that also?

The other route is to keep expenses tiny, always, and just keep making games until they pry the keyboard and mouse out of your cold, dead, fingers. The fellow that did the Dink Smallwood games is still at it, at the Independent Games Festival I saw his teenage lawnmower game. I've been running my own Dragon's Eye Productions for over 10 years now, and doing better than ever. PopCap Games is doing really great (and their games are tons of fun, so they deserve it), and there's too many shareware, freeware, flash and java games and game sites to even mention. Yes, a lot of them suck, but there's some good ones too. There's a lot of interesting looking games at dexterity.com for one. I still hope that Garage Games will thrive, too - they're doing original game development using the Tribes 2 3D engine (which they made, at their last company). I don't think the development houses are dying any time soon - just some specific individual ones, which has happened pretty much every year, often with little fanfare.

In total, this is meaningless until you a) keep track of which page people got, and always give them the same one, and b) do it over a longer period.

Steve Pavlina of Dexterity Software detailed the tracking procedure in a post to the relevant topic on the Dexterity forums:

"A cookie does remember the odd/even distinction, so it's the same on every return to the site, unless something has wiped out the cookie or it's been blocked. Visitors who block cookies are tracked separately, so their data isn't part of the result set. The number of sales from visitors who block cookies is less than 1%, so it's not really significant anyway."

Pavlina also remarks that this is preliminary data: "Again, I want to keep running the experiment for at least a few more weeks, since as was previously discussed, the short-term effects may differ greatly from the long-term effects. And I definitely don't feel I've collected enough data just yet. So it's very possible that in the weeks ahead, these figures will change a great deal."

This /. story is more than usually off-target because the story lacks details of the experiment. Here's the pertinent thread:

http://www.dexterity.com/forums/showthread.php?s =&threadid=1579

Much like stores have to plan for losing 2 - 5 % of their inventory to theft ("shrinkage"), so too must software companies accept that someone, somewhere is going to hack your software if anyone likes it. If they have all of the bits and bytes of your system sitting in front of them, and they have no need to communicate with your server, they can always strip it out. Your purpose should be to encourage the maximum number of users to pay for the full version, not to have the minimum amount of piracy.

A freeware version is a good idea, as it will raise your visibility... If someone is so cheap that they would use a pirated version, you might convince them to become a customer by offering freeware, then enticing them with the full thing. Most of the copies of WinZip out there are the freeware version, but there are a heck of a lot more paid copies than if they didn't offer the free one.

A 15 day trial is too short. You are not just trying to show users the full value of your software, you are also trying to get them so used to using it that they are willing to shell out the cash to keep doing what they are doing. Most people have settled on 30 days, but 60 days wouldn't be out of the question.

I'd also charge more for the software, as price creates a perception of value: 25 - 35 dollars should be sufficient. At 15 dollars you are putting yourself in the realm of cheaply made, junky Visual Basic apps.

You've probably heard the following, but as an avid digital photographer I would find your software difficult to use. For one, you don't have an intuitive, on-screen way to navigate through folders. There is a reason every other piece of image software out there has this... it's much easier to manually search your image collection, which is why you have a browser in the first place. No real image collection is a flat folder.

The single-level Thumbnail filmstrip is also a cute analogy, but it makes it difficult to, once again, search your pictures. There should be some way to have multiple filmstrips to facilitate easier searching.

On one hand, whatever algorithms you are using to handle large file databases is solid... ABC took a 10,000 image file folder with only a 5 second pause on this P3 800. And now that you have a solid program, the last bit of polish required is what brings in most of the money.

On the other hand, as you mentioned you are competing with literally thousands of other products, such as ThumbsPlus, SuperJPG, ACDsee, and many others which are all highly professional, tremendously polished, and mature products. Spidering websites is a good first step, but you need to differentiate yourself if you are going to see real success. Are you going to be the online viewer of choice, with auto-import from camera / auto-export to HTML via FTP features? Are you going to push yourself onto OEM machines as a simple, easy-to-use viewer for regular people?

And if you haven't read Steve Pavlina's excellent article on selling shareware, I strongly recommend you do so now.

• Garage Games
• Free Lunch Design
• Black Eye Software (check out Eternal Daughter)
• PopCap Games (Bejeweled)
• Dexterity Software

Steve Pavlina has some great articles about this issue.

E.g. You have to train. Sit down and work for 30 minutes keeping in mind that you will have a reward afterwards. Reward can be anything you like - watching a movie, having a dinner, playing a game.

I tried it myself. The result is that after some time you don't have to force yourself to sit down and start working. Your mind doesn't feel big pain to work because it knows that something pleasant is waiting afterwards.

BUT, NEVER DO IT OTHER DIRECTION. If you say "now I play a game and afterwards I will start to work really hard" - you are dead. Your mind will feel the pain if you finish a game and it will resist.

steve Pavlina has some GREAT articles on personal productivity. very simple and straightforward. i've tried a lot of stuff but this one works for me SOO well...

Get More Done

try it. you will definitely get results!

if i only knew in university...

andrew - who is posting this from SIGGRAPH 2003

I actually have the same problem, and i've found my biggest distraction to be the computer itself--instant messages, emails that need responding to, web pages that need to be checked every few minutes for updates (thanks slashdot and fark!), and just general screwing around all conspire to keep me from my appointed task.

My breakthrough came when i went to a coffeeshop to work with a laptop on an empty battery and no free outlets to be found. I started working on a notepad, and before i knew it i had the entire design for what i wanted to do laid out, and most of the code hand-written. It was amazing, and surprising. Obviously there's some things you HAVE to have a computer for, such as debugging, but i've found the more i limit my computer usage to only the most necessary tasks the more likely i am to accomplish more than 15 minutes of work a day. Incidentally, in that one eight-hour stint at the coffee shop i got more work done than in the three weeks previous, which is more a testament to how badly i was blocked working at home than how productive pen and paper made me.

also this guy has some good articles on personal productivity you may find useful.

So, the real question is : are current times so desperate for gaming software shops that developers revert to releasing shareware instead of selling their work as regular products ?

GarageGames seems to be having a bad time of it.

If you want to have a look at what the shareware gameing world is up to you could try some of the others doing great games.

Dexterity
Mountain King Games
Retro64
Phelios

In fact, too many to list. All of those sites have links to others. You could spend days following them all.

Or you could try some of the new emerging quality shareware game news/review sites.

Diygames
Bytten
Shareware Gaming Magazine
GameTunnel

There certainly are a lot of "me-too" games out there, but one that I found recently that held my attention for quite a while was Aargon Deluxe (can be found here). It's a puzzle game involving lasers and optics. Definitely a neat concept. I don't know if it's available for other platforms (I have OS X), but it's worth a look, IMHO. I haven't ever seen anything like it.

If shareware didn't make money, companies would not make shareware versions of their software. Why do games companies make shareware? Because shareware is great advertisement. If 5% of their clients buy the full version of the software, that is 5% more than what they would have had anyway. To check out a shareware success story, check out Dexterity Software. In particular, check out the articles section. The dude outlines how he successfuly created a shareware company and how he can still make money at it.

If shareware didn't make money, companies would not make shareware versions of their software. Why do games companies make shareware? Because shareware is great advertisement. If 5% of their clients buy the full version of the software, that is 5% more than what they would have had anyway. To check out a shareware success story, check out Dexterity Software. In particular, check out the articles section. The dude outlines how he successfuly created a shareware company and how he can still make money at it.

I wrote a game Fitznik and it has been out only a few months. I'm currently living off of the proceeds.

Now I couldn't do this If I were living in the US. The NZ dollar is worth 42 US Cents so each dollar becomes $2.38. On the other hand though the sales lifespan of the game is likely to be much longer than I spent developing it. I'm not sitting idle. Another game and expansion packs for my current game will bring me quite a respectable income in total.

Now maybe you can make more if you write a business app that brings in more if it hits the right spot, but I'm not considering the bottom line my end goal. I want to write games, and if I can earn a decent living writing games why should I take more money to do something I don't want to do.

Remember, Commander Keen and other Apogee games sold over 30,000 copies. I wouldn't consider that Little or no. If my game sells 30,000 copies (not that I expect it to do that well) I'll be buying a house.