The Indie Game Commandments

simoniker writes "As part of an in-depth postmortem of Xbox title Stubbs The Zombie over at Gamasutra, company founder and Bungie co-founder Alex Seropian has revealed his own personal 'indie game commandments' when setting up his new firm: 'First Commandment: We shall establish our game's creative direction... Second commandment: We shall own our intellectual property... Third commandment: We shall not let a third party determine our success, such as the publisher who's doing (or not doing) the marketing, or the funding source (likely a publisher) making demands that are not in-line with our goals... Fourth Commandment: We shall have a small manageable team. We don't want 50 employees making one game over three years in house (we want low overhead), and we don't want to suffer the churn of ramping up and down for projects.'"

Comments

TFA

[mugnyte]

...is a nice mea culpa of past mistakes. However, I feel some of the situation he learns from is staged by the decisions made early in the process. If they'd hired a full time producer, a contractor "wrangler" and perhaps an admin or two, then their headcount would've been 16, the burn rate probably closer to 150/month, but the excess stress of the game (the "crunch time" finale) could've been reduced (it never goes away).
  The game itself looks cute and well made, although I'm beginning to join the "repackaging an FPS engine sucks" camp.