Starting and running an indie game studio is no easy feat. Over the years, we have made our own share of mistakes and always tried to turn them into learnings. Like many indie studios, we learned most of our lessons the hard way: missed deadlines, underestimated marketing, over-scoped features. This bingo is our attempt to make those mistakes visible before they happen.
Best practices for indie teams are often the topic of conference talks, articles, discussions, and postmortems. Years ago we had found a super-useful image of an “Indie Dev Mistakes Bingo” on social media, but could not find it any more (let us know if you can!). So for our first team workshop of the year, we decided to collect many of these lessons into a simple format: a bingo of common risks and pitfalls in indie game development.
Wie es funktioniert
- Get together with your team (this takes about an hour).
- Go through the list of risks one by one and discuss each card: Can you give it a green color, or should it be red?
Are you currently at risk of making this mistake? Or is it already a real problem in your team? (For the big issues, we turn the card deep red.) - Look for patterns. Do several cards point toward the same issue? Maybe your production pipeline needs attention. Maybe your marketing is underdeveloped. Maybe your scope is simply too large.
- Together, create a list of concrete actionables to address the biggest risks. If you can’t solve something within the session or you’re running out of time, set a follow-up date to go deeper on that topic.get together with your team, this will take about an hour
We hope this little meeting format helps you and your teams improve your game production process! Let us know if you have feedback or if you have mistakes we can add to the list 😊
