The (Mobile) Indie Game Dev Survival Guide

The (Mobile) Indie Game Dev Survival Guide is the talk I presented at GDC China 2013.

Can an indie survive in the mobile world?

It may look like games for mobile is a paradise for indie developers, but truth is that it is quite hard to be noticed among the swarm of apps.

In this presentation, Raul shares the tips & tricks he has learned about how to survive as a mobile indie game developer for the past 3 years, including a post-mortem of all the games of The Pill Tree and also a post-mortem of The Pill Tree as a company.

MTG Tracker 5.3 Released

Another update for MTG Tracker, just in time for another pre-release.

First things first, the changelog:

  • Added Theros
  • Fixed crash filtering collection / wish list
  • Improved deck view with card details
  • Improved deck list with color and format
  • Improved flow for adding cards to deck
  • Price for a list now applies on the selection
  • Taping on a card on a list selects the proper set image

Now, apart from a few bugs on the collection / wish list section, all this one does is to improve the screens and the flow on the decks area. Because it is one of the most used features of the app, and I want to provide the best experience for the users.

To notice how much of an improvement on the UI this version is, I have to show two screenshots. This is how it was until this version:

decks_deck_framed

This is quite a nice screen with good information. Being able to see the deck list together with the details is nice, and it has been good for a long time, but with today’s release it looks like this:
decks_deck_new_framed (1)Now, each card on a deck has type information and casting cost… I can’t believe I had not added that before, now I can’t imagine that screen without them.

But also, for each deck, you can now see the format of the deck and the colors it uses. Because it is always nice to know that stuff.

cardshark_header

Speaking at GDC China

The talk “The Indie Game Developer Survival Guide” is part of the Mobile and Smartphone Games Summit of GDC China.

The talk is inspired by other guides like “The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy” and “Zombie Survival Guide” and it is a compendium of the post-mortem of the games of The Pill Tree and a post-mortem of The Pill Tree as well.

The talk goes over the current mobile gaming landscape, the different business models, how they worked for us, lessons learned and tips so you can increase your chances of survival as an Indie Game Developer.

GDC is a great conference for game developers, be it USA, Europe or China, and I am really humbled that they invited me to speak there.

However, China is very far away, but for the ones in the Netherlands, I will be presenting a slightly different talk at DroidConNL this year: “The Mobile Indie Developer Survival Guide” which includes some more details about how apps do.

The slides will be available on Slideshare soon after the conference.