IndieCade Festival 2015

Let’s face it - being an indie developer sucks sometimes. So many developers compromise their integrity to attempt to get the chance to build what they want, and many end up not reaching that goal, becoming burnt out on the grind, losing sight of their passion or delivering a fraction of what they intended and destroying their vision in the process. How do you hold true to the games you want to build while trying to get a startup off the ground? Even scarier, how do you stay true to your studio’s design goals as you realize you need to cover a potential gap between projects? How do you build a startup, designing the games that you want without starving to death? In this talk, WhiteMoon Dreams talks about holding true to the studio’s design goals while trying to keep the studio afloat and growing from a bedroom developer to a multi-project studio without doing projects or creating habits that compromise these ideals. We walk through the studios core ideals, building prototypes, doing bizdev as indies, laying off people, incentivizing our family through everything except money, building developer communities and every other last bit of deliciousness we’ve tried over the last 8 years to stay true to our vision and do exactly what we want – no matter the cost.