TOM FRANCIS
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15 Years of Indie Dev In 4 Bits of Advice

It’s rough in the games industry at the moment, and a lot of folks are spinning up their own thing. So I thought now might be a good time to boil down what feel like the key things I’ve learned in 15 years of running an indie games studio.

If you’re just arriving, we are Suspicious Developments. We did:

• Gunpoint (2013) – 10k reviews, 98% positive
• Heat Signature (2017) – 6k reviews, 94% positive
• Tactical Breach Wizards (2024) – 10k reviews, 98% positive

I’m the game designer and writer, I do some code, and until recently I ran the company (I now have help).

As you might be able to tell from the list, our games are all over the place in development time and genre. But they all sold great and reviewed great, and to the extent that we controlled that at all, I credit it to prioritising sustainability.

That means definining success not in total sales or accolades, but in how sure you can be of making another game at a happy, comfortable pace. All our games made more than twice their money back, and we’ve never been closer than 2 years to running out of funds.

The biggest factor in getting to that position, of course, was sheer luck: we made our first game in our spare time, with no budget, and it came out at the perfect time: 2013. Indie games had started to make real money on Steam, but the scene wasn’t flooded yet, so a small-scope thing from first timers had much easier time selling. That kickstart from zero to game-budget-money is ultimately why we’ve never needed a publisher.

So I’m not the right person to ask about startup funding. But we weren’t that rare in our first success, and we are increasingly rare in our still-being-here, still-making-stuff, still-independent. So I can at least advise on how to make what you have go as far as possible.

Looking back, this is what feels like the highest-impact, most-copyable aspects of that. I hope it can be of help.

Why four?
Look, I’ve only been at it 15 years. It’s gonna take me til 2030 to learn a fifth thing.

Contents

1. Stay as small as you can
2. Pick something prototypable
3. Testing is the magic bullet
4. Price is a solved problem
5. A timeline, to illustrate

1. Stay as small as you can

I hate to say this at a time when it would sure be nice if there were more jobs, but I say it to encourage more stable jobs. Staffing up doesn’t really create jobs if it leads to layoffs or closure, and it fucks with a lot of lives along the way.

I think we only get to a healthier industry for workers when more studios are sustainable, and more jobs are stable. And things get unstable very fast as you grow.

The maths of how team size affects your chance of success is brutal:

• Success is making more money than you spent
• Doubling your team size doubles the amount of money you need to make
• But as the numbers go up, vanishingly fewer games make that much money. So it’s not just half the chance of success, it might be a tenth

For reference, Suspicious Developments’ average burn rate is about 3 full time salaries. I think if we had scaled up to 8 after Gunpoint, we would have made a bad game next, then no games at all.

Heat Signature was a tough game to figure out, and if we’d had less than 3.5 years of runway to test and iterate, we would have just had to release it in a bad state. If we’d had only 3.5 years of runway, I’d have been stressed as hell and the company would have collapsed if it wasn’t a hit.

We haven’t been consistent because all our ideas are golden, we’ve done it by staying small enough to keep testing and working until they’re good. And that’s a more sustainable kind of success, because rolling with punches is built in.

A lower burn rate is a superpower. There’s nothing else that’s fully within your control that can so dramatically increase your chances of success.

2. Pick something prototypable

This didn’t really work, which was useful to know 6 years before launch.

By ‘prototype’ I mean a playable build that meaningfully shows what’s good about your game – a proof of concept.

A prototypable project is one where you can build that in an amount of time you can afford to lose. If you can make a prototype but it’s gonna take 3 years, it can’t serve the main purpose of a prototype: to check this game idea works while there’s still time to change tack.

Being able to do this quickly is crucial for two reasons:

1. If the prototype ends up proving your idea doesn’t work, or is beyond your means, you’re gonna want as much time as possible to do something about that.

2. If your prototype proves the idea can work, how much time you have left directly determines how good the game will actually be.

It’s also just incredibly motivating and clarifying for the whole team to be able to play the game they’re working on, and see where it’s headed.

So:

• Choose your project based heavily on which seems the easiest to prototype.
• Pick stuff you can prototype with the people you already have.
• Don’t obsess about anything until you have a prototype: you don’t know what’s important yet.
• Assume everything you do before you have a prototype might need to be scrapped or redone.

3. Testing is the magic bullet

How did we make Wizards good? We asked players which bits were bad, then fixed them.

You are going to take an exam that costs all of your life savings to sit. If you ace this exam, you’ll win 2-10 times your life savings. The games-playing public already knows all the answers to the exam, and will tell you if you ask them.

It is incredible how many devs don’t ask them. Or don’t ask enough of them. Or don’t ask them early enough, or enough times.

Testing can be a fair bit of work and time, but nothing is as expensive as launching without it.

This phase of development is called ‘making the game good’, and if you don’t have time for it, that’s as big of a problem as it sounds.

4. Price is a solved problem

On a pretty real level, your sales are a function of:

1. How many people arrive at your Steam page
2. How much your Steam page makes them want to buy it
3. How much it costs

The first one is famously hard. The second one heavily depends on making the game good, which you’re gonna spend 90% of your time on.

The third one is just a single number you can change in 30 seconds, and you can find out the correct value for it in one round of testing.

We just ask people how much they think the game should cost, and every time we’ve gone with the price most people chose, and every time they’ve sold great and reviewed great.

A timeline, to illustrate

I’m a visual thinker, so I laid all this out on a timeline. The positions are arbitrary, of course, but there’s no realistic place to put those five lines that doesn’t make doubling your headcount terrifying for your breathing room on both quality and stability.

Obviously most of this post is broadly aligned with conventional wisdom. But the thing I want to yell about, that people don’t seem to internalise enough, is how dramatically and reliably having more time, with a testable build, converts to your game being better and your studio being safer.

But does making a good game guarantee a hit?

Nope! But at the indie scale, making a bad one sure prevents it. And staying small helps again here: if you need to sell a million copies at launch, quality alone can’t ensure it – marketing and other factors all need to align. If you only need to sell 50k, you can get a lot closer to that with just good word of mouth.

Again, this is not a guide to selling the most copies. It’s a guide to making whatever funds, talent and good fortune you have go as far as possible, and keeping you better insulated from whatever bullshit happens next. And that comes down to giving yourself as much time as possible, and checking in with players to make sure you’re spending it well.

Project Battleaxe Dev Log 1: The Four Verbs

We’re working on something new! Can’t say for sure if it’ll work out yet, but the core combat part of it is shaping up nicely already, and I wanna show more of the process as we go than I did with Wizards.

This is being made in Godot. Get on our mailing list if you wanna test when it’s ready.

And I’ll prob be posting more clips on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/pentadact.com

Here’s that earlier clip: https://youtu.be/Hla3gWrV4TA

A Snowy Ramble On What Makes Games ‘Different Every Time’

It’s snowing, and I have a mic that make me audible outdoors!

So I got mildly snowed on while I rambled about board games as roguelikes, what matters when making games ‘different every time’, and how Dune Imperium pulls it off so well.

Blundering Into Dead King’s Bluff

Blundered into a board game design lately, and it’s coming together. Here I am talking about it on a cold, sunny, noisy (sorry) day! Will show it in action once some little rules things solidify.

The Bone Queen And The Frost Bishop: Playtesting Scavenger Chess In Plasticine

My chess variant stalled a while, cos I rarely felt like coding when my work day was done. So I bought a chess set and some plasticine to try some ideas lo-fi style. What follows is how my first game of this iteration of Scavenger Chess played out.

Continued

Five Problems With Chess

Firstly, of course: many folks I like and respect love chess, and I’m happy for them and have no interest in persuading chess fans to like it less or want something different. But it’s not for everyone, and I’m one of the people for whom it’s not. So what I’m interested in is: what needs fixing to make it a game I enjoy? And if you did that, who else might enjoy it?

I am gonna call these problems problems, though, because it gets exhausting to say “possible areas where there’s scope to broaden or mutate its appeal to a different set of people, without wishing to detract from or disparage the great enjoyment many already draw from the game as it stands.” And because some of them, from my perspective, for players like me, with all the caveats above, seem incredibly fucking stupid. Continued

We’re Looking For Someone To Make A Tactical Breach Wizards Trailer

Update: the position’s been filled, thanks everyone!

We’re looking for someone to make a roughly 2 minute trailer of Tactical Breach Wizards, preferably by the 9th of May.

We have a new chapter of the game to show off, but we don’t want to do our usual in-depth talkthroughs because it would start to get spoilery.

The game has pause, slowmo, level select and camera controls built in, and we’ll also provide you with the Unity project if you’re able to make use of that.

We have a composer and some tracks already in, you’d work with them directly to figure out the music needs.

Our game is a fairly straight-faced parody of a modern military action thriller, borrowing superficial tropes and critiquing or inverting some of the deeper ones. You can get a sense of it from our last talkthrough vid:

And you can get a sense of our sense of humour from the Gunpoint and Heat Signature trailers:

Void Bastards Vs Heat Signature: A Completely Objective Analysis

Note: this was written around the time Void Bastards was released, but languished in my Drafts for years because I’d planned to make it longer. What’s there all still makes sense to me though, so I’m just gonna make it about the 3 things I did cover and throw it out there:

Void Bastards is a roguelike first-person shooter about boarding randomly generated spaceships. I designed a top-down roguelike about boarding randomly generated spaceships, so it’s interesting to see how the two games tackled the same issues differently, and how well their solutions worked out! I picked three: Continued

Gridcannon: A Single Player Game With Regular Playing Cards

I thought it would be an interesting game design challenge to come up with a single player game you can play with a regular deck of playing cards. My first try, about a month ago, didn’t work. But on Sunday I had a new idea, and with one tweak from me and another from my friend Chris Thursten, it’s playing pretty well now! In the video I both explain it and play a full game. I’ll write the rules here, but they’ll make more sense when you see it played: Continued

Making A Better Card Feel Worse With UX

Nowhere Prophet has a power where each turn you can choose 1 card from your hand to discard, and draw another to replace it.

Slay the Spire has a power where you draw 1 extra card per turn, then must discard 1 of your choice right after.

Slay’s power is straight up better: you get to see what the new card is before deciding what to discard, which both lets you factor it into synergy considerations, and allows you to discard the new card itself, if it’s worse than what you have.

But experientially, Nowhere Prophet’s feels more positive. You’re presented with a hand you can keep, or if you like you can get a do-over on the card you like least. Doing nothing is fine, but if you see a bad card you can chuck it for good odds of a better one. Yay! Continued

Steam Quirks For Developers

Talking to people at GDC and Rezzed, especially people just starting in game dev, made me realise I’ve accumulated a load of non-obvious knowledge about how Steam works and how best to use it. Info like this tends to get passed around between established devs, at events and in closed circles, but newer devs and those excluded from these groups don’t get access to it.

Everything marked ‘info’ was either learned by me first hand, or told to me by Valve at events with the express purpose of getting this kind of info out to developers, without request of confidentiality. I say this because I do also get told things confidentially – none of that is in here. Continued

Charity

When Gunpoint did well, in 2013, I thought: “I should give some money to charity. But this might have to last me the rest of my life. So I should wait til I have a second game out, and see how that does.”

When Heat Signature did well in, 2017, I thought: “It’s doing great so far! But how fast will it trail off? This has to cover the budget of the next game. What if Steam’s algorithm changes and all our revenue stops? Maybe after the third game I’ll know more about-”

I see what my brain is doing. There’ll always be enough uncertainty in my life that I can delay a donation in the name of caution. But I don’t think that loop ends on iteration 3 or 4, so I’m cutting it short now. I’m giving $25,000 to the Against Malaria Foundation and another $25,000 to GiveDirectly. Continued

My Week

This year I’ve started tracking the hours I spend programming, because generally once I start tracking something I naturally start to optimise it. I’m not a workaholic – I’m at greater risk of not putting in the hours than of putting in too many, and I’d like to make sure I’m putting in enough.

Programming is about 40% of my job. Another 40% is design, and the other 20% is every other job on a game that isn’t art or music. The design part is hard to track though: I find most productive design thinking comes from a big engine in the back while you’re doing other things, as it randomly matches disparate ideas and sprinkles them with what you’re currently experiencing and asks: “Is that anything?”

Programming, though, I can measure: I start a timer and then focus on work for anywhere from 8 minutes to 80. If I get the urge to check Twitter, I can but I have to stop the timer to do it, and only log the work time. I only get to log the time if it really was focused work – all breaks and interruptions and meals and everything else is excluded. Back when I notionally worked an 8 hour-a-day job, I had an hour for lunch, lots of Twitter breaks and interruptions. I’d be surprised if I averaged as many as 6 productive hours a day.

Anyway, here’s my first full week’s programming time tracked: Continued

Heat Signature’s Space Birthday Update Is Live!

Heat Signature is one Space Year old today! To celebrate, we’ve released a big free update we’ve been working on for five months, with over 20 features – including our own twist on a Daily Challenge.

Click through for details on each:

• Character Traits
• 7 New Hazards
• Glory Missions & Clients
• Upgraded AI & Reworked Alarms
• Player Story Trading Cards
• Contractors: 4 Unique Enemy Types
• The Daily Challenge
• 10 Quality of Life Features

Continued

What Works And Why: Emergence

I love Deus Ex, System Shock 2, and Dishonored 2, and the name for these games is dumb: they’re ‘immersive sims’. If you asked me what I liked about them, my answer would be a phrase almost as dumb: ’emergent gameplay!’ Continued