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Hard-won secrets from the frontlines of indie game development. Shared assets, shared code, shared success.

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Production

How to Build a Steam Next Fest Demo Without Derailing Your Actual Game

A Steam Next Fest demo is not a second game. It is a public test of the first 15 to 30 minutes of trust: does the game launch, does the player understand the loop, does the promise on the Steam page match what they can p

Jun 8, 2026

Community

How to Write a Contributor Handoff for Game Artists, Composers, and Designers

A contributor handoff is the packet of context someone needs before they can do useful work on your game. For artists, composers, audio designers, and game designers, it is the difference between creative partnership and

9 min read

Strategy

The Clowdr AI Standard: What Counts as Shippable Work

AI arguments usually collapse into a purity test. That is useless for a game project. Clowdr needs a standard a developer, artist, composer, designer, writer, or project lead can use before AI-assisted work becomes part

9 min read

Strategy

Sound Is More Than Generation

If you write music for games, the AI pitch probably sounds familiar. It is not just "this tool can make a melody." It is "we do not have a budget for a composer, so we will generate something." It is "we only need backgr

7 min read

Strategy

Taste Is Still the Job

If you are a game artist, the AI conversation probably does not feel abstract. It feels like watching your portfolio get scraped, your style get imitated, and your job get described as a prompt away by people who never h

7 min read

Production

The Tool Is Not the Architect

AI coding tools are the easiest part of this whole argument to sell to developers. That is exactly why this post has to be careful. It would be simple to say: agents make code faster, indie devs are under-resourced, use

6 min read

Strategy

How to Pick Your Next Indie Game Bet (Without Burning Two Years On a Lottery Ticket)

Most indie devs don't pick their next game. They buy a lottery ticket. One idea, one five-year swing, sold as passion. Then the numbers hit. The graveyard you don't see Walk through any indie-dev gathering and count the

9 min read

Production

The Last-Mile Decision: When to Ship Your Indie Game vs. When to Polish

You know the feeling. The build works. Testers don't hate it. But every morning you open the project and fix one more thing that wasn't in yesterday's bug list. That is not finishing. That is the polish loop, and it is t

8 min read

Strategy

Working as a Game Composer for Free: When It Works, When It's a Trap

A decision framework for composers tired of being told "never work for free," and equally tired of getting burned when they do. The median indie composer in the 2025 GameSoundCon survey made $8,500 a year. The median per

10 min read

Production

What Is a Game Dev Accountability Partner? (And How to Find One Who Doesn't Flake)

You've got the graveyard. The incremental game you bailed on in week three. The top-down roguelike that made it to one level. A Vampire Survivors clone that's been at "almost playable" for seven months. You opened the pr

11 min read

Post-mortem

Indie Game Postmortems: 7 Reasons Projects Die After Year One

You can find a thousand posts about why 90% of indie games die in the idea phase. Almost nobody writes about the graveyard that opens up between month fourteen and month twenty-eight, where actual shipped games and shipp

8 min read

Community

How to Work With a Game Artist on Your Indie Project (Without Making Them a Service Desk)

Most indie devs bring an artist in at week 30. That is the part that kills the project. You have built the game, you have built the tech, and now you need a sprite sheet by Friday, and the artist you scrambled to hire tr

7 min read

Community

Discord Server vs. Game Dev Team: Why One Ships and One Doesn't

A Discord server is a chat room with notifications. A game dev team is a small group where someone is counting on your work by Friday. The two are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where most indie projects

9 min read

Community

Why AAA Composers Are Quietly Looking for Indie Projects (And How to Reach Them Before They Take a Job)

Why AAA composers are quietly taking indie work, and how to reach them before the answer is already no. Composer allocation doesn't happen when you start looking. It happened months ago, quietly, through taste and trust.

9 min read

Community

How to Spot Rev-Share Red Flags Before You Join an Indie Game Project

Last updated: 2026-04-19 Rev-share is not automatically a scam. But a lot of indie game rev-share projects die for the same reasons: no shipped proof, no written terms, fantasy split math, and a founder who wants your wo

6 min read

Production

The Ship-It Friday Ritual: How to Run a Weekly Demo That Forces Your Indie Game Forward

Every week without a witness is a week the game can disappear. A Ship-It Friday ritual forces a weekly shippable — five minutes of playable, or a single captured GIF, or a visible change to one system — against a deadlin

6 min read

Strategy

Your Game Art Portfolio Is a Graveyard. Here's How to Fix It.

If you've been making game art professionally for more than a year, there's a good chance you can show less than 10% of what you've actually made. Cancelled projects. Perpetual NDAs. Studios that went silent. The work ex

9 min read

Community

How to Stop Getting Ghosted on r/INAT (And What to Try Instead)

If you've posted on r/INAT in the last year, you already know that r/INAT ghosting isn't a bug. It's the default outcome. The subreddit has a sarcastic running meme that one actual poster wrote into their own collaborati

9 min read

Production

Accountability Circles: How to Run the Small-Team Ritual That Replaces the Indie 'Family'

Your Discord team has been dead for six months, but nobody said it was over. The artist replies every other week. The programmer vanished around week four. You can see everyone's Discord status is green, which somehow ma

8 min read

Production

The Ninety-Ninety Rule: Why Your Indie Game Stalls at 90% Done

You've been 90% done for four months. The core loop works. The art style is locked. You've shown friends a build and they didn't hate it. But every Friday the game is still 90% done, and some Fridays it's 88% done becaus

9 min read

Production

The Vertical Slice Protocol: How to Prove Your Indie Game Works Before You Scale It

Open your "graveyard folder." You know the one. Incremental game, Vampire Survivors-style, FPS arena wave-based. Twelve project folders, each with a week-one README that promised this one was different. None of those pro

8 min read

Strategy

Solo Dev vs. Team: Which Path Is Right for Your Game?

There's a question that never dies in indie dev circles: should I make my game alone or with a team? You'll find strong opinions on both sides. Solo devs point to Stardew Valley and Undertale. Team advocates point to the

10 min read

Community

How to Find Reliable Teammates for Your Indie Game Project

"LF artist, DM me." Posted at 2am. By week 2 you're left on read. By month 2 your project is back to being a one man army: you, your Trello board, and a prototype starting to feel like a guilt trip. The fix is not more d

7 min read

Production

Scope Creep Is Killing Your Game: A Practical Guide to Cutting Features

Scope creep in game development looks like one extra feature, then another, then six months of work on systems nobody asked for. This guide gives you a five-question framework for deciding what to cut, a backlog system t

11 min read

Strategy

Why 90% of Indie Games Die in the Idea Phase

Your indie game isn't stalled because you lack talent, discipline, or ideas. It's stalled because you're doing creative work in an environment rigged to kill creative work. You probably disagree with that. Most stuck sta

11 min read

Production

How to Finish Your Indie Game: The Complete Guide

Finishing an indie game is a structural problem, not a willpower problem. Most devs quit because they're doing it alone, not because they're lazy or unskilled. This guide names the patterns that kill projects, and the st

19 min read

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