Production from the Logbook

Every Production entry in the Expedition Log — hard-won lessons from the frontlines of indie game development.

Production Community Strategy Post-mortem Success

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

9 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

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

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

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

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

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

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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