Slime Rancher director shares tips for surviving indie game dev

There's been some pretty stuff on Game Dev Twitter today, including a helpful thread from Monomi Park cofounder Nick Popovich about how to survive as an indie game maker in 2018.

Popovich's lessons learned are worth a look given that Monomi Park did pretty well for itself with its debut game Slime Rancher, surpassing a million units sold shortly after launching out of Early Access last summer.

While his advice is A) derived from his unique experience and B) sometimes pretty straightforward ('have some business sense...[or] hire someone who can do it"), it's also concise and informative.

Notably, Popovich chose to anchor his advice to the notion that indie devs should think in threes: try to spend three days or less on trying to solve a problem (or else come back to it later), for example, and try to spend three months or less working on major milestones.

We've taken the liberty of reprinting a few choice snippets of his advice below; you can (and should) read the full thread over on Twitter.

If Popovich's thoughts strike a chord with you, consider looking back at our conversation last year about the development of Slime Rancher and his GDC 2017 talk on the game's success as a playground for emergent storytelling.