Some people wanna be indie developers because there's a community of happy people who do the kind of things that they do and they can hang out with t… - Jonathan Blow

People have this reaction, ‘Why would I be interested in a game where you just walk around and draw lines on a bunch of panels? Why is there even a world there? Why is this not just a cheap iOS game or something?’ There are very good answers to that, but you don’t want to give people those answers because you then spoil the game for them.

So, let me say something that may—I mean, some people get a little nervous when you talk about things like meditation and I'm gonna say something even worse than that. So if you're about to embark on a long project, you might ask yourself the question, "How do I know this is the right idea?" Right, if I'm gonna spend years on this project, how do I know it's the right thing? How do I know I'm gonna stick to it and get it done? So I came up with this thing that I sort of facetiously called the Cry Test, which is just—imagine you're in a very safe place, with somebody you care a lot about—very intimate relationship with this person—you're very comfortable with them. And you start explaining to them what this project is that you wanna do. If you're not in danger of breaking out in tears, not even necessarily in sadness, not even necessarily breaking out in tears, but having some involuntary upwelling of emotion. If that's not going to happen in that kind of situation, this probably isn't a project that you're that committed to. Because to do a really long project, that drive needs to be very deep. It needs to come from your core. If it doesn't then what's gonna happen is you start working on this thing, six months later—oh, I have a really neat idea for a game, it's got a grappling hook and stuff. That sounds neat, and you start working on the grappling hook and stuff and it turns out to be harder than you thought. And not as good as you thought. And six months later you're like "Well, what if I had a jet pack instead?" And it'll just go like that. You'll drop one thing and pick up another thing and drop that thing and pick up another thing in a chain, because you're not that committed. To succeed in a long and difficult project, there has to be love in the idea. And I don't—you know, in English we toss around the word "love" all the time, like we say like "I love pizza" or something, but I don't mean that. I don't mean "I love this idea" as in "oh, it's such a great idea". I mean, "I love this idea in the way if I don't do it, I'm gonna feel like I'm not doing the purpose of my life." It has to be that strong. So the problem is that most people don't know how to find something that strong in game development. You certainly don't get taught that in school, so—at least, not any school I've ever seen—so I'd just encourage some deep introspection, just try—ask yourself what you really care about, really, because usually that answer will be very different from—usually, if you ask yourself what I care about, you'll come up with some answer, and then if you ask yourself "Really? Is that what I really care about?" Not really, it's usually some kind of politically correct answer that we tell ourselves. If you iterate on that, if you keep asking yourself what you care about, and not accepting the previous answer, you just ask again, ask again, eventually you make it to something you really care about.

[In games], a lot of the problems that we need to solve [are] global state manipulation problems. And so pretending that it's not, by saying "look I have a functional language and I'm going through seven layers of things so that I can avert my eyes sufficiently from the fact that I'm actually just manipulating globals at the end of the day" - that's just an obfuscation, it doesn't actually solve any problems.