Happy Spider

Shipping My First Indie Game: What I Learned

A placeholder postmortem on building and releasing a small indie game solo.

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This is a placeholder article in the Game Dev category.

The Game

Imagine a simple top-down shooter — one level, one enemy type, one boss. Small enough to finish; complete enough to ship. This is a fake postmortem of that project.

What Went Well

  • Tight scope — limiting to one level meant actually finishing it
  • Early playtests — getting feedback in week two caught a game-feel issue before it was baked into everything
  • Godot — the scene system made it easy to iterate on enemy behaviour without breaking the whole game

What Went Poorly

  • Audio was an afterthought — placeholder sounds stayed in until two days before launch
  • No win condition designed upfront — had to retro-fit it, which touched far too many systems

Numbers

Metric Value
Dev time ~6 weekends
Launch platform itch.io
First-week downloads placeholder

Key Takeaway

Scope ruthlessly. A finished small game teaches you more than an abandoned ambitious one.

This is placeholder content. Replace it with a real game dev postmortem when you're ready.