yeah that's pretty common. i don't rely on myself at all when it comes to judging how good a game is, cause of all the biases involved. i judge it solely by the reactions of playtesters

the easiest way that involves work would probably be freelancing; use elance.com or freelancer.com or similar sites and look for jobs which match your skills. those can be language specific (e.g. 'i want someone to code a flash game for me) though. and it's not always specific to games, if you can code, it's easier to find jobs like 'code my site'

if you have skills besides coding (e.g. art, music, writing) you can also apply to jobs in those fields

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/192654/Unitys_mobile_licenses_are_now_free.php

[started but never released or finished yet:]

started but never released or finished yet:
-ergintandal (started 1997, intend to finish it one day)
-ziggurats for red turtle (started 2002, intend to finish it one day
-an invitation to neverwhere (finished, waiting for orchard-l to release it)
-alterpoint (started 2005, intend to finish it one day)
-new detail (started 2007, intend to finish it one day)
-saturated dreamers (started 2007, 95% done, will be released this year)

released but in a partially unfinished state:
-The Dungeon of the Sword (1995)
-Munchers (1995)
-Second Seeker (1996)
-Your Kingdoms (1996)
-Wingedmene (1999)
-Rulers of the 7 Wonders (2001)
-Tilde and the Mask of :P (2001)

released and finished; these are full games from title screen to ending credits:
-And& (2000)
-Harlock and Rinku's Game which Includes the Game Bill's "Never Go West" (2001)
-Knight of the Ages (2003)
-Alphasix (2006)
-Immortal Defense (2007)
-Fedora Spade series (four games, 2007-2008)
-an unnamed valentine's day game for increpare's contest (2009)

not sure what that comes down to but i voted for the 10+ one, even though arguably it's slightly less than 10 if you don't count the ones that were released but in an unfinished state

in any case, to clarity my original statement quoted in the first post, i did not mean that people can't have good opinions unless they've *finished* games, what i meant was that working on games gives people knowledge that they can't come by by just playing them, and it's usually more useful to talk to people who have worked on games rather than people who have not if you want to learn how to make games. it's not a good idea to learn how to make games from people who have never worked on a game

also the distinction between having finished a game vs merely worked on one isn't all that important; both type of people have vastly more knowledge about game development than someone who has never worked on a game. having worked at and failed to do something is still a lot better than never having attempted it when it comes to knowledge of how to do it

Not trying to be argumentative, but I honestly wonder what percentage of each (TIG design readers, redditors) have actually made at least one game.  This may be completely unfair to one side [and if so, I apologize in advance!] but I'd always seen both populations as pretty equivalent, honestly.  I mean, they're both internet forums with no requirement for entry, populated by people who are really interested in, and want to talk about a particular subject.  There's no real reason to go to either unless you make games, or want to.

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=33555.0

ya, according to that poll about 80% of active tigs users have finished at least one game, which i'd bet is higher than the average user of r/gamedesign

and there are a lot of people on tigs who have never finished a game either, but even so, most of those who haven't finished a game have at least *started* on a game and work on a game, whereas i'd guesss that most on that subreddit never even attempted to make a game

as i see it, outside of niche forums like this which are composed of people actually doing creative stuff, the vast majority of gaming forums are composed of people who are not doing stuff, but just talking about it

there are also forums (mostly secret ones) that have an even higher ratio than tigs does because they tend to be invite-only. for example, the eo forums, while they were active, were composed exclusively of people who had finished a well-received game maker game, and i met plenty of great people there and had lots of great discussions there. unfortunately those types of forums tend to die out over time because of the nature of the invite-only system, so tigs is about as good as you can get in terms of an open forum for real game developers

indie game: the movie?

i don't really have much advice, both of my facebook fan pages that i run have very few fans (less than 200 combined), which isn't very much of a user base to figure out what works and what doesn't:

https://www.facebook.com/saturateddreamers
https://www.facebook.com/immortaldefense

nonetheless from what little i have, what i do is i tend to post short updates to facebook about interesting or quirky things, and keep big updates to my website. for example, for me, trivia about how to pronounce a character's name, or stuff like fan art or let's plays, belongs on facebook, not the website. whereas stuff like new trailers would go on both facebook and the website

yep, i agree with most of that. i'll put it on the wishlist. i fixed the font problem today though (it has to do with the way gm handles .ttf fonts of a size of 10 or lower, i upped the font size to 11 and it fixed the issue with the width of the "m" character). i also like the idea of making the middle parts more transparent than the edges, i'll try that later on too

they are improving studio all the time, so if it's crashing for you, make sure to report those crashes in the gm studio bug tracker, and they'll fix them

i am still working in gm7 for saturated dreamers though. it's just too much of a hassle to port it to new versions each time one comes out, especially because it'd involve a lot of changes to the graphics and code. i plan on porting it to studio for the mac port *after* it's released

also: remember that you *can't* port it to mac even with studio unless you own a mac and a software license for that mac (which costs 99$). that's a big drawback

I don't really know where I fit in with freeware vs commercial. I've been "programming" for years in GameMaker using D&D, and I've made a few weekend projects, but now I'm working on my first full game that I'm planning to sell to pay for (at least part of) college costs. I kinda feel like I shouldn't be selling this game, since I'm no Notch, Jonathan Blow, or Phil Fish (lol). I'm not an amazing programmer, artist, or musician. I'm not even outta high school yet! Is this feeling normal(ish)?

that's kinda like saying 'i don't want to lift weights, i'm no arnold schwarzenegger'

there are about 10,000 commercial indie game developers; most of them are not as famous as the ones you named. you only hear about the millionaires and wild success stories, rather than the every day people doing it, so you shouldn't compare yourself to the few you have heard about

okay, i fixed the aliasing issues and made other improvements; here's what it looks like now. there's still room for improvement visually but it's good enough for now, since i've spent about 5 days just working on that i'm eager to go on to the next task -- which is actually finishing up the skill tree's skills

i think the trees are worse; they were better how you originally had them

overall i'd suggest reading some pixel art tutorials. there's a lot of good ones, just read a few

pretty much every major area has a lot of game developers; just attend igda meetings and such. there is a higher proportion of them in california, but unless you're in rural montana or wyoming or something, chances are there's an indie game developer within 10 miles from you, you just need to find them

the in-built gm one is a*, and you can usually adapt it to your needs. you can do stuff like increased acceleration with gm's functions with pathfinding, not sure what you are having trouble with when attempting to do that. coding an alternative system could work but it'd be much slower since it'd have to be written in gml

nothing, since i'm basically the only one working on it anymore (most of the rest of the team either stopped working on it or mostly finished their roles and have nothing further to do). well, me and eva (eva's still doing the promotion stuff and the site design) i guess. part of the reason it's taking so long is because i have to do a lot of the work other members of the team said they'd do but never got the time or motivation to do

i also don't know when the precise date is that we began the game. the earliest mention is around june of 2007, which will make it 6 years next month