Hi all,
I'm interested in starting a new software project and I'm gathering ideas from the indie game development community.
So, experienced game developers: what app would you pay for if it existed now?
Ah therein lies the rub, you used the word "pay".
What would indie dev's pay for? Well from my experience I'll not pay for anything I can reasonably use something else for free even if its not quite as good.
Got a nice tracking software? Oooh awesome ; wait its 4.99 a month? No problem Google Doc's here I come I can track this in a spreadsheet!
Now understand something ; its not because I won't buy software at all -- its because software seems to be generally expensive and I have a very limited budget as an indie.
Heck some indie's are straight out of highschool young people with close to 0 budget.
So keeping that in mind the things I have personally paid for as an indie with a day-job is:
- Substance Designer (was 50% sale or I would not have bought it)
- Silo2 3D
- Unity Pro Desktop
- PhotoShop
- a handful of unity plugins
- a bigger handful of assets from the unity store
- L3DT (large 3d terrain generator)
- sounds (either as a pack or individual ones)
Things I looked for but did not purchase due to unreasonable prices or my budget or poor choices:
- a better more rounded modelling software ( 3DS Max, Maya ) (so horrible, forget about it even Maya LT pricing is high)
- a good sculpting software (3d Coat, ZBrush, Mudbox) (3d coat is almost affordable but Im getting by with Blender for free right now)
- Project Task Management Software (nothing good to say here , its all either huge corporate level stuff that is priced for corporate teams or stuff as low level as notepad or a spreadsheet so I just use google docs)
- Good low end normal/bump/occlusion/etc map generation software. There's a few choices but none of them got me to bite ... I get along with Xnormal most of the time because its free but it seems like between NDO, DDO, Substance, Crazybump that no one has hit the sweet spot for this software yet (to me) they all either wan ttoo much on average OR are not functional enough.
I'm sure others can add more examples