Over the years I have concluded that there are not really many super-secret email addresses and contact details for games reviewers. Almost always, they are just listed on the site. I know thats true of bluesnews, kotaku, rock paper shotgun etc,
The real trick is getting them to actually read the email, rather than delete it. I think almost all emails you send to game reviewers get through, most probably get deleted if it's from someone new and your game does not grab them.

So the problem is how to 'grab' them, when nobody knows who you are. I have no idea how to really do that, but from talking to a lot of journalists, I'd suspect that what you need is

A great game name
At least 1 awesome screenshot
A decent website that you link to
An original and decent game

I think you can be billy no-mates, and have those 4 in place, and you will get a great review and loads of publicity. Just make sure you have all four covered. Good luck :D

Also, youtube videos are great. Don't worry about blind-mailing full copies. Say one is available on request, and anyone serious about covering the game will email you.

There are a lot of very 'nice looking' games out there using free engines. This doesn't make them high quality games. They often look good, but have few features, or unoriginal design, or play badly.

There are also a lot of projects by newcomers to indie game dev, esp from the mainstream industry, who are making and releasing their first projects, projects which may be awesome, but the business model makes no sense and they are unsustainable businesses.

If you want to compete as a full-time indie in the long run, you can avoid the latter group, because I suspect they won't be around for long. I know a lot of people who have spent a lot of their savings, their relatives savings, and their overdraft to make games that have no market, insane competition, no busines plan, or are sold so cheap that they will never break even.

So right now, may not be the calmest time to take the temperature of the indie market in terms of quality. I think it's a bit of a bubble. When I look at games that sell no better than my own, but are made by 6-10 man teams, I know there are a lot of people that are a month or so away from flipping burgers

Another up-vote for sprite sheets here. I've found in my games that havign as few texture swaps as possible yields a HUGE difference in frame rate.
For big complex games, it's good to have a system where you can hit a hotkey and show all of the current Settexture() calls in the current frame. Stuff like Pix can do this, but building it into your app isn't too tricky, and it's very convenient for tracking down slowdowns.

I recomend targeting a sizeable niche if you want to make money, not go mainstream. if you want to make casual games for housewives, you compete with bigfishgames 'one-game-a-day' schedule and multi-million dollar budgets.
You will lsoe that battle.

The key is:

1) Make a niche game
2) Aim at a demographic that buys, not pirates
3) Put a lot of effort into the business side
4) Have a very very polished high quality game

I only make PC games (with mac ports) and have been doing it a long time, but I certainly make more than $20k.  If it helps you to see what's required this game:
http://www.gratuitousspacebattles.com
Took in over half a million dollars gross. It was two years work, and there were some artists and musicians working on contract.

A lot of games do this because it speeds up file-loading to have one big file (yes really) on windows PC's. In a lot of cases its nothing to do with protecting the assets from the player.

Depends who they are. People who will *only* try your game if its free, probably arent likely to pay for your next game either. It's possible to have half a million happy customers, none of whom have paid a penny, or ever will.
And some customers will generate a ton of supprot hell too. There are actually some people who are not worth reaching. People who ahve no money, or will pirate the game anyway.
Not all customers are worth the same, in business terms

Right now I'm putting-off going back into my games unit-design screen to see just how out-of-date and useless the code for that part has become since I pretty much changed everything in the last month.
I have a horrible feeling none of ti will work and I'll have to code the entire GUI from scratch again.
BAH!
Thats the problem with big projects, you spend too much time away from entire sections of the code.

Don't expect to make a fortune from ads though. If your site is the absolute dogs bollox, you can earn $1 per thousand impressions. That assumes 1,00 real imrpessiond to interested parties, not 200 impressions each to 5 people running adblock. Advertisers are very good at telling high quality traffic from low qaulity traffic.

So if you get a million impeessions a month on your site, you will get $1,000 a month, before the ad agency takes their cut, then you pay the website bandwidth, then you deduct any corporate tax, then any personal income tax....

It's not a route to riches.

I don't think indie games portals are necessarily a bad idea - but I'd never buy from one. It makes more sense to buy directly from the developer, seeing that I want to give them money so they develop more games and don't see any reason to have anyone else take a cut. I think anyone that's likely to go to an indie games specific portal is going to be aware of this.

I agree 100%. That's why I started up ShowMeTheGames. It's not trying to make money from indie game devs, it's literally a collective online games database and promotional tool for indies to pool their resources, and enocurage the direct sales you mention.

Whereas this, on the other hand, is just an attempt to do Steam, but with 0.00001% of the budget. No online games portal is goign to exist in the long term as a profitable business unelss it's founded with a least a million dolalrs of startup investment, probably $10 million.
Hobby websites are a different matter, but lets not pretend anyone is about to beat steam at their own game by launching one.

generally small projects are better when starting out, because they actually get finished then, and they are best for learners. You can make a total hash of the code in a 3 month game, and it won't haunt you for years.
Big projects are what you do when you seriosuly know what you are doing, and want to make something that actually sells and becomes popular.

Even some simple looking games (like zyngas, or popcaps) are really big projects. The majority of the time goes on iteration, playtesting and balancing.

I didn't make any real money from indie games until I was 30. I didn't make enough money to go full time until I was 35. I didn't make any real 'fuck you' money till I was 40.
I wasted loads of years trying to be a rock star. It really doesn't matter how old you are if you are just someone behind a keyboard.
Don't worry about it.

[ALL THE TIME]

Ever since I started work on Gratuitous Space Battles, I've been listening to a big long playlist of sci-fi music from Star Wars, Star Trek etc. Sometimes I even have Revenge Of The Sith movie playing in one monitor whilst working in the other.
The idea is that the whole atmosphere and 'attitude' and emotion of the stuff gets so infused into my brain, it works itself into the design, the code and the text and everything when I'm working.
I now hear darth vaders theme tune ALL THE TIME.

on a similar note to this topic, you might find this interesting:

I sold the exact same game at two different prices, on the same page, and saw how many people paid for the more expensive version:

http://www.positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/registernomads.php

Which was quite positive news :D

I've employed a number of musicians over the years and paid thousands of dollars to them. I've also spent a lot of time looking for musicians.
The situation as I see it is this:

1) You have an absurdly hard job. the market is FLOODED with musicians wanting to do game music. I get roughly 1 application to do music for my games every week. As I do a game every 12-18 months, thats a lot of oversupply.

2) From my POV, the point of your website is to prove to me you can do high quality music of the style I like. If your homepage is flash, I don't care, but it also doesn't impress me. I'm not after a web designer, but a composer. The best thing is to make sure you have as many examples as possible, in as many styles as possible. References from happy customers is welcome too.

I've maybe looked at 100 different composers websites. At least 10 of them I skipped immediately because they had some fancy plugin to display their music samples which wouldnt work, or took ages to pre-load stuff. Simple wav or mp3 files ALWAYS work.

Good Luck, i hope this helped, even though it might sound a bit negative, just saying how it is. The good news is, that money is rarely a factor in picking a musician. Having the ability to do the right style is more important than being 20% cheaper.

Ok, there is a new race available for my game 'Gratuitous Space Battles' now, called 'The Nomads'
Screenshots:


Video:




Details page:
http://www.positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/nomads.html

I'm having a bit of a pricing experiment too. The new race is $5.99, just like the last ones were. However, there is the option to get it at a discounted rate, if you are in certain circumstances, which I'm letting people decide for themselves. There are more details on the buy page, together with stats to show who took the discount (not by name, just by percentage).
The details are here:
http://www.positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/registernomads.php

Hopefully people will find the outcome of the experiment interesting. I will, anyway :D

in any case i do like bmt-micro a lot, the only reason i prefer fastspring is because it allows an option for the user to pay what they want for a game, and currently my game is pay what you want. with bmt-micro that's harder to set up (if not impossible?).

From what they tell me, they do support this, but currently you have to ask them to set it up, its not vendor-configurable yet

Mostly the fact that BMT have phone support for customers and FastSpring do not. Plus I have a very good, longstanding relationship with BMT. Some customers simply will not buy from a company that they cannot, if they needed to, speak to on the phone.
There are enough online scams that this doesn't surprise me.
As I understand it BMT can provide payment systems for ongoing subscriptions and services. they are also highly flexible when it comes to getting client-specific stuff done, in my personal experience.

try these:
http://bmtmicro.com/
http://home.plimus.com/ecommerce/
http://www.fastspring.com/

I strongly recommend BMT Micro. Superb customer service, even if they lack many of the features used by the others. (I've used all 3, and loads of others I won't recommend :D)

This really does depend on code structure. A lot of people just stick all their code all voer the place, have everything call functions in everything else, and end up not only with buggy and messy code, but code that is slow to compile.
Essentially, getting this stuff right is the difference between just programming, and proper software engineering. A book which is gerat on this is 'Code Compelte' although tis slightly dated now.
Basically, you need to really think about what code goes where. if you get it right, the vast majority of your code is 'private' and totally isolated from any other code. In that case, changing some code in A, won't requrie B to recompile.
Sadly, theres no easy way to learn how to do all this, it mostly comes down to long experience, and looking at a lot of professionally written code.

isn't Joe Danger a bit like the bike games?