Indie Dev Story

It used to be that a whole lot of people were needed in order to develop a game and start a studio, mainly because everything had to be developed from scratch. Nowadays a single person can make a game in a matter of weeks of even days, depending on its complexity. In fact, there are competitions out there that challenge people to develop games in just 48 hours.

Indie Dev Story is a simple clicker game in which you have to help a lonely game developer build his first game and release it in only thirty days. The mechanics are actually very demanding and fast-paced, even too much so sometimes, but the idea has merit, and it would be nice to see it evolve into something a lot more polished sometime in the future.

To begin with, your character has three stats you have to keep an eye on, namely tiredness, fitness and social-ness. Tiredness can be kept at optimum levels by sleeping, while the other two require you to exercise or hang out with your friends. However, it’s also important to work on a real job in the meantime, because you have to pay your bills every couple of days.

Clicking is the most important thing in the game, because there is no automated process in place to do that for you like in most other games in the genre. Time is constantly running out, so you have to move quickly and know exactly what you have to do in order to get enough work into the game before the release date. Speaking of which, the game ends when you release your project and receive the reviews from the critics.

Along the way it is also possible to purchase new things with your money such as a more comfortable bed, a bigger apartment, or a better computer to work on the game faster. Everything costs money, on the other hand, and every day you spend working is a day you are not developing your game. It’s a fairly stressful gameplay formula, and it needs some work before it works as intended.

Indie Dev Story is actually a very engaging video game, even if it’s just a jam project with very basic mechanics. If the mechanics are polished and more content is added, this could actually be a bestseller and a great way to spend your spare time.