Indie Game Clinic

Hi folks, hope you're all doing good! Two more streams this week, and then next week there will be a new video essay on Friday 19th.

The next essay will be an intro to how game art communicates. We'll be dipping our toes into gestalt-psychology and affordance theory, how these things impact graphic design, and how to use this to make more intuitive choices about game art.

Those of you who are channel patrons will get a more long-form written essay on visual communication in games (covering gestalt, affordance, and semiotics) dropping on Monday 15th, and then early ad-free access to the video essay on Patreon on Wednesday 17th.

My streaming schedule is going to be all messed up next week by the house move, but hopefully there's enough there to keep you going in the leadup to Non-Denominational Midwinter Feast.

As I've been working on my book 'Game Design for Indie Devs', it's helped me establish a new workflow for the channel. This workflow for content creation works quite well for me; I can use the book drafts as a script for the videos but then chip in with more casual/informal examples whenever suitable. The drafts also become bonus content for people supporting the channel on Patreon, and you guys here get more structured and focused essays. If you liked the recent videos on subtractive design in indie genres, or repetition-with-variation, it's because of this more structured workflow.

Let me know if there are any topics you're more interested in hearing about sooner. The book will have a section on pretty much every subdiscipline of game design, and they've all gotta get written at some point!

1 day ago | [YT] | 34

Indie Game Clinic

Hi folks. This week is an extra stream week.
I'm moving house on Monday and predicting I'll be out of action for a few days, so I'm doing extra Indies Under the Knife this week to make sure I keep up with the backlog.

Tomorrow is turn-based Tuesday; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sFsG...
Light Voyagers / King's Guard / Where Noble Plans Lie / Sync Tactics

Wednesday: more itch.io browser games, games TBC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv3gA...

Thursday puzzle games youtube.com/live/3MuRle6pyDI
Games: Gravity Whipped / Skull Seeker / Beyond the Board / A Simple Expurriment

Thanks for sending in your games, folks!

2 days ago | [YT] | 8

Indie Game Clinic

This week’s Saturday Shoutout goes to Gleb. You may have heard about Gleb on the DirtWorld dev streams but he is responsible for a load of cool GameMaker tools (many of which we are using in the project right now) and has recently been working on some of the game’s more technically demanding parts.



Gleb's libraries include;
- Figgy; a live-config tool for GameMaker, which is making it a lot easier to set-up live configs for areas like difficulty, creature and treasure spawning; pretty much anything we'd want to be able to tweak on the fly.
- Lookout; a set of custom debug overlays.
- RoomLoader; the tool we use in DirtWorld for taking individual rooms - composed in the editor - and then live-loading them into the game. RL also allows us to take snapshots of the rooms and draw them as previews, something it would have been nigh-impossible to do otherwise!



If you want to give Gleb a hand, you can vote for RoomLoader over in the GameMaker awards, where its up for a Best Tool award. opr.as/GMA25-Vote

1 week ago | [YT] | 40

Indie Game Clinic

EDIT: Thanks for all the kind words below, folks. I see this posts section as a way of speaking directly to the core audience of the channel without doing a video about it, and I really appreciate your support!

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Re-posting here from the comments, as every week there's someone who wants to have a little dig about a channel being Patreon funded and/or the Discord not being open access.

Every time someone complains that I haven't made myself the unpaid mod of a massive ungated Discord server, I immediately know I've dodged a bullet by excluding them from that space. Total lack of understanding of the economics of content creation, despite happily consuming stuff which IGC's existing backers have paid to support the making of.

There's a reason why so much other game-dev content tends to be sensationalist and selling a money-making dream rather than being about craft. If you want to make even a basic living on YT simply through ad revenue you have to capture a lot of eyeballs.

Without fan-funding, the only thing it makes sense to do is target the broadest audience possible (beginners) or to have a channel which exists solely to advertise paywalled courses. I don't begrudge other creators for doing this stuff, but it's not what I want to do - and I don't think it's what most of you want me to do either!

The channel makes <£400 pcm through AdSense, and the Patreon makes around £2000. After tax, this is a little less than I earnt in my first year as a more junior university lecturer back in 2018, and less than half of what I earnt in my last full-time role as a senior designer.

I love the fan-funding model. I contribute to several Patreons, and have done for years. I'm also very glad that the 350-ish people who currently financially back the channel are allowing me to create university level design education for 20k-50k monthly viewers.

What I really dislike is when people effectively insult those backers by implying that they shouldn't get some type of reward for keeping this channel going (which is what the Discord community exists to provide).

Thanks to everyone who's been supporting the channel in whatever way you can. It's still small enough that I can read every comment, and I appreciate your replies and responses. But please don't insult the folks who make the channel possible, or imply they've been duped in some way, or that they don't deserve their own community.

Hope you all have a great week. 👋🏻

2 weeks ago (edited) | [YT] | 392

Indie Game Clinic

This Saturday I want to shout out Negative Space by Tier 87, which launched yesterday store.steampowered.com/app/3624300/Negative_Space/

I really like the combination of crunchy deck building with a lot of focus on “hand buffing”; which was one of my favourite mechanics in certain eras of Hearthstone. I really like the mix of the long term strategy re: the deck, with the match-based tactical choices of whether to play or buff. Plus lots of fun little puzzle-like boss encounter designs.

The music and art are also bangers.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 66

Indie Game Clinic

I'm trying to cutdown on the recurrent workload of thumbnails etc. so here's the new generic thumbnail for Thursday's INDIES UNDER THE KNIFE stream, tomorrow at 10 GMT. This week's games will be:
One Rotten Oath
By Your Own: Survival Inventory
Mik
Object Impermanence

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 60

Indie Game Clinic

Hello folks! I hope you've all had a great start to the week, and I hope to see some of you on my usual Tuesday GameMaker stream.

This is just a quick update to let you know you can get Chris Z's games marketing courses at a big discount this week. And if you do so using any of the affiliate links below, you'll be helping support this channel too:

🩶 The Gray Friday Bundle: www.progamemarketing.com/l/bundle/565732/gray-frid…

👁️ The Visibility & Wishlist Masterclass: www.progamemarketing.com/p/visibility-and-wishlist…

🛗 The Pitching and Funding Masterclass: www.progamemarketing.com/p/the-pitching-and-fundin…

✈️ The Inside Conference 2025: www.progamemarketing.com/p/inside-conference-2025?… and 2023: www.progamemarketing.com/p/inside-conference?coupo…

📊 The Game Marketing Ideas Database: www.progamemarketing.com/p/ideas?coupon_code=2025G…

Best of luck with your projects this week, and sound off below if you've got a build going live.

3 weeks ago (edited) | [YT] | 30

Indie Game Clinic

It's time for a Saturday Shout Out!

This weekend I wanna say thanks to GAMMA for being a super active member of the IGC community,

I've really been enjoying following Gamma & Toad's Goreticulture, a very strange and funny game about growing flowers in the remains of some sort of Quake deathmatch level.

gammagames.itch.io/goreticulture

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 44

Indie Game Clinic

It's my birthday... I'm 39 today! 🥳 Those of you familiar with UK law will know that this means I only have one year left until I'm ground up into a grey paste and fed to one member of the Royal Family.

To celebrate the beginning of my last year alive, I'm doing what any good content creator would do. Capitalizing on it with a Patreon flash sale.

For NOV 13TH ONLY only, you can get an annual subscription to my Patreon at a 40% discount. By getting a year in advance you'll be able to support the channel's continued operation as I run our Discord, schedule regular playtesting streams, stream design and dev work on my own game(s), and put out video essays on game design.

If you're not already a member, and you find yourself in a financial position where you are able to subscribe, joining will get you;

1. Early access to upcoming long-form video content, as well as first drafts of scripts, long before each video is shot. Indie Game Clinic content is meant to be open access, providing game design perspectives on YT and Twitch without needing folks to sign up to an expensive video course course. For this reason, I try to focus Patreon rewards on things which are produced as a natural part of the process; you'll mostly get behind the scenes stuff and early access [including materials from my upcoming book for people who get anything above the cheapest tier].

2. A regular place in our community playtesting streams. These currently happen every other Wednesday and feature a rotation of games being made by members of the Discord. Unlike Indies Under the Knife (which functions on a public service model where games are picked from the backlog whenever it suits the channel) the community playtests allow developers to receive feedback several times during a game's life cycle if they want to.

3. Access to our Discord, which is deliberately kept private to enable constructive collaboration and problem-solving. We're agnostic about tools and technology, pragmatic about the business side without over-emphasizing it, and we focus on design, creativity, and collaborative problem solving over inter-dev competition and the "meta". It should go without saying, but we are also strongly anti-bigot and pro-diversity, and gently anti-AI [we won't bully you for using it, we would just encourage you to listen to gamers, do what's best for your own personal development, and collaborate with humans wherever you can].

So if you want to give the Clinic (and yourself) a birthday present which will last for a whole year, go and use checkout code OLDMAN at www.patreon.com/indiegameclinic. Applies to all tiers except 1:1 mentorship.

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 212

Indie Game Clinic

This week's Saturday Shoutout goes to SMUGPIRE smugpire.itch.io/

Kiloton game was literally the first game I reviewed on the channel, back in the summer of 2024 when I was still making 30 minute reviews of one unknown indie game at a time! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWEY3...

Since then Smug has put out two additional games in the same universe, all in different genres (top down shooter, turn-based-tactics, and now an Armored Core-like).

It's similar approach to the one you've seen used by Tomas Sala (The Falconeer) and it seems like this developer's world of weaponized catgirls has its own little following.

Good luck with the rest of 2025 Smugpire, and may your evil corporation's employees forever be expendable.

1 month ago | [YT] | 34