Make Indie Games Professionally

We are an independent, self-funded initiative with the goal of spreading professional knowledge to indies all across the globe.

We believe that knowledge that has the power to change lives should be accessible.

The people behind Pro Indie Dev participates in several
initiatives to improve the condition of indie developers.

In our experience, the main problem that keeps indies from succeeding is a lack of understanding of the strategic
principles that go behind games made by their more
successful peers.

They often copy the superficial traits of these games,
but fail to finish their projects or reach a significant audience
because they don't understand the strategic context that
made those traits work in more successful games.

But we want more indies to thrive! That’s why in 2018 we called a bunch of our friends and organized the 1st Global Conference on Professional Indie Game Development:

The response to our opening event was overwhelming, so we try to get out of the trenches of professional indie development every once in a while to share our battlefield experience and tricks with indies who are now facing the same problems we all faced one day!

With the improvement of game-making tools and abundance of learning material on the internet, there's more people than ever making games.

We think that is awesome, and hope that trend doesn’t stop! We believe that games are the ultimate art form, and rejoice with the opportunity of experiencing such a breadth of interesting ideas and perspectives in our favorite medium! <3

But when indies start chasing their dream, they soon start facing harsh real life challenges such as delays, anxiety, inability to get attention to their projects, inability to consistently live off of their work, etc.

That’s where we veteran developers can help!

Pro Indie Dev happens through our free newsletter, to which you can subscribe by scrolling to the bottom of this page. In there we share insights on a variety of important topics for indies who want to make a living off their games.

As if making games were not hard enough, nowadays indies face the challenge of sorting through a lot of uninformed / contradictory advice! We help with that too, and in all our emails we have a special focus on keeping it real and highlighting the approaches and techniques used by real professionals to achieve real results.

Also through our newsletter we organize free specialized lectures and hands-on lessons. Some of our past lectures include:

MAKING INDIE GAMES AS A PROFESSIONOvercoming the main challenges to take the leap from hobbyist to

full time indie developer.

REACHING FINANCIAL SUSTAINABILITY AS AN INDIE DEVELOPERHow to structure a repeatable process to consistently finish games worth selling.

HOW TO EVALUATE THE DEMAND FOR YOUR GAME TODAYA step-by-step demonstration on how to dig the required data and estimate the revenue potential for your game.

We organize these lectures every once in a while and they are also free, but they are exclusive to subscribers of the newsletter, and are usually not advertised anywhere else. If you’re interested, please subscribe!

In those free lectures, we usually open a few spots to Pro Indie Dev’s paid advanced training, called “FGGS”. That advanced training is meant for people who are really committed to making indie games for a living, and who are really willing to do the work to start having professional results out of their games.

That training is probably too intense for most people reading this, but if you think you might be a good candidate, please subscribe to the newsletter to be notified when we open a new class!

We should probably open this section by thanking all our friends in the industry who have contributed their knowledge and experience to make our inaugural event such a huge success!
Here they are:

EDMUND MCMILLEN

Creator of Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac

ADAM SALTSMAN

Creator of Canabalt, publisher of Night in the Woods

JAMES STONE

Creator of Jump Gunners and Xenosis

RON CARMEL

Creator of World of Goo, co-founder of Indie Fund

RYAN CLARK

Creator of Crypt of the Necrodancer

TANYA X. SHORT

Co-founder of Kitfox Games and creator of Moon Hunters

CLIFF "CLIFFSKI" HARRIS

Legendary founder of Positech Games, creator of Democracy 3 and Production Line

STARLIGHT SKYES

Twitch Partner, game artist and marketer

MIKE BITHELL

Creator of Thomas Was Alone

XALAVIER NELSON JR

Narrative designer and PC Gamer columnist

LUCY BLUNDELL

Creator of One Night Stand

JAKE BIRKETT

Creator of Shadowhand

DANILO DIAS

Creator of Odallus

EDUARDO LAMHUT

Co-creator of 1M+ players Holodrive

PEDRO MACHADO

Co-creator of No Place for Bravery

NATHAN HURDE

Maker of Game Pencil Engine

TIM RUSWICK

Gamedev youtuber and founder of Game Dev Underground

GABRIEL DAL SANTO

Founder of Pixel Cows and Pro Indie Dev

On a more daily basis, the whole Pro Indie Dev initiative is
organized by Gabriel Dal Santo.

Besides co-founding Pro Indie Dev, Gabriel is a veteran
game developer, public speaker and consultant for indie
studios. He is the CEO and lead designer on b2b-focused
studio Pixel Cows, which he also co-founded, and actively
participates in several initiatives in the industry geared
towards the democratization of professional knowledge
for independent developers.

To this day, Gabriel still personally writes all the emails for
the Pro Indie Dev newsletter, and also runs all of our
workshops and lectures!

To participate, all you have to do is to register your email. You will be notified whenever there is a free event or workshop, and in the meantime, you can start learning from our more relaxed emails discussing professional game making, networking, marketing and other essential aspects of making indie games as a financially sustainable profession.

So register below to join Pro Indie Dev, and let’s start changing your results as a professional indie game developer!