Some days are really strange. Today I came back home (to my parents home) after 2 weeks in my new house (about 2h of driving). I was just arrived, eating some delicious “Lasagne” made by my mother, when my brother came home in a hurry because he had to play a match of 5-a-side soccer (that small version of soccer known in Italy as “calcetto”).
I decided to go playing, so I could see again some old-friends. It was a strange sensation. Just 4 years ago, I was seeing them all weekends when we were going out to have fun (and maybe drink too much!).
Now I saw them after 2-3 months, a long time. Still I felt happy and we did the usual jokes, even if I noticed that the time has passed. One of them was talking about the joy of having a son… I think he is ready for that himself 😉
Then played the match as Goalkeeper (I usually play that role), and when I came back home and checked the mail – surpirse- sold a copy of my game “The Goalkeeper”!!!
Now that’s what I call a coincidence…!

Many newbies ask this question: my answer is “as soon as you can”.
Seriously, there’s absolutely no reason to delay. If you’re still living with your parents, that’s the best situation ever.
Later if you go living on your own, you’ll realize how easy is to waste whole morning or afternoons for “trivial tasks” like going to town, cleaning the house, etc.
So if you aren’t engaged, live with your parents, I’d say it’s the ideal situation to start your indie business!

I talked with another dev and he was very pissed by yet another affiliate using the infamous “steal google queries” tecnique 🙂
What is that? easy, you search for the best keywords for a game and make a webpage with the game affiliated, using all the best SEO systems.
So for example for a search like “YOURGAMENAME DOWNLOAD” instead of your site you would see www.competitorsite.com selling your game with affiliation.
We both agreed (me and my friend) that this system isn’t very polite and is more like to stealing money 🙂
An affiliate should really bring MORE visitors to your site, not stealing the visitors FROM your website to get affiliation credit…! LOL

A thing not many indie devs notice is that some (not going to make names) tend to “inflate” their figures a bit 🙂
Like saying they got 5.000 daily visitors, 50 sales/day and so on. I remember getting a banner on a site, claiming they had 10.000 daily visitors, for one month. Well I had less than 12 referral from that site. Quite strange since the banner was right in middle of the HOMEPAGE…!
About the “false sales stats” that can be quickly checked. When I saw Atlantis and Professor Fizzwizzle sales report, I was a bit dubious, so I affiliated them.
After one month I can be sure that they were telling the truth: I managed to sell several copies of both games even from my site which is clearly targeting a different audience…!

The summer has ended and I’ve seen with disappointment that even this year many woods were burned by men (not accidentally). This really sucks. The world is lucky that the might Ent exist only in my upcoming Magic Stones game! 🙂
It’s one of my favourite avatar in the game because of his special attack, the Stomp which “hit all 1st line targets at once for 3-7 damage”.