The most underestimated aspect of having a indie business is the role of your partner, the significant other. At least for those working at home, is essential to share same goals and to respect the other side work.

But you could ask, what are those “problems” ? Here are some examples:

• doubts about the fact you can make it: this is one of the first obstacles. Unless you’re living in a very poor state, for example where $100/month is already a good income (in this case you should really be able to make it!), the financial problems will be the first thing to face. Rarely your first few games will give you interesting revenues, so there’s a big difference from working with someone that constantly encourages you, or with someone that ask “when you’ll get a real job?” 😉
• problem for the fact that you’re working at home: as you might know, everything that’s “new” or “different” is a sure cause of troubles in our modern boring social life. So, for example, if your partner works all day in office, he/she could expect you to have done certain housework stuff, like cleaning or cooking. Why? simply, because you were at home. Like that meant that you were at home doing nothing! but surely they don’t understand, at least in most cases and for sure when starting and you don’t even earn enough money.
• problem of concentration: as I already posted before… people think that programming is just like a normal manual activity, like washing dishes: you start, you can take a break whenever you want and then resume working as nothing happened. Every programmer knows that this isn’t absolutely true! is good to take breaks from long working session, but it’s YOU who decide. You’re about to understand that very difficult pathfinding algorithm and -zack – “dear can you take the dog out please” or “come downstair, there’s a fun thing on TV” and so on. The best advice would be, if you can, get an office SEPARATED from your house. Your productivity would double for sure.
• where to go living: seems a paradox but the fact that you can basically go living everywhere there’s a internet connection, you could start thinking maybe to go living elsewhere. This is surely and advantage of this kind of job, BUT – be careful – always try to rent first. Buying a house just 100-200km from your hometown, only to realize after a few months that you miss your people, friends, places and so on is really a bad thing. On the other side you could relocate in a completely different country/continent and live happily like our friend svero of Twilight Games 😉

But in ALL the points above, your partner plays an important role. Sometime you have to take difficult decisions, and better be clear from start what your work means and what are the rules – or you could be sorry later and have to take hard decisions (like leave him/her because he/she doesn’t understand you). You can say that misunderstanding happens in every relationship, sure, but as I said, indie business is such a particular kind of work that makes such things happens more frequently than you could think.