Had tough days lately, with the release of Magic Stones and … cats. Is really hard to mantain concentration while 4-5 cats roam freely through the house, jumping, screaming, crashing things.
My girlfriend just don’t understand how is hard to mantain concentration and work in such conditions. She wants to help the cats because they’re ill, weak, outside is cold, etc. But I suppose we need money to live (and to feed the cats).
How I am supposed to get money without working? this sucks, when you work at home people think that you’re always no holidays doing nothing.
Is a really common thing, other developers told me that they have same problem, maybe not with cat but with kids or simply their wife.
Instead of being grateful that we can stay together, girlfriends and wives usually break our balls. Is so hard to find someone who understand you completely! not that in this particular case is so difficult…hope things will get better.

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…!