A couple weeks ago, I traveled to San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference (GDC) with my good friend, Michael, and attended many presentations from both large and small development studios. We’d been thinking about starting our own small game development team as a side project for quite some time now, and going to GDC only made us want to do this even more. While at GDC we saw so many different companies and even more varieties of games that it got us thinking: how can we possibly make games that can compete with these other studios?

The reason it seems so difficult to make competitive games is that almost all of the good game ideas have been taken already and most of these games are being developed by huge teams of people comprised of some of the most talented software developers around. So how do we, a small team of programmers, make games that people will want to play more than these really nice AAA titles out there? Well, while attending GDC, we also saw numerous examples of small teams of people just like us making some really successful games. How did they accomplish this? It starts with a simple game idea, a lot of hard work, and also quite a bit of luck.