The following is advice to things I’ve come across over the years as well as advice I’ve had others give me that proved useful.
Finishing a Game
A really great article that contains wonderful advice on actually finishing your game. This is the hardest part of game development and is something everyone can learn about.
Engine Choice
Avoid the “I’m too good for this engine” trap. This happens to engines such as GameMaker that get an unjust reputation for being associated with bad games despite being used to create very popular games like Hotline Miami, Nuclear Throne, Risk of Rain, Undertale, and Spelunky.
A Programmer’s Guide To Creating Art For Your Game
One man game development studios are becoming more and more common these days and plenty of them are having success. That said, what do you do when that one man doesn’t happen to be an artist? This post looks at some of the options the Indie game developer has for creating or acquiring art for their game. Link to Article
The Total Beginner’s Guide to Better 2D Game Art
This article will introduce you to basic art concepts to give you a head start in making your own 2D game art. This is not a Tutorial! This article is for those with some vague familiarity with 2D art for games, primarily people who are programming games but would like to create quality assets, or those just getting started with creating art for games. By 2D assets, I’m referring to 2-dimensional images used for games - anything from character sprites to large backdrops. This article focuses on giving a brief introduction to good old-fashioned art skills and the ways they can make your game better. It’s meant to give you a brief introduction to some principles and ideas so you don’t have to waste your time discovering them the hard way or develop any bad habits you will then have to break. Link to Article
PixelArtus’s List of Pixel Art Tutorials
Write Games, Not Engines
This is a mirroring of the wonderful blog post “Write Games, Not Engines” originally posted on 2007-08-30 here. This post has been instrumental in the indie game dev community, but unfortunately the website has gone down. I am mirroring it here in the hope that it will continue to be useful to a new generation of coders. This mirror was taken on 2013-11-07. I have made minor changes to the HTML and corrected a few typos/semantic-glitches, but otherwise the mirror is direct. Link to Article