Indie Game Management Boilerplate

Dashboard

Workflow

Design

Knowledge

Assets

Explore

About

Igor Black

What is this

If you are looking for a template to kickstart your indie game management document, then this boilerplate template can be for you. The template is made based on what I personally find to be a helpful process when setting up an all-in-one project management tool, knowledge base and asset storage when you develop solo or in a small team. If you find it helpful, you can

Buy me a Coffee⁠

. Or give me your feedback on

Mastodon⁠

Reddit⁠

. Example assets was found on

OpenGameArt⁠

⁠

Choose this template if

You are a solo developer, a small indie team or you work with a small amount of contractors.

You prefer to keep everything related to your project in one place.

You prefer to focus on general milestones and iterate without strict requirements or deadlines.

You want a boilerplate setup which you easily can (and would want to) customize and expand towards your own management process.

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Template structure

The template structure consists of 3 main domains: data, knowledge and management.

All of your data is stored in

Datasets⁠

, where you store all your tables. Use table views on other pages, this way you can easily reference the data you want from a single source of truth, customize or delete other pages without losing your data. Other pages in

Assets⁠

are used to view and control your game assets.

Most of your game knowledge (world building, character descriptions, level design etc.) should be in

Knowledge⁠

. Customize it depending on a type of the game you’re making or transform it into something more wiki-like if you prefer. You also have

Design⁠

to write a GDD, but I suggest keeping it brief.

For management purposes you have

Dashboard⁠

, where you can display most relevant information about your project status, and

Workflow⁠

, where you can manage your milestones and assign tasks.

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Workflow suggestions

Obviously, you are free to design and work with this document in whichever way you would like. That being said, this template is designed around some processess I find most helpful, assuming you are a solo dev working with some contractors or a small team of up to 10 people.

Out of the box, your project is divided into several

stages⁠

, from

@preproduction⁠

@postrelease⁠

. In my experience, strict deadlines on every single task are almost impossible to plan and follow on a project which involves a fair deal of experimentation and creativity, so unless you know exactly what you’re doing and can follow all your deadlines - it does more harm than good. That is why in this template only

stages⁠

have optional deadlines, to roughly outline majors steps in you gamedev lifecycle.

To achieve that, you break down each stage into several major

milestones⁠

which are required to complete that stage. You can create and assign individual

tasks⁠

to your

milestones⁠

, and a milestone is considered done when all of the tasks under it are completed. Every task should be assigned a weight, which can be crucial, desirable or optional.

Crucial task is a task, without which you cannot complete a stage.

Desirable task is a task which would really benefit your game, but is not absolutely required.

Optional task is a task which you would like to finish if you can, but wouldn’t be that detrimental to not finish if you have no time.

That system allows to better prioritize your tasks and to better follow deadlines by getting rid of something your game can be finished without if you don’t have enough time or resources.

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What is missing

There are several things which you would probably want to add to this document, but I omitted on purpose.

As you can see, there is no Marketing page, because marketing process can change drastically depending on if you’re planning to work with a publisher or publish yourself, on your target platforms, budget etc. I don’t see a useful generalistic approach that would work for most people, so I decided to leave it out.

Same goes for integrations. You would probably want to add some kind of quick sketching / brainstorming tool, like Mira boards, integrate your email, git repository or whatever else you’re using. But it would be impossible for me to assume your preferred tool set, so you won’t find any integrations in this document by default.

What is this

Choose this template if

Template structure

Workflow suggestions

What is missing

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.