Or what mistakes have you made or have you heard that other developers have made?
Posting abstract questions in forums too often.
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Drinking milk without checking out expiration date.
Very common mistake.
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Underestimating work. Start small, or enjoy the long haul. Remember, no burning out allowed.
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Trying to make Skyrim 2: Electric Boogaloo when you have all the ideas and its rev share and it’ll feature the entire Mario cast fighting Master Chief alongside Doom Guy but with better crafting and multiplayer and next gen graphics and a map the size of the galaxy^2.
Its their first game but don’t worry they have it all written down, They just need 1 programmer, 5 sound designers, 13 reddit questions on legality, 54.3 help wanted posts on the forum, and half a skittle.
Come on guys, it’s obvious to make history with them.
I will say the biggest mistake people can make is blindly taking advice from forums. Think things over and come to your own conclusions.
And also not spending time with loved ones, or getting out more.
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I respectfully disagree. Believing that the expiration date represents the state of your food is a far more common mistake.
More seriously, underestimating work would be the big one.
An over-reliance on other peoples’ solutions would be another. Whether it’s a tutorial or a package from the Asset Store, using other peoples’ stuff because it’s easy / cheap now isn’t necessarily the best way forward for your project as a whole. You need to understand what’s going on in your project, because you can not manage / plan / solve problems in a thing you do not actually understand.
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It’s just I saw this blog post and thought it would be interesting to see how the amazing Unity community would answer the same question…
Common mistakes by indie game developers – Cliffski’s Blog (positech.co.uk)
You should have opened with that. 
I generally agree with it. In particular the part about marketing budget is great. If you don’t have a budget, find a way to get a budget. Organic growth is slow, and on top of being good you also have to get lucky if you go that route.
Lack of discipline and the allowance to stop working on a project, starting on a completely new one. Ending up with a library of many unfinished projects, you can lie to yourself about being something you’ll come back to in the future.
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Ha. I read that later in the day and agreed with all of it. I didn’t make the connection to this thread though. I stand by my overestimation common mistake, because cliffski’s list seems to be a bunch of “do or do nots”, where with estimation, there’s plenty of “trying” going on.
I don’t agree with one part. I don’t think it’s a good idea for indies to start showing their work from day one, at all. Unless you believe first impressions are worth nothing.
Even the author doesn’t do that, he waits until its visually acceptable first.
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Fair enough. Truthfully, I haven’t published anything about my game yet, so yeah, maybe it was just me endorsing bad advice to get a leg up.
- Wanting to make their favourite game as their first project, i.e MMORPG, Multiplayer FPS.
- Jumping ship to another engine/framework as soon as new shinies are revealed
- Not finishing projects and continuously starting new ones
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Scope Creep.
Im all for exploratory development but there absolutely must come a time in the game project when you lock down (in a document) what the end result will be and then you work towards that. The longer you put off that feature-lock the much more work you have to do.
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Despising social networks.
How is that ever a bad thing? 
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No exposure 
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You can both despise it and use it at the same time. 
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Anything I do is a mistake, do as i say, not as i do, unless you are ready for the long haul. Sometimes there is no sugar coating the road not taken. A lot of people search their lost keys under the street lamp, because they can see there and not outside, in the dark of the night, even though they didn’t lost it near the street lamp. The street lamp is comfort, sometimes you have to move away from it and accept to blindly go in the dark.
Edit:
Being creative, seriously don’t be too creative, it’s uncertainty, do what’s proven and things will flow smoothly. Remix is where sanity is, if you remix enough different things, it will look creative enough to satisfy both the ego and the sanity. If you try to make a point, or explore something new, you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot and take the risk of never successfully landing something.
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