Facebook Indie Games

1. Bring designers and developers together early. Once designers have a feature idea, developers immediately start working on how it could be implemented. This dialog can ensure that slight changes to the design that would make it much easier to develop are discovered and agreed at the start.
2. Use free and off the shelf components. Modern development is about writing code that glues general purpose components together, and presents an interface to your user. Use them! Be willing to sacrifice total control over the design in exchange for faster development times.
3. Sleep. Yes you'll work long hours to get the game out, but you need your sleep too. It's especially important to take a break between code completing the game and launching it to the public -- because once you launch you'll be back to late nights again.

At the start, I was just like you. Mafia of 50, Godfather points of 10, $35,315 in cash, not knowing what to do... it was bloody frustrating! Eventually, I got fed up and decided to start learning exactly what it took to become one of these epic Godfathers. I logged on, started researching and did a lot of in-depth spying. It turns out that these guys aren’t just masters of the game – they are geniuses.

But they are careful geniuses, guarding their secrets like Fort Knox. It took weeks of research. I would find them on forums, contact them on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. I would look over shoulders on the train and email them secretly from second and third email addresses. To put it simply, I dug everywhere I could find dirt.