How can I be an indie game designer?

[Earth001]

I have always wanted to make games and I am interested in indie game design. I was wondering what are some ways that I could start my own indie game company of make my own indie games?

 

[turkey3_scratch]

First I would recommend a year of both saving up money and learning programming. The first question to ask is what types of games you'd like to design, and how much they will cost to make, and how much programming experience they will require. You could start off with simple stuff like 2D games or even develop 2D Indie games. 2D games are much simpler to program due to there only being two dimensions. You need to consider a team of art designers, and programmers possible, maybe any friends you have who would accept cheap pay or do it for fun.

What platforms would you design for? If you want PC games you'll have to look into learning C# or C++ for programming. Since they can be quite complex especially for new programmers, you could start learning web design for about a week on http://codecademy.org and get the hang of programming, especially in something like Javascript and PHP. But one cannot simply design a game quickly, you need to gradually build up from easy to harder games.

If you really have never programmed a thing in life, play around with http://scratch.mit.edu/create for a day or two.