The first thing I want to say about IndieGoodbye is a huge thank you! The indie game dev community is amazing. Thanks for the retweets, posts, games, help and motivation. It was great! :) Even though the world did not end, I assume everybody had a great time coding and creating.

Let me show you some numbers I got and the idea behind this “apocalypse game jam”.

Some numbers

IndieGoodbye took place from Dec 4th until Dec 22nd. During the time, 13 (thirteen!) games were finished and published. Well done, people!

The site received 19 +1’s, 156 tweets and 87 likes. More stats:

 Visits: 3,168

 Unique Visitors: 2,365

 Pageviews: 3,589

 Avg. Visit Duration: 00:00:56

The making of

It was an ordinary day of December. I was working on a game during my free time, hoping to release it soon. I wrote a TODO list and noticed too many items (damn feature creep!). Doing some math to estimate the date I would have the game finished, something got my attention: what if the world is really about to end on December the 21st?

My thoughts: “If the world is about to end, I must finish and release that game! It can be my last one!”. As soon as I thought about that, I asked myself: “Am I alone?”. I bet not! So I decided to create the site to help me finish the game and, as a consequence, help everybody else.

During the next days, I used my (almost nonexistent) free time to put the site together. After a few hours of work, it was done, then I brought the domain and the site went online. December the 5th I spread the world:

 

It was really nice to see all those game developers thinking about ideas, making plans to work on that almost finished game. Special thanks to Christer Kaitila (@McFunkypants)  and Michael J Williams (@MichaelJW, editor of Gamedevtuts+) for helping me spread and reach lots of gamedevs.

Conclusion

IndieGoodbye was an amazing experience. It was a lot more than just finishing a game, I got in touch with several developers. In the end, the game was just a small detail.

AS3 Game Gears Blog. URL.