Stop Getting Ghosted: How to Build Your Indie Game Dev Squad

Building an indie game team sounds simple until you actually try to find reliable people. You post on a forum, get flooded by flaky hobbyists or the classic "Idea Guy," and eventually, your project fizzles out.

If you are struggling to find the right squad to bring your indie game to life, our latest episode of Indie Innovators breaks down the exact strategies you need to find, attract, and keep top-tier indie talent.

Here is a breakdown of the biggest team-building problems and how to solve them:

🛑 Problem: Looking in the Wrong Places Traditional job boards like Indeed or generic Reddit threads are often dead ends or filled with people who will abandon the project when the work gets hard.

✅ The Solution: You have to go where the professionals actually look for work and hang out. Join curated Discord communities (like specific Unreal, Unity, or Godot servers), attend local game dev meetups, and browse platforms like ArtStation and GitHub. Don't just drop a link and run—engage with the community, show off your messy prototypes with confidence, and build genuine relationships.

🛑 Problem: Asking for "An Artist" or "A Programmer" Generalizing your needs leads to mismatched expectations. You might bring on a highly experienced AAA veteran, only to realize their deep specialization in turn-based combat doesn't fit the cozy simulation game you are trying to build.

✅ The Solution: Hire based on your game's core pillars and your current development phase. If you are in the prototype stage, you don't need a high-end texture artist; you just need someone who can slap a character on a basic rig and get it moving. You should also define whether a role is a "continuous" need (like coders and project managers, who make great long-term equity partners) or a "burst" need (like audio designers and UI artists, who are better hired as short-term contractors).

🛑 Problem: Getting Ghosted by Mentors When junior devs ask for help in professional servers, they often drop a screenshot of a few broken nodes and say, "Help me fix this". Mentors ghost these posts because there is zero context and the person is just asking for a quick fix.

✅ The Solution: Ask questions with genuine curiosity. Instead of demanding the answer, explain the context of what you are trying to achieve and ask, "How do I go about diagnosing this problem?". Professionals are much more willing to spend their time helping someone who actually wants to learn the process.

🎧 Listen / Watch the Full Masterclass:

▶️ Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQV6E96b-jg

🟢 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0KwxWJTxEgtkcOUW35lVhy?si=Gl1TwXGfQnaCJ1ZILejyUQ

💬 Join the Conversation!

Have you ever struggled to find the right teammates, or dealt with a flaky collaborator? Hop into our Discord right now to talk about your similar experiences, share your own prototype plans, ask questions, and show off your progress!

🔄 Know a fellow developer who is currently struggling to recruit a team, dealing with ghosting, or trying to figure out who to hire next? Share this article with them to help them find the right squad!