Welcome to the first community writing challenge! Here's how it's going to work for the month of June. Each day or so I'm going to post a new community challenge topic. All you need to do is provide a response to it according to the supplied rules. The winning response according to the MOST upvotes at the end of the month will receive a month of GDNet+.

We are looking to collectively as a community build a list to as many valuable resources on the posted challenge as possible.

For everyone browsing this, remember to upvote your favorites!

Some rules for every challenge:

1. You do NOT need to supply a complete answer or topic reference, but it may help garner more upvotes

2. All descriptions must be written by you with your own justifications for inclusion of the resource

CHALLENGE #1: Indie Inspiration : What inspires you as an Indie developer?

Description: We have all seen postmortems of Indie games at some point. These are some of the ground-pounding folks who fly by the seat of their pants and perform every aspect of game development from programming to art to marketing. Help us salute these lone wolfs and those who look to follow their path by creating an AWESOME list of inspiring Indie postmortems, stories, and documentaries. Try to separate movies from articles in your response. Youtube is okay!

Rules:

1. Post one or more links to great resources with the following: title, url, author, and a brief description of what this resource is and why it is inspirational.
2. The reasoning behind why the link is inspirational or should be included for Indies should be written in your own words!
3. Anything you post is fair game to be included in an article without attribution - we are just looking to create awesome resource pages here of the best stuff
4. We like Gamedev.net links first (but anything is okay really)! These articles are often contributed by our own community members.. which makes them extra awesome. ;)
5. Any site online is fair game as long as you link to the final article destination (ie. don't link to any other resource mega list pages)
6. You may update your original responses as many times as you like!

Here is an example format for just one link:

Dominoze PC Post-mortem: Nine Years, One Programmer

http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/creative/game-design/dominoze-pc-post-mortem-nine-years-one-programmer-r2966

Author: Christopher Haag

With a 9 year development period, Chris shows the evolution of ideas that went into Dominoze. With no deadline or apparent profit-motive you can read about the point in which Chris started to kick things into high gear and worked to push out a finished and polished game.

Steve Pavlina (creator of Dexterity Software) had a whole bunch of articles a decade ago. Sadly most of them went offline, but it appears several of them were reprinted in various locations on the InterTubes. He began as a developer of shareware titles, much like today's app store games. He went on to consulting and learning what other people were doing to both fail and succeed. Then he went on to write about the lessons he learned.

Amateurs vs professionals
http://web.archive.org/web/20061015231031/http://www.dexterity.com/articles/shareware-amateurs-vs-shareware-professionals.htm
Author: Steve Pavlina.

This article shows some of the differences between amateurs who fail and professionals who make a profit. For example, many amateurs go through the cycle of idea, create, release, fail, and don't understand what they are doing wrong. This article walks through some of the steps that profitable independent developers follow from concept to profit.

If No Independent Developers Are 100 Times Smarter Than You, Then Why Do Some Get 100 Times the Results?
http://web.archive.org/web/20061022041000/http://www.dexterity.com/articles/seven-keys.htm

Author: Steve Pavlina.

This article jumps in to some of the issues that prevent people from reaching their full potential. It touches on the importance of actually setting written goals, actually selling your software, and actually measuring results.

Going Full-Time

http://web.archive.org/web/20061015230506/http://www.dexterity.com/articles/going-full-time.htm

Author: Steve Pavlina.

Steve points out that once you "go indie", once you decide to transition from a hobby to a business, you need to change your perspective. You are no longer a programmer. You are now a business owner.

There are many more articles on his old site, most are gems.

Since they are now placed in the public domain, it may be worthwhile to reprint them as GD.net articles.