This is a backup of a post made MANY years ago over at Indie Gamer Forum at request of others I have put it here for others to read.
If you have any questions related to this I dont really check that forum so head on over to my open source projects discord and ping me there Discord, with that out of the way everything else here is a lift from the forum post, enjoy.
I was looking through but could not find much listed on this topic so wanted to condense some lessons learnt over the years and some good (and free) tools that can be used for an individual or a team to get the best start on a project and to help keep everything moving along smoothly.
So you have come up with a great indie game idea and you have done more than the 99% and have decided to go from the "thinking" phase to the "doing" phase, now rather than rushing in to some im