This is in response to someone on Facebook asking the question in the title, but the offer I give here is extended to anyone reading this.
I have a bachelors in computer science and was recently given credit for contributing a bit to a mod for age of empires one of the leading real-time strategy games. Let me tell you what I think. If you can't understand it and you really really want to learn how to develop games just send me a message and friend request I'll try to guide you through things and help you know how to get started. It's helpful for me to talk to beginner and aspiring programmers because it get helps me get back into programming.
For low budget indie development combine three things: 1)Something people need or want to see to make sure you have hit a new unique niche E.g. Build a game with realistic sci Fi setting and do research if necessary but watching Sfia on YouTube for example 2) Clever marketing by featuring your game to the right people and all kinds of different relevant social media outlets. Do this while making sure to express exactly what they might expect your game to offer to them at every stage of development including early office stages alpha stage the beta stage and pre-release. Build a community that might be interested in your game while you're developing it and be open to feedback instead of having to market as much. Create several social media pages where people can participate in the development process. You could also do tricky things offering to create advertisements for influencers who talked about sci-fi in this case. What you would do is offer to create an advertisement for them which might include early graphics from your game. You make sure to include some of their logos characters or other symbolism which would connect them to the game's content. You make sure that people viewing the advertisement can read any description or a comment somewhere that the game content viewed in such an advertisement is not representative of what they might see in the final game but just something to show appreciation for your advertising partner and how you support what they're doing as it is in line with the vision for your game.. the general vision to mention to mention would be just high quality sci-fi in this case. 3) An agile development approach where you release a very early version of the game with one simple level for example but with all the attractive concepts built in and included for people to enjoy and try out. Agile development means that you develop a basic minimum working version of the software program very early on and keep adding to it rather than waiting
