Hey guys, I'm writing a research paper on Indie game development for school. Any tips/things I should include about game creation would be greatly appreciated.

That's... pretty broad :-)

What's the actual topic of your paper? Theme? Goals?

Many large books can and have been written about game development, not to mention articles, blog posts, etc. etc. There's more knowledge out there than you can reasonably distill into a single paper unless you have some guiding focus on what you're discussing.