Try and avoid proximity to hot button issues.
This part I’ll have to disagree with. Indie games are great for the creative control in the developers hands. They have much greater freedom of expression than a typical publisher would let them. So, to me it’s stupid people wouldn’t expect this. This reminds me of a story I’d heard, where a student was expelled for modelling their school in their favorite shooter, because it was seen as a terrorist plot. I can’t find the exact story again, for some reason.