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Return of the Independent Game Developer?
chromatic writes "Several of the trends that make open source development possible are affecting other programming worlds. I've written an article about independent game development. Perhaps the gaming industry is ready for the craftsman-team approach."
I'm gonna plug the Independent Game Developer's Association
I've been trying to get people to work on an open source game for several months now.
Nobody wants to do the bitch work... all the hardest stuff to get started. They just wanna join in and help after it gets goin.
I'm no coding wizard, i can do enough to get by... I write the working shit code and the people too lazy to help at first fix it. Maybe it works better than i thought.
In my day we used to program with just zeros we didn't even have ones
I'm not a big gamer, but in the Mac world some of the best known, and highly regarded game developers are small. One example is Pangea Software whose games are shipped on all iMacs. It's a one man outfit (although he hires out graphics and music).
We're a group of four developers working in SDL+Opengl1.4 + DirectX + QT ... trying to produce an industrial-strength multi-platform FPS game, and there are a few obstacles along the way that seperates us from the bigger companies:
(1) Artists. We can only go so far with our limited time and budgets with blender, (to a limited extent, with demo versions of truspace, 3dsmax..)
(2) Programming man-hours. I spent a month building a truspace object importer, that also optimises the polygons and faces. We tried Polytrans, but we still have to use our little (will be GPL) prog for optimisation and correction purposes. We now need importing filters for several other file types but dont have the time to program it.
(3) SDKs. Playstation, gamecube, Xbox development kits are out-of-reach for us, unless we've already sold a couple of games. These kits are priced for companies that can pay.
(4) Investment. We'll need to feed ourselves for a few months while we develop. This hasnt been possible and the development work has taken a back-seat to our jobs/studies. I'm sure many cottage-industry developers can relate to this, despite the open possibilities and chances in the market for ideas.
I'm sure people can come up with more problems but we've discovered these to be the biggest ones ensuring the market belongs to the relatively few larger companies. Theres sure is skill out there, and so are ideas. I can just hope the opensource spirit enters the game-developer circles, and sourceforge gets packed with high-quality competing games that has revolutionised servers and operating systems.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
The open source model would apply, with people taking already existing programs and modifying them, to make the world richer and richer. The world (the construct?) would be an enormous continous space, with parts being fantasy, parts futuristic sci-fi cities, and other parts being similar to the real world.
Once a "critical mass" of programs had been achieved, it would become possible for people to create their own games in this virtual world. I love playing Supreme Snowboarding, it's a bit old now, and pretty simple, but I love the feeling of speed you get as you board down the course. Perhaps that world could be a virtual ski resort - some people could play "Sim Ski Resort", I could play snowboarding, and 007-wannabes could use it as a virtual film set. We'd all play together in this huge virtual world, adapting it to create new games and scenarios as we saw fit.
Of course, there are lots of practical design problems here. How to make a programming language that is simple enough to be understood by people without lots of prior programming experience. How to build a world that doesn't get killed by latency. Can you even simulate the natural world using only mathematics etc? I think so - look at some of the GIMP filters for instance.
It's just a pipe dream of course. I for one don't plan on attempting it anytime soon. I think WorldForge are trying something similar though.
Essentially what happens is a game company lanches with a hot idea, a sexy game everyone has to have and a console maker feels they have to have, too. All is right with the world and there's money in the coffers. Then after a few games, or extentions of the first successful title, it's a scramble. Take anything, a dead horse which can spare a little more hide for whipping, and dress it up. Reviews say it stinks, nothing like their glory days, etc. The only company which seems to be eluding this downfall is EA, but in my book they're still rehashing old titles every year, 2002 football, 2003 football, etc.
It's not really unlike what happens with rock bands. The great songs they've played in clubs and garages for years are finely honed, they cut an album, it's hot, they're stars. Then the sophomore jinx kicks in and they release a mediocre second album and disappear.
What boggles my mind is the wealth of original ideas explored back in the day on C64, Apple][ and Atari 65xx processors. Almost all were designed by some guy in his basement, submitted to the emerging game companies, and sold 10,000-30,000 copies. You rarely hear their names anymore, but that's like the band analogy, they had one great idea. Imagine mining those things, finding the owners to get that stamp of approval (to keep the lawyers out of it later) and do a new release. I know a lot of those games still kick ass in emulators. Imagine what a Gavin Camp could do with them, with OpenGL, etc.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Go see LiveForSpeed and see for yourself! More realistic simulation than almost anything out there, free while in beta test, netplay.. Worth a try, really.
have you been defaced today?
Doom flourished with third-party maps. Modifications for Quake and Half-life took on lives of their own, leading to commercial releases.
This also has surpassed the programmers expectations. It also can lead to an interesting point that sometimes the developers do not want to spend so much time supporting/developing for the game. Sure the fans help, and it is the fans that make their material free to use. There are plenty of talented CGI people and programmers, they just don't want to devote their entire life for peanuts and a divorce.
I personally always look at the "other" games. The ones made by a common Jane/Joe. It is kinda of like going to the old theater on campus and seeing what the no-name director/artist can do. Sure graphics is great, but so is the game play. For instance look at Neverwinter Nights. The capabilities are amazing, not to try to sell it, but you can pretty much add anything you want to your modules, sound, graphics, tile sets, scripts, and even more. Granted to really cruddy part is the the tool-set is for Windows only. Just think of is a a fact that this game was in development for 3-4 years before Linux started entering the scene. Any how the main point is that most of the games that live so longer are due to the fans. They are the ones creating the materials and keeping it going. The businesspeople have already made their money so they could careless about the continuing life-unless they see a sequel out of it.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
One of the regular columns of Game Developers Magazine, is a feature called: "Game Postmorten". In this column, different game companies talked about their experiences writing some of their games.
You'll notice that more and more games are resembling big hollywood productions, with multi-year engaments, and dozens of contributors. This has come about because users expect photo-realistic graphics, and true-to-real physics engines. A small group of developers have little chance of having this resources at hand.
For an example, check the Postmorten for Dungeon Siege Here.
John
The drops of water don't know themselves to be a river; and yet the river flows.
Publishers currently handle the printing of the manuals, the stuffing of retail boxes, distribution, advertising, and money. According to the article on Garage Games, the Independents would still be outsourcing printing and stuffing. They gloss over the problem of distribution, but imply that the independent would be well served by their services. Advertising they claim is a pittiance, though that could be simply because it is executed so badly by the major distributers. And finally MONEY... The article implies that every independent can become an Ambrosia if they just aim at an underrepresented market, but this, quite frankly, is unrealistic. Despite what the article says, you cannot hire real artists, sound personnel, video editors, coders, and testers for six months for 5,000 dollars. That budget should be more like 200,000... and that would be a lean and mean 4 person crew. If you can convince everyone to work pro-bono and can find a spare pair of rooms in someone's house, that will offset most of the costs but will put the talent into an even worse position than they started out in.
The dream of relaiming IP from the publisher, as well as creative control, is an alluring one. But the fact is the publisher serves several vital roles in this industry, most of which are underappreciated by veterans who have had several great ideas and a lot of bad projects canned by the major houses. What climate has changed? What power shifted to the independents? Doesn't the lowered entry barriers into game development, as mentioned in the article, make publishers a relatively rarer and therefore more powerful entity?
-C
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
As I look across the video game market today, on the PC and on the various big three consoles I've noticed a lack of games that absolutely fundamentally suck in just about every way imaginable. Its like game developers have suddenly "forgotten" how to create jerky blocky video game characters using 2-bit graphics. I mean is it impossible with all the power in these boxes to create something on par with Pong? I guess you can call this the pre-madonna syndrome.
e owulfed"
Fortunately the Open Source community rides to the rescue once again to drive back the night. If there's one thing the OS community is known for its bad interfaces and horrible graphics. I have no doubt that right now a crack team of 3l33t h4x0rz are working on the very first 16-bit version of Tomb Raider, Daikaitana and Halo. Once they get all the bugs out and do some serious regression testing those games should be down to 8-bit and by the time they're proud enough of their work to offer it as a come one come all beta those games should be purring along at 4-bit goodness.
They'll probably call their gaming platform the "Emulator-Within-An-Emulator-Within-An-Emulator-B
or EWAEWAEB for short. EWAEWAEB will revolutionize the video gaming world. Founding and core EWAEWAEB developers will be asked to go on the G4 Video Game Channel on Cable TV for endless interviews on how they pulled the rug from under the established gaming powers and saved the day for all of us.
Its truly good to know that there are still some people dedicated to REAL gaming in the world and not just sell outs who have a perverted blood lust for the blasphemous "realism" in today's games.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Years ago, when gfx developers ruled the demoscene, content was not that important. Today, it's the other way around: developers can program whatever they want, if you don't have awesome 3D models, textures and sound, it will not draw the attention expected.
:). No, what's needed is a big pile of content: 3D models/textures, backgrounds, fonts, sounds, musicscores etc. etc.
The same goes for games. A 3D engine/2D tile engine is one thing, but what will you show with that engine? The programmer art cooked up by the developer? I hope not
So I don't see the 'independent game developer' as a valuable jobdescription. What's needed for development of a good game is a complete team, with of course one or 2 developers but above all: a couple of contentproducers with excellent skills.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Since I was very young I have been using a Macintosh and when I first started to learn game development, it was on a Macintosh platform. I recently picked up programming under Win32 since I have more access to machines running Windows. When I was going to school at night, I meet a kid who wanted to get into game programming. Our biggest problem was we could not come up with a game idea that was good, and didn't already exist. (Apparently we are not the creative bunch) Then it hit me. Alot of people have written very successful games for the Macintosh and released them as shareware. I would email the person who wrote the game and ask if they would like to port their game over to Windows to expand the user base. Alot of people took me up on the offer, My friend and I would write these games after work and then the author would sell them on their site and we get a check every once and a while for a couple of bucks, which would usually be exchanged for Beer at the bar right next to the school. Basically, I get to enjoy my hobby, and make a few bucks at the same time.
Your idea may fly eventually, but right now Moore's Law hasn't caught up with it. Workable 3D game engines have a very tightly honed feature set. They work because of a massive, carefully chosen set of compromises.
This is how it will turn out. Assume everybody will come and throw a stone soup party on the engine. A few months later you're already getting 0.25fps, and everyone is pointing fingers. You have to pick and choose, or give up. Well, picking and choosing is what everyone is already doing, and moreover they set out from the start to do it, so...
With a very, very well managed project - I almost think of a couple people working full-time on managing it, you can go farther than a few months, and maybe do some interesting things, but at the end of the day, you won't get to the destination you're imagining for another few years at least.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
>> Nobody wants to do the bitch work... all the hardest stuff to get started. They just wanna join in and help after it gets goin. ... ] ...the point is that until you have something that builds and mostly works, there's no point in shopping it around for opensource help...
;-)
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> Ahhh, young grasshopper, it sounds like you don't want to do the 'bitch' work either.
> [
>
And therein lies a key problem. (Comments not directed at the original author.) Xdroop, you nailed it on the head. You see so many people who want to be an Instant Producer(tm) w/ no experience or budget. Usually goes something like, "I have this GREAT game idea, all I need is volunteers - a programmer or two, some artists, and..."
In other words, "I scribbled this on a napkin and now I want others to make it happen."
DoD sims were my mainstay prior to taking the leap. I was as a one-person start-up that crumbled just prior to beta release due to divorce. (DOH!) But I built the project from the ground up with OOD/reuse/robustness in mind, cross-platform, OpenGL, networking, etc. Took my time to do it right. My kids were enthusiastic beta testers, found more bugs than any team of grown-ups ever could.
I still have the project and will resurrect it some day (solo, thank you). But if I really wanted to, I have enough that I could release the design docs (technical and gameplay), business plan, and commented source to a prospective team and they could see that it works, review it, play with it, and decide if it was right for them to join a team.
If instead I'd gotten on an IRC channel/Usenet group and said, "I've got this great idea for a realtime cross-platform 3D networked series of games, all I need is...". That's like standing up in the middle of a shopping mall and hollering, "I'm looking to get laid by a gorgeous model, all I need is..." Your odds are about the same.
There aren't many of us, but open source composers do exist.
It's interesting, because I think in many ways, OS music composition still reflects the more early (idealistic?) days of OS programming. The entry price to make good sounding music is still steep. There's no OS DAW that I know of that can do what you need one to do, and music production still relies heavily on hardware, both to mix sound and to generate sound (thought this is changing!). So the people you get donating the stuff they write without a thought to recouping the monetary investment they've made are passionate about music and the community. Sharing the music is its own reward, as it were.
And there's demand. Now a person starting up an OS project has to have a muse. They have to have an idea that hasn't been done. But back in the early days of GNU, it wasn't so much of a question. It was like "We don't cp or ls yet. Work on that." or "emacs doesn't read email yet. Clearly it must before it can be considered complete."
That's still the state of things in OS music -- there's still that need. The community provides the inspiration for you and you just bang out a(n elegant and awe-inspiring) musical representation of it. I know many digital composers that, when hard up for new ideas for their own stuff, take gratis commissions or other free work just to get the juices flowing.
At any rate, if your game needs music, drop me a line. I may be able to hook you up. skiaatskiadotnet
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I've been playing video games pretty much since the NES came out, and know many who have been playing since earlier. I love playing console
and PC games, and love the idea of making my own game, even if it is just for fun.
Many game players (at least among those with some computer knowledge) dream that they could make a game of their own.
However, there is actually quite a bit of work to go into a game, besides just programming. Unless it is a text only game, you need art and music. You also have to come up with the concepts and story for your game, as well as the "rules" for the game itself (for example, if you want to make an RPG, you need to figure out all the stats, etc. that you'll need).
If you are making the game for fun, it is doable. It doesn't really matter if the game ends up looking like a Super NES game. As long
as you enjoy the end product.
But then there are those who might try to start making games professionally. It seems that starting from scratch will only get more difficult as time goes on to make a game that will sell.
In the early to mid 80s, if you could code well, you could probably make a text adventure game by yourself and have a shot at actually selling it if it was good / interesting, especially if it was well liked by other computer geeks.
Unfortunately, things have changed. The top selling PC games nowadays were made with many people. To make a similar game you not only need programmers, but you need 3D artists and someone to make an entire music score. You might need voice actors, and someone to "direct" the cutscenes. Finally, you need to market the game to an audience of the lowest common denominator.
Such a game would be quite hard for someone starting out to produce and then break into the business with. Even if someone can manage to make a good game, they still have to get it out there.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
See the problem is people don't have the initative to sit down and write the graphics algorithms. The math is actually simple once you absorb the terminology. There are quite a few good website out that are very good at explaining the math.
.com is good for ideas. Some of the articles on there are very technically oriented.
http://nehe.gamedev.net
http://www.gametutorials.com
nehe's will get you started with the basics and game tutorials' is for the collision detection.
www.gamasutra.org or
I've been working on my game for about a year. I had to learn Blender and python but it only took me 3 months to catch on and have a exporting script where I could load the models in my game. To be honest, Unemployment was a real angel in disguise. I could stay up all day and all night coding on my game. Now that I have a job I don't have the time I once did to acomplish the large factors that make up a game's design. World transversal, Model loading, Collision systems.
But I will say this, It is totally possible to develop a game on your own and without expensive propriatary products. They did it alot in the 80's with the exception of the propiratary products....
--got milk?