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Indie Games - Fast, Cheap and Everywhere
bios10h writes "MSNBC has an article about indie game developers and their businesses. 'INDEPENDENT COMPUTER GAMING: It's not always pretty, but ask any one in the biz and they'll say that it represents the purest form of game development. And sometimes the cheapest.' Interesting read about the indie games scene... maybe we have indie developers in the Slashdot crowd that would like to comment on this."
In my opinion, the hardest part is getting good Artists. I run the open source SQ7.org game project, and we're doing some exciting stuff. We're doing fully voice acted, 3d rendered, interactivty, or a large scale.
While we've always have plenty of programming help (not that we couldn't use more..), I've found that getting 3d graphic artists is amazingly difficult..
Programmers tend to discover the site on their own, or read my sig in Slashdot, and help to volunteer to bring together a project like that. Programming types Rock.
But Graphical Artists tend not to do that, and I'm not sure how to attract them.. I've tried posting to 3d forums, Offering to pay the few bucks I can each month.. But I've never really gotten as much as I need. The people I have are Great, and we're doing some pretty damn cool artwork, but we need more help.
How do other people solve this problem? Can anyone give any advice on how to get their attention? Adwords on Google?
Colin
Colin Davis
So what are the best sites to check out the indie gaming scene on? Gamespot and all those don't quite cut it. Is there an underground game review site that I'm missing? Hed.
http://goldysmom.blogspot.com
I would really like to be an indie game developer. It's there like a 3D engine for free for noobs like me?
Like it said in the article, this kind fo stuff brings you back to the gaming scene int eh late 80's and early 90's, where some of the best gaming titles came from. Some of the gaming companies that made games in those times grew to become bigger franchises, such as ID with their cheasier games like Commander Keen. I still remember games like Epic Pinball, Raptor, and such, that I still play in Dosemu all the time. I remember a quote once, I think it was from the guys from ID, that basically said the next big gameing change isnt going to be done by the big guys, but by a couple of guys in their garage (if anyone remembers who said that, feel free to enlighten me, I cant remember and it would be nice to give credit). Ill spend a few hours checking out some of these games, they ought to somewhat entertaining, even if they are simple few minute diversions...
I run my own indie game company and let me tell you, there's nothing better than having the freedom to do whatever you like in the development process. Many game companies, especially the big ones, make you work one position and your input isn't appreciated on other topics. With Indie game companies you'll have anywhere from 1-15 people working at the company making something that truly (in most cases) want to play themselves.
The ideas portrayed in many indie games, although not blockbusters, are normally fun to play, small in size and are fairly inexpensive. With my company I have the freedom to code in whatever OS's I want, so my companies next game will be released for Linux/Windows at the same time, absolutely no code changes, literally. Most companies don't give that sort of freedom, where indie projects do!
I love the concept of indie game development. I dearly do. But look at indie development forums, look at indie game companies, and what do I see: endless reworkings of stale puzzle games, endless reworkings of a certain group, 8-bit games (Boulder Dash, Asteroids, Breakout), clones of Commodore/Atari/Apple favorites that now run on your desktop, and so on. There's also a certain high-end crowd that creates engines that look like Quake II, but without any games on top of them.
Imagine if the independent music scene were like this. All indie bands would be scrambling to record cover versions of small set songs from bands from the early 1980s. And they'd be defending that practice by claiming that there are only a handful of good songs out there, so why write a new one?
Then again, given how many indie games make the big time, maybe I'm just smart. :)
In any case, my web game, Carnage Blender has a small (I've made enough back to cover hardware costs and the odd pizza) but loyal following. It's primarily a clickfest but, I think, an entertaining one. There's far more depth to the strategic choices than is initially obvious, particularly when you start to get to the high-level spells.
We probably have one of the highest overall IQs of gaming communities that you'll find, because the admins actively discourage idiots. (As opposed to newbies, who are welcome.) Unfortunately, a lot of idiots have credit cards. Guess you can't have everything... :-)
Go closed source.
Raise some capital.
And pay the devs.
He's ALMOST right on that. Part of what most of the artists who WILL work on you project look at is what the likelyhood that they get some sort of return on thier investment (time = money). I'm not saying that there aren't any artists who will work on a free - just damned few. And most that I do know are doing it to get a leg up in game development - build thier portfolio, etc.
If you've got a project that's up to the point of beta, you'll find it much easier to get artists on board. Also, go make an account at GarageGames, and watch for artists lookin' for a freebie project to work on in thier free time, or people who just quit a project and are lookin' for something else to work on (watch the .plan files.)
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
... the most important indie games of the internet's history - MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs and the like. They incorporate written and linguistic creativity, roleplaying, imagination, don't require any special software other than generic telnet, can be played on the oldest of links and, most importantly, are often free :)
Try a good one at hypercube.org:9000, or many others at www.mudconnector.com.
-- K
Hands down, www.garagegames.com. They're selling the Torque game engine (of Tribes 2 fame) for developers for a measly $100. Great community there too
Well, that's nice and all, but it's not the question he asked. He asked about review sites for independant games. That's a project I've been working on as a side line (a nice community oriented freeware / indie game site) but haven't completed. One of them I would recommend is Indie Games. Not a great site, but fits what you are lookin' for. Also check a lot of the shareware games sites - pretty much Shareware Game Author or Freeware Game Author = Indie Game Author.
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
I just stumbled onto Starscape by Moonpod, an indie developer, and am extremely impressed by it. It's only the 2nd piece of software that I've ever bought online (the first being Kali).
It's sort of an evolution of Raptor by Apogee -- have ship, buy upgrades -- but adds research for better upgrades and a lot of exploration. And the game just oozes style and polish. Highly recommended.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
I find it is a lot of fun to write something just for the sake of doing it and letting people play. It's quite rewarding to get E-Mails from people who enjoy playing what you've done.
For those of you who liked Tetris I've got a multiplayer competitive version up and running at Blockwars. No ads or popups or any of that nonsense...
Blockwars isn't my end goal though... it's a testbed for the multiuser code I intend to use on more creative projects. So if you hit a bug, I'd love to know! :)
Blockwars: a real-time, multiplayer game similar to Tetris.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Wulfram 2 is an indie game which I've found to be somewhat original. While development is a bit slow, the community is one of the best I've found in any online game, and the game is free to play. It's a FPS with some strategy elements involved, and the game puts an emphasis on teamwork. The amount of work put into training new players is impressive, as is the moderation, making this one of the best free multiplayer games I've seen.
I was disappointed not to see a section about Chris Sawyer, who programmed one of the most popular games ever essentially on-his-own (although backed by a commercial vendor, eventually).
How do you find the torque engine in terms of flexibility, speed, and ease of use? I'd really like to try it out but I'm not sure if I want to spend a $100/developer licensing fee at this time ... (I have 3 developers, and not $300, haha). But if it's powerful, and will save some time on the development of our in-house engine that we're working on, I might drop a hundred bucks for myself.
Well... I fucking LOVE it. Seriously. The built in scripting language (TorqueScript) is pretty powerful for stuff that either (A) needs to be accessable to modders or (B) 'makes sense' in the scripting side (doing all of your collision detection from the scripting side would be bad. Handling the effects of a collision on the scripting side works well, and I use it extensively.)
Getting up and running with playable results is easy, depending on what gametype you are doing. If it's a first or third person style game, it's fairly simple - the SDK comes with a fully playable example that you can use as much code as you like from it. Just load it up, and start hackin' out what you don't need, and hackin' in what you do need.
It's pretty flexible - and what the engine doesn't have can be found a lot of times in the community forums under the Resources or Code Snippets area. If it's not there, it's usually pretty easy to hack it in on the C++ side or the scripting side.
There's a HUGE community to get help from. That's a wonderful thing some days! And the Indies who are workin' on other stuff tend to help each other out - good example was that I talked to Justin from 21-6 after playing a bit with the beta of Orbz 2.1, and noticed that he made Ogg encoded sound work a lot better than my implementation. I asked him about it, and he just packed up the engine/audio directory, and sent it to me, fixing all my problems in a single .zip file!
Speed is good. Trajectory Zone is an example I'll use (since it's my project ;-) Scorched3D and TrajectoryZone share a lot of the same hertiage - Scorched Earth is the inspiration for both of 'em, but we took very different development pathes. I finally checked out Scorched3D on one of my Dev machines. PIII 400Mhz, dual processor, LOTS of RAM, 64MB TNT2 (what a bastardized card - still can't see why they released that, or how I ended up with one ;-) . TZ does not run perfectly on it (which is why I created some modifications to the particle system - I added an LoD system for particles, and added it as a Code Snippet for the community to use), but it's very playable, usually running at 25 - 30 FPS after the modifications I made to the particle system (I beat the hell out the particle system. Imagine a mushroom cloud from a nuke, made entirely with particles and does collision detection with the terrain. Now imagine 20 or so on the landscape at once while players are going nuts. That's how badly I abuse particles ;-) Scorched3D is NOWHERE near as playable, even after I turned all the settings down (no animated water, low textures, etc. etc.,etc.) It does really well, and handles multiple players pretty well (NOTE: as long as you aren't doin' stuff like 3000+ poly models with no LoD!) So, it's pretty good performance.
If there's one complaint I've got, it's the documentation. It needs to be better. However, they are working on Torque 1.2 right now, and that's one of thier priority items - better and more current documentation. However, what the documentation lacks, the community makes up for - cruse the forums, and you'll find the answer 9 times out of 10.
If you've got any more questions, feel free to email me.
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
Why is it that free tools/libraries for game development are usually(often) cross platform, but commercial ones aren't? This puzzles me.
Why is it that free tools/libraries for game development are usually(often) cross platform, but commercial ones aren't? This puzzles me.
Ya know... I've often wondered that myself. I suppose part of it could be attributed to support costs for the libraries & tools on other platforms is viewed as higher, but I think part of that is bull. Total friggin' mystery to me. I use Torque with VC++ on Windows most of the time, partialy because most of the content development tools I need are on there. I'd love to see most of 'em ported to Mac (I'm a Mac OSX fan these days) so I can finally abandon the Windows based PC as my primary platform. Tools is what holds me back.
What makes this really funny is that Torque it's self is crossplatform. Write a game using Torque, and compile it for Linux, Windows, Mac easily (IE - no headaches, just compile the bastard.) Why can't it be that easy for a level editor and model maker? (Well, I guess that's not completely true - Blender has now released it's OSX version. But I can't export for Blender to Torque dts formats at the moment until a working exporter is written :-P )
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
Ah - a subject close to my heart. I've been programming games of varying quality and complexity for 13 years. The closest any of them came to 'success' was the modest following garnered by a top-down RPG called Aspetra back in '96; but it has never really been about getting big or making $ for me. I simply LOVE designing game engines, from graphics to AI to physics to everything else. Although I have had a pretty easy time of landing interesting, fun software jobs, I have had absolutely NO luck attracting the slightest bit of interest from game companies, ever. So I continue to enjoy my 9-5, M-F, working on everything from compilers, to integration, to various business apps; but if I want to develop a game, doing so in my 'garage' is, so far, the only way to go!
I have a fairly good knowledge of the Amiga scene, where - for obvious reasons - almost all the game releases of late 1990's were independent games. Some of them were actually quite good and I really miss them on the mainstream platforms. Amiga coders were doing some true magic with optimizing 3D engines to cope with high-screen true-color animations on ancient processors like the 68040. The quality of their work was superb. However, it was rarely followed by the quality of the scriptwriting and graphics design. Now here's my question: why is it easier to find a guy who will spend many sleepless and unpaid nights writing the game engine - than to find a guy who would put a similar effort in writing a good story or drawing an interesting texture? This resulted in weird "sort-of-games", that were actually nothing more than a blazing fast 3D engine and just a couple of rooms to show that it works. What's the point?