Slashdot Mirror
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
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?
... 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