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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."
A good Indie MMOG: Rubies Of Eventide. I have only heard good things about Rubies'.
Personally, I have an Indie game of my own invention. Although it doesn't take much thought, it does demand agility when using both a mouse and a keyboard with one hand at the same time. It's basic premise has to do with three open browser windows, the web site images.google.com, the text strings "angelina jolie" - "salma hayek" - "britney spears", a scroll mouse, and a big wad of tissue.
My girlfriend is not very fond of the game, and adamantly refuses to play along with me. I even offerred to let her use the joy stick instead of the keyboard.
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
that is the real question
I would really like to be an indie game developer. It's there like a 3D engine for free for noobs like me?
Who says one form is purer than another? Does creating games for profit make them impure? I certainly hope to profit from my creative work, and it is quite pure - in fact, it is religious music. Where do these standards come from? Look more closely for assumptions in articles, and at least explain them in the write-up, editors.
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...
Indie games are great. I love them because their communities are so small and tight-knit. One of my favorite Indie games would have to be Wulfram 2. The game is completely volenter driven. There are more than a few people who have stuck with the developer for as long as five years.
There are some problems with Indie games however, the biggest would have to be support. Alot of these games are struggling to stay alive, and to do so they need to either be pay to play, have a large number of donations, or just simply have a ton of advertisements.
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
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... :-)
For a minute there, I thought we were outsourcing game programming to India.
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
The Irony of Indy Games
;) Than again, there are a few companies that are going from commerical projects to more of an indy style. Once you see the amount that publishers take... you start to see the value in online distro's!
;) Enjoy the world of game development for zero cash!
Outside of the handheld ( PalmOS, PocketPC ) markets, or cell phones... many indy games are either crap... or sales pitches to publishers! Im not saying all... there are probrably dozens of exceptions, but on the whole this remains true. Its funny though, when you look at "past" indy games...
HomeWorld
Doom
FlashPoint
Really... by definition, an indy game is self financed, without a publisher in site. Its funny that that moment you have success in the indy market, you tend to get picked up by a publisher... then your no longer indy!
For anyone really interested in learning more, check out:
Garage Games Misc resources, plus a licensable engine
FlipCode Great gaming related site
Gamedev.net Like flipcode, but less mature ( you'll see! )
Gamasutra The site for game developers! Must see
CrystalSpace LGPL 3d Engine. Very impressive
WildTangent Cheap game engine (web based), plus online publishing
Auran Jet Affordable 3d engine, flexible licensing
OpenGl The site for OpenGL info. Lots of useful links
From the above list, you should easily be able to find anything else your looking for!
It still seems picking up an opengl book and doing it yourself is the best way to go in the long run.
Oh that depends on if you want to concentrate on game development part time for the next 18 months, or on engine develpment part time for the next 12 months, THEN start game development. Engine development and game development are two different beasts really - the overlap in some areas, but, game development concentrates on issues like gameplay, content, etc., while engine development concentrates on things like speed, graphical optimisation, etc.
My opinion to ANYONE who's looking at starting into the Indie field, get a free engine or buy an engine (see a couple o' edorsements for my favorite elsewhere in these threads) and use it. Indie Game Development is rarely someone's fulltime job, so why spend the time re-inventing the wheel? Spend the time developing games.
(On the flip side of that, there's always the issue that you know the engine like the back of your hand if you developed it yourself. I purchased the Torque engine, and it's something like 250K lines of code. I'm surprised how well I know certain parts of the engine, because I decided I just wanted to make a 'quick tweak' on something, like adding particle system LoD, and ended up pretty much knowing it by heart now. So this is kind of a non-issue - get to know the parts of the code you WANT or NEED to know about, and ignore the other stuff. Just be sure to start with a fairly stable and secure engine before thinking this way ;-)
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
Hrmm.. You aren't by chance the say Davis Ray Sickmon who used for work on the Freedows/AllOS project, are you?
[Peforms Jedi Mind Trick, waving hand]This is not the Davis you are looking for. I never worked on Freedows or AllOs. Move along.
Yeah, same guy. Don't mention that again. ;-)
In any event, what's the difference? Why is it people will code on Open Source projects, but not do 3d work? I guess I come at this from a bad perspective, but I really don't understand the difference.
Well, you make the assumption that people do code on Open Source projects. Many of them totally flop for lots of reasons (go cruse SourceForge looking for inactive projects. There are LOTS.) It really all depends on how many people feel the need to scratch that particular 'itch'. Since you mention Freedows and AllOS, it's amazing how many people involved were more interested in artistic pursuits (making webpages, etc.) than doing coding. There was only a core set of developers who were interested.
Artist on the other hand work totally different. And most of them that seem to have the skills to do the job are doing it commercially already (part of the Trajectory Zone team I have are commercial artists working for a percentage of profits. Thank god - no more "programmer art" ;-) , and those that don't are often not worth having on the team, haven't learned focus, etc. It's very very strange how most of the graphic arts for games that I met work. Totally different mentality than the programmers on the same project. I have a hard time relating some days ;-)
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
It apparently runs on just about anything: Mac >=10.1, Windows >=98, and a bunch of x86 Linux distros.
No kidding - I love Marble Blast Gold (however, I got it for free - but had already planned on buying it after playing the demo.)
One of the trends with the games offered at GarageGames is they are CROSS PLATFORM!!! That may not sound real exciting, but, I own Orbz 2.0 and Marble Blast Gold. I own a PC and a Mac (I love my PowerBook. Er... my WIFE'S PowerBook.) If I ever switch over to Mac completely, I don't have to re-buy the game, or give up the game - just download the Mac version. It's hard to get publishers interested in a cross platform game these days - Indies WANT crossplatform, since the Mac market may be smaller, but less cluttered (and same for Linux).
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
The thing about developing your own game is, you have the power to really try and make it perfect. You have real creative control, you know? You can take the high road if you want, or lean towards a humorous kind of bent, or just go completely deranged and do something freaky. It's cool. And, you don't have any creeps in suits leaning on you to make your character's tits bigger, or dumb down the dialog.
One bummer is, being only one guy, I won't be able to get anything to market in less than a year or two, and I can't afford too fast a computer, so my graphics will be targeted at lower-end machines, like, say, a 500Mhz Celeron. So, my game will *look* like an older game in a sense, and won't be as flash as the crop of games it would normally be competing against. But I don't think that's a bad thing. Let the big shops have the high end. I think there's room at the lower end for guys like me. Not everyone has a P-IV, right?
As far as my game goes, it'll be a third-person shooter with first person controls and modest but smooth graphics. I don't want to give away too much, but I think it'll really appeal to this crowd. It's very high-tech oriented. I figure, maybe, 2005 sometime. My business model is: I'm going to release the game engine itself, with development tools, open source for Linux, Windows, and FreeBSD so that anyone who is into this stuff can create their own game using the tools. I'm looking at using Crystal Space or Ogre as a base, and building my system as a game-engine layer on top of their graphics engine. So, if you want to play the game, you download a bundle with the game engine and a compatible build of one of the graphics engines, for free. But, then, you pay for the actual levels and mods. Every couple of months, I come out with a new set of levels and mods, which you can pick up for like, twenty bucks. You can't steal my *story*, because it's like a novel, right? But you can write your *own* story using my tools, and jump into the market right alongside me. Isn't that a neat idea? I figure, the more people create cool, weird little games, the more there are for me to play. That's GOT to be a Good Thing, right?
And, since I just posted it, and it's now in the public domain, it can't be patented (this post is a prior-art description of the concept, 8/1/2003 5:29PM).
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
*YOU* choose your platform. THink about it. :: sniff ::)
;) ) Same rules apply. I play the music I want to play, no one can tell me otherwise.)
Are you tired of seeing the best games only come out for Win32? Maybe you're a Linux user and have to dual-boot, just so you can play the greatest/latest game. Maybe you're a Mac user and you're just SOL (for the most part). The fact is, most commercial companies only want money, and lots of it, and money can be made on Win32. Even with a shitty game, if it can sell to just 1% of the market, can still pull a profit (unless it's one of those billion dollar all-graphics-no-game jobs). With Indie developers, there's no shareholders to satisfy. There's no board of directors mandating you use DirectX or whatever. You can target minority platforms if you choose, and with a reduced overhead (and pent up demand for a good game), can actually find a market. I don't know if A Tale in the Desert is making a profit, but you know, the marketing (almost non-existing, word-of-mouth kinda thing), the packaging (download only? I've not seen a box) and the fact that it runs on Linux without WINE is truly revolutionary in many ways. While the game doesn't appear to be my cup of tea, I give them mad props for doing it and doing it on their terms. AFAICT, they didn't have to rush it out of the door to meet some projected sales targets. AFAIK the rollout was very smooth. It's nice to be able to produce quality. (Of course, someone's probably going to come along and say they're not an Indie company and were bankrolled by EA or something and completely crush my dreams..
Anyway, if I were under the pressure to produce mounds and mounds of money, you can bet I'd be a Win32 developer. However, I'm just a hobbyist/indie/wannabe, so guess what? I'm trying to do everything I can on Linux, because I can. No one is there to say I can't. YOu know what? I'm even using Java! Take that! (see www.lwjgl.org). See, I'm not stuck in a shop that says I have to use 3DStudio Max (I can't afford $6k, can you?). I use TheGimp because it works for what I do (although Photoshop + some KPT filters is better for a few things (the KPT Procedural Texture plugin is just.. nifty.. For the kind of stuff I require, that is). I can use Eclipse + Java + LWJGL, all on Linux, targetting Linux (of course, get the benefits of cross-platform, but that's secondary, eh?). What I'm getting at is, as an indie developer, you can call the shots! And I can even GPL the game, if I so desire! That's what's rewarding, to me, the ability to have control.
(Also note: I'm an independent musician (lack of talent?
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
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?