The Rise of The Indie Developer

Gamasutra has up a feature on The Rise of the Auteur & the Return of Indie Development. The article's argument is that the explosion of gaming into mainstream consciousness is opening up niche market opportunities. From the article: "As the overall market of game players increases, the subset of people interested in indie development will naturally increase. Have an interest in indie artists in any medium usually takes more effort (finding new artists via word of mouth or niche communities) and so most people are not interested in putting forth that effort. The formulaic nature of most game development will slowly help spur some of these new players to look for new sources of game experiences."

Comments

Tools and Technology

[American AC in Paris]

For me, it's that the tools and technology have become sufficiently advanced that one can make a good, complex two-dimensional game with higher-level languages and far less bit twiddling than used to be necessary. Today's typical entry-level desktop machine is way more than powerful enough to run a reasonably well-designed 2D game. Today's tools distill complex blitting, transformation, and collision routines into single function calls. Today's operating systems virtually eliminate the need to futz around at the hardware level for all but the most demanding games. Thus, an indie developer doesn't need to devote his or her time to learning and executing all the arcane bits of optimization that the cutting-edge studios need. You don't, for example, need to worry about floating-point operations slowing down your system the way you did just ten years ago. You don't, for example, need to worry about rotating sprites, or writing pixel-perfect collision routines--that's all taken care of nowadays.

Gamemaking tools are simply getting better. Computers are able to do more in less time. Today's gamemaker gets to spend a lot less time slogging through proprietary hardware APIs, interrupts and assembly code and a lot more time actually building the game. That's what counts the most.

It's not really that bad

[alvinrod]

There's been a lot of doom and gloom about the industry lately bemoaning the lack of innovation and indie development. While the outlook today is bleak, the only constant in this industry is change, so it's not likely to stay that way forever.

I think this is true with almost anything now days. People have some sort of nogistalgic impression of the past that makes it seem so much better than the present. Add that into the fact that people just like to bitch and complain, and you've got the above comment applied to anything.

There will always be something new and innovative out there. I'm willing to bet there's a lot of stuff that people don't even pick up on. Additionally, we have to remember that during the last decade a lot of new genres sprung to life. Of course games like Doom were going to be innovative. Nothing like them had really existed before. Someone could make a game that simulates growing mold and it would be somewhat innovative (we already have sim games of all types) but would the market really want to buy a product like this? If you want to blame anyone for the lack of innovation, blame consumers that keep buying the same rehashed stuff over and over again.

There're still plenty of frontiers out there for games to explore. The Nintendo DS, for example, is something that really hasn't been done before. There are also a lot of genres out there that need refinement before we can move on. 3D platformers could, in general, stand to have better cameras that offer tighter gameplay. Occasionally, innovation happens within a genre. Look at the Madden series. It went from playing a season with your favorite team to having an owner mode where you can set the price of hotdogs in your stadium.

Innovation is happening all the time, but when the market fails to support innovation, it goes away. Given the cost of producing a game on a console it's a lot harder for indie developers with radical ideas to get into the game. That's why you see a lot of nifty little games come out for computers or made in flash. These are a lot easier for a small timer to make given their limited finances.

Who said they had to buy it?

[RootsLINUX]

I work on an indie game in my (not so copious) free time. It's open-source and 100% free (as in freedom, and in beer). I do it mostly because I enjoy doing it and it lets me learn many new things. I also consider it my gift back to the OSS community, which has already given me so much.

Of course since I have zero budget and very little time on my hands, it's not going to be a flashy game that will compete with the likes of WoW or something. Rather, it's something reminsic of the SNES-era RPGs, which were the most fun IMO. If a user is introduced into indie RPGs by means of free games, then surely sooner or later they're going to play one that they think absolutely rocks, and thus hopefully they'll begin to look at non-free indie games with more curious eyes.

Indy is finally stepping out of the shadows

[Pyrowolf]

With indy games like Gish getting rave reviews, proof that the indy scene is more than tetris, breakout, and R-type clones.

The indy scene really is about the people who are ok plunking down $20 for a game that they can just pick up and play for 20 minutes, isn't overly involving, and can be put back down. People ranging from your Mom playing Zuma, to your kids playing Chuzzle, to Dad playing Jets 'n Guns

I like Indy games, especially for my young daughter, that I know are fun and entertaining, innexpensive, and have replay value - and the $20 price tag on most makes them worth while to me.