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December's Best Indie Games
cyrus_zuo writes "As a last cry out to 2005, Game Tunnel
has just published its
monthly list of the top games of December. This feature articles takes
a hard look at the Indie games released in (or around) the month of December with four
different voices reviewing and rating each game, providing a variety of insights
into what was and wasn't great in Indie gaming in
December."
How about a round of of the year instead? I don't really keep up that often, but I'm sort of interested to hear if there's any truth to the rumours than indie games are more fun than the big commercial ones.
seemed to me that the games needed more focus on gameplay and stability. I like how the one guy points out that Mastermind didn't even include an uninstall option. My, how many time have I run into THAT problem with "indie" games. What's so hard about cleaning up the install for the user when they're done with your game?
Uh...games certainly have come a long way since the Public Domain scene of the Amiga, haven't they...look out EA!
Not really. Back in the Shareware days, games were of exceptionally high quality for such small studios. Plus you got a full game that was so good you wanted to buy more. Now all those Shareware companies have gone full commercial, and the Indies have replaced them. The Indies don't usually offer much more than a demo, and you often find that the full game isn't that much more interesting.
Indies need to find their groove in the same way that the Shareware studios did. Until then, they'll always be bottom rung.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Then a lot of these people have done a lot of work.
There's only so far a person, or a bunch of friends, can get when programming [in their spare time most likely] a game of any level of complexity.
Tools are better than they were years ago however. What took a month to program in 1985 in assembler can be done in a couple of evenings now, motivation allowing. As long as someone has some graphical talent you can get good looking games out without too much effort. Sadly they aren't going to have the same level of gameplay as some modern games - it's hard to compete against a multi-million dollar game!
It's easy for an indie band to get good and be better than a mainstream band. It's not too hard to do decent films on a budget either, if the skills are available. But game writing seems to be pretty hard to get something even 10% as good as a commercial offering. Is it a problem with the tools - Java has some pretty simple game libraries now however, but you still need to know some complex stuff if you do a 3D game, for example. Is game-writing the educated-geeks choice of creativity, another pasttime like knitting, a band, amateur dramatics, etc?