Our Indie Experiment - MadMinute Games

baby arm writes "MadMinute Games' Norb Timpko has contributed the first installment in a series on independent game developers. He describes the balancing act required to get a game like Take Command: 2nd Manassas out the door while still having families and day jobs."

Comments

Indie principles rule

[SIInudeity]

Power to the indies. I myself, have been hobby-coding games since I was in Primary school. Power to these guys, who code games for the love of it, not the money.

Buy the game, it's terrific

[crimguy]

Good article, and I'm glad MMG is getting some press. Take Command 2nd Manassas is a great game, and a terrific achievement for a 2-man development team. If you haven't bought it, give the demo a try - I guarantee you'll be impressed. It has my vote for wargame of the year (in my make-believe gaming awards in my head)

And no, I do not work for the company. I hadn't heard of them until about a month ago.

Why waste time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why waste time playing games when you could be writing them, like this guy? How much time do you waste grinding in WoW, trying to increase some number in a database? You could spend that time doing something productive -- creating something.

Re:Why waste time?

[Aladrin]

Maybe because some people prefer the tedium of MMO grinding to the tedium to MMO writing.

I've wanted to write my own game for YEARS. But that dream is only a dream. I like the planning, I like the thought of having my own game and doing what I want with it, but the reality isn't nearly so rosy.

As soon as your project gains even a little fan-base, you've suddenly got a group of people telling you:

A) Your game sucks because it's not (insert reason/other-game-name)
B) Your game needs to do this. Yesterday.
C) They hate you because you don't listen to them on YOUR game.
D) Everything is peachy and wonderful and they have nothing to say, really, except they want to waste your time and if you don't respond, they turn into C.

This is, of course, assuming you work alone. If you work FOR someone, or WITH someone, you've gained at least half a boss.

Life in game-dev land is NOT ALL ROSES.

Add in the fact that the average career of a game dev is 5 years and you've got a recipe for disaster.

More power to the game devs that make all the games I love playing, but I no longer want to be one of them. I'd much rather pay whatever I have to and just have FUN playing them games. Ultimately, they come up with more ideas that my single brain could ever create anyhow.

Re:This is a tough business

[IntelliAdmin]

You right that you are not in the same market - Now that I think about it, it really has no weight in the issue. Last year my 5 year old nephew came over for a month. I have zero games, and was not about to put out $50 for some game I would never play again. Found a very cool indy game that he and I played for weeks - only cost me $14.95. It was a typical 2D shootm up (Kinda like the games you would see in the old days on the Atari 2600, or Commodor 64), and it was a really fun time.

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Re:I suck

[AnyoneEB]

(is Wii the Indie dev dream console?)

I believe that is in Nintendo's plan. I hear the dev kit is $2000 (although it may be difficult to get one right now). Obviously, that is more than it costs to get started on PC ($0; assuming you already have the hardware in both cases), but it is cheaper than most consoles. Nintendo is offering easy XBox Live Arcade-style distribution of games via their Virtual Console feature. Actually, on that topic, how has XBLA been for indie developers?