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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."
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.
I have total respect for any Indy game developer. It is a very tough business to get into. It is so saturated with Hollywood types that are constantly taking a loss on $10 Million game projects. Building a game is such a gamble. Its not like a utility, or p2p app where you can gauge the interest in it - you never know until you release the game what type of response you will get. Sometimes these Indy guys work on a game for years, release it and get nothing back.
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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.
Reading TFA, it seems that s/computer games/paintings and from the MO you have pretty much any bohemian artistic operation (minus the volunteers).
A philosophy I agree with, and sounds like a fun way to do things. Especially if you like to be your own boss.
If I say that in their low res demo movies it's obvious that the avatars use pretty low res billboard textures will make me suck won't it :P
I'll get modded down, I'll get replies asking "if I don't have better games, I better shut my mouth" or how bashing is nor productive and how many work went into this game.
But this is why the gaming industry is so tough nowadays. While all developers are small teams of talented boys and girls fascinated with technology, big budgets quickly up the ante and spoil it for everyone.
Indie games have to differentiate and separate themselves from the general games market and stress on different values, like gameplay, originality and fun (is Wii the Indie dev dream console?).
If they fight within the big market, too many people will stare at the low res textures on the avatars and sigh.
Please read and re-read that. It is this kind of motivation that is missing in a GOOD CHUNK of our K-12 education and I think it has a A LOT to do with why a lot of kids are not interested in "core" courses.
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
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.
Most elementary, junior high, and high school teachers in America are government employees. That's bad enough. To make matters worse, they're given a checklist of things they must teach (and answers that students must regurgitate) in order to continue being employed.
Now, I don't have high expectations for civil servants in general, but I can't escape the conclusion that teachers are set up to fail. The ones I know work far more hours than any of their governmental supervisors. Given that the vast majority of their time remains focused on mandatory teaching & testing subjects, they have little time for motivating anyone.
Sadly, the only thing in American society that seems to evolve more slowly than the education system is the legislative baggage that mandates how teaching is supposed to be done. For many school systems, educating young people is being replaced by years of babysitting, with diplomas handed out mostly on the basis of acceptable attendance percentages for a suffient number of years.
Perhaps what we'll see in the future is a more entreprenurial version of way the military operates. Employers could foot the bill for training employees in skills that matter for their specific jobs. In exchange, employees would sign 2, 4, or 6-year contracts for long hours in low-paying jobs during which they can be fired but can't quit.
How about this version of "corporate sponsored" education
1 a Corp agrees to sponsor a school
the corp gets
a possible new workers
b a nice chunky tax deduction
c a group of very heavily regulated workers (little jobs that have a huge "play factor")
the school gets
a funding
b other resources (do you really think that a school sponsred by Coke won't have..)
c a lower problem of disipline (having kids paid to run around would keep them out of trouble)
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So basically, you want to bring back serfdom, with the difference that instead of being tied to a patch of land you'd be tied to a corporation. And, of course, the employer has no duties towards the employee, even when the employee is de facto their property.
Thank you for demonstrating why unions are still very neccessary.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Honestly, I think unions and tenure are two of the big reasons why America's educational system is steadily deteriorating.
In California, a large part of educational spending goes to the teacher's union, and to the cost of negotiating with the union, rather than to the teachers themselves or to the cost of books and supplies.
Tenure, meanwhile, promotes freedom of expression and thought at the expense of the freedom to hire and fire teachers based on performance. One major lesson being learned by students today is how to maintain the status quo, or at least a protracted, downward slide.
Private schools, which aren't similarly burdened, are seeing a growing demand for their services, while public schools are closing down, even though the overall population keeps rising. That's gotta tell you something about the perceived value of a public education.
What you're describing isn't something new; it's called indentured servitude and it was a common form of employment in colonial North America. As we've become more attentive to the rights of the laborer, this and other forms of slavery (and being legally bound to a contract you can't get out of is certainly closer to slavery than free labor) have gone by the wayside.
I wouldn't mind seeing employer-funded education necessarily (though one wonders if that would result in the same bad consequences we've gotten from the employer-funded health care system). But indentured servitude should remain in the past, where it belongs.
Read my blog.
b a nice chunky tax deduction
Sorry, I'm not buy that. No, seriously, a tax deduction is me (a taxpayer) paying someone else to do something the government want's to have happen. I may as well pay for the work and prevent the corporation play nanny. For-profit institutions are not exactly the bastions of moralilty.
Also, workers who don't do much work, and can't be channeled and refined into performing specific repeptitve tasks, just aren't efficient.
Finally, you can't pay [kids these days] enough to keep them out of trouble. The more you pay them to keep them good most of the time, the bigger trouble they're able to get into when they aren't being paid. No, you can't pay them enough to keep them on a leash all the time.
I'd be in favor of euthanizing all the troublemakers, but it's not always the kids fault. Euthanizing a good number of the parents these days...well, that has merit, but there just isn't enough space to kill and bury all the bad parents out there without major health hazards to the rest of the population.
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Wow, I really shouldn't have come into work today. I've gotten a lot done, but my cynisim has really hit a local peak. Better work myself back down before everybody comes back tomorrow.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
i downloaded and played the demo, it is definately a fun game. i really love commanding columns of troop brigades and marching them into enemy flanks, and rushing them with the CHARGE! command.
Perhaps I should have worded it as "...2, 4, or 6-year contracts at prenegotiated salaries during which they can't quit without repaying the cost of the education they've received."
Frankly, without my initial, cynical wording, it really wouldn't be indentured servitude, at least not in the very-nearly-slavery sense. Rather, it would be the exchange of labor for education, at the end of which the worker would have both training and experience, two things an entry-level worker would benefit from having.
BTW, even Wikipedia mentions that "[indentured servitude] was the legal basis of the apprenticeship system by which skilled trades were learned." Master tradesmen didn't simply train apprentices out of the goodness of their hearts. Without the commitment of service in exchange for room, board, and training, mighty few masters would have taught their trade secrets to anyone.
for example vectors are a must for 3D graphics, but quite not for a music composer
Vectors aren't used in Rock and Roll, perhaps, but if a student actually spends a few semesters studying music theory, and post-tonal theory, they will discover that mathematical concepts such as vectors are commonplace. In post-tonal theory, Interval Vectors are used as representations of clusters of tones. In other words, to a rock guitarist, C and G may be two totally different chords, however, to a post-tonal theorist, they might be the same. A post tonal theorist would see the pitches of a C Major as c-e-g or as interval vector 001110. G Major would have the pitches g-b-d, but the same interval vector!
For more information, see wiki- Interval Vectors.
burrocrisy
and that would be what? Ruling by jackasses? Never has a slashdot misspelling been more apropos