The Indie Game Commandments

simoniker writes "As part of an in-depth postmortem of Xbox title Stubbs The Zombie over at Gamasutra, company founder and Bungie co-founder Alex Seropian has revealed his own personal 'indie game commandments' when setting up his new firm: 'First Commandment: We shall establish our game's creative direction... Second commandment: We shall own our intellectual property... Third commandment: We shall not let a third party determine our success, such as the publisher who's doing (or not doing) the marketing, or the funding source (likely a publisher) making demands that are not in-line with our goals... Fourth Commandment: We shall have a small manageable team. We don't want 50 employees making one game over three years in house (we want low overhead), and we don't want to suffer the churn of ramping up and down for projects.'"

Comments

Re:Translation

[chrismcdirty]

I interpreted #2 as "We will not let a publisher run our intellectual property into the ground with a series mind-numbing sequels."

Interesting interpretation via Bungie

[thatguywhoiam]

* First Commandment: We shall establish our game's creative direction.

Check. Marathon: great art direction, a cogent storyline with development potential. Myth: also great art direction, compelling gameplay mechanic for RTS, fantastic atmospheric storyline.

* Second commandment: We shall own our intellectual property.

Check. All original development done by Bungie, with in-house artists and designers. They even bought the company that composed the music for Myth.

* Third commandment: We shall not let a third party determine our success, such as the publisher who's doing (or not doing) the marketing, or the funding source (likely a publisher) making demands that are not in-line with our goals.

Aaaaand here's his mea culpa. Microsoft buys Bungie, dramatically alters scope of Halo, makes it a one-platform-launch. Delays game for years. Alters art direction, ends up being a pale shadow of the Marathon design. Myth is sold to a 3rd party developer who produces a lacklustre sequel. Halo is a great success - the only success, really - for Xbox. Crawls onto other platforms much later, the last of which is the Mac - four years after it was demo'd on a blue and white G3 tower at Macworld.

* Fourth Commandment: We shall have a small manageable team. We don't want 50 employees making one game over three years in house (we want low overhead), and we don't want to suffer the churn of ramping up and down for projects.

Can't comment. Maybe Stubbs suffered from this.