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

TFA

[mugnyte]

...is a nice mea culpa of past mistakes. However, I feel some of the situation he learns from is staged by the decisions made early in the process. If they'd hired a full time producer, a contractor "wrangler" and perhaps an admin or two, then their headcount would've been 16, the burn rate probably closer to 150/month, but the excess stress of the game (the "crunch time" finale) could've been reduced (it never goes away).
  The game itself looks cute and well made, although I'm beginning to join the "repackaging an FPS engine sucks" camp.

Re:TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

...is a nice mea culpa of past mistakes. However, I feel some of the situation he learns from is staged by the decisions made early in the process. If they'd hired a full time producer, a contractor "wrangler"

As someone who's spent a lot of time (in a different industry) on contractor-heavy projects, it was a little amusing to read that he had the exact same list of complaints we always do--and a little surprising that he didn't see these things coming ahead of time. I assume they're universal problems. Contractors always slip on dates, so you always end up with serious internal "crunch time" when you use them . . . sometimes worse than normal, since at some points we've had not just less time to finish, but more work, to do things we expected contractors to supply, simply to keep things moving.

Managing contractors well takes administrative overhead, just as any other type of management. Try to cut that overhead, and your gambling with your project's costs and timelines.

Re:Interesting interpretation via Bungie

[Ford Prefect]

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.

There's a fascinating video from Bungie out there somewhere, demonstrating various stages in the development of Halo. It becomes immediately obvious that it was a rather tortured project, with little cohesive game direction behind it, and wildly changing ideas as to what the final product should be. Starting as an RTS, moving to third-person, and so on. The stunning films produced for MacWorld and E3 on are revealed as smoke-and-mirrors - there was a work-in-progress engine there, some nice vehicle physics and some semi-working weapons, but no AI, no missions, and most importantly - no game.

Probably the only thing that really made it through intact to the Xbox FPS was the art direction. (Compare the video from E3 2000 with parts of the final game. Pretty close.) The gamers' nebulous ideal of an earth-shattering Halo, which Microsoft allegedly killed, suppressed or altered, actually never really existed.

Original goals for Halo: hazy. Obviously he's not making that mistake again.