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The Future of Independent Game Development
The Guardian's Games Blog has an article discussing where indie game development will go in the next few years after its recent resurgence. The story follows the success of one small game studio, and suggests that the games industry will move to further embrace low-cost development. Quoting:
"The likes of XBLA, ... PSN and WiiWare represent a reasonable revenue stream for publishers and developers, especially with a recession looming. However, in-house staff may not have the skills required to punch out cool, hugely intuitive budget games, with little or no management. If you look at something like Geometry Wars from Bizarre Creations, the project was started in the free time of experienced coder Stephen Cakebread, and may never have happened had he been shunted on to different, larger projects. Instead, big industry players are reaching out to the indie scene to source talent."
It doesn't matter if it's not as good, you did it yourself.
Firstly, bedroom coding was NEVER dead. Fuck it, I should know, I was doing bedroom coding games back when I used to read articles in Develop magazine about teams under 100 couldn't make games, and I kept doing it when Peter Molyneux was warning everyone it was suicide to start a small dev company, and I'm still doing it now. The fact that mainstream media such as the guardian doesn't read our press releases doesn't mean we don't exist.
Suddenly, because there are some indie games on console games, people think "indie gaming is back!".
Bullshit.
True INDEPENDENT gaming will always be at home only on the PC and the Mac, and maybe the iphone, because these are the platforms with no barrier to entry. If your game is for XBLA or PS3 or Wii, then your game idea and code has to be approved by a committee of suits at one of those companies. That's about as un-independent as it gets.
True indie gaming is where someone owns the whole company, has invested their own money to fund, sell and promote the game, and earns all the revenue. The minute you have a 'distribution and publishing partner', things begin to compromise.
That's not to say that you don't get some awesome games from 'indies' on consoles, but to herald it as the home of indie gaming is just wrong.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
when i think indie game dev i think mods. not like helpful mods that add stuff to a game, or add a neat feature or two, but mods that really change the way a game is played. because most indie game dev's won't write their own engine, and a lot won't even be able to license one, and frankly a lot of them that do license one probably shouldn't.
i played this one indie game once, possibly because of mention in a slashdot article. a multiplayer FPS where you could add/subtract terrain from the game world. anyways, one time i was in a server by myself and i dug the entire planet down to the core where it won't let you dig anymore, then i made collumns going up as high as you could go, and then i connected them making interconnecting highways like a spider web. it was all very intricate and beautiful. i spent a good hour doing this.
then the server reset the level because the time limit for that round had been reached. i havn't played the game since.
big industry players are reaching out to the indie scene to source talent.
Like it ever did. This is just a sign of the video game industry maturing.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Maybe computer games will actually show some game design again instead of being graphics/physics engine demos.
mmmm...forbidden donut
His name is "Cakebread"? Are you serious? That is too awesome. I'm naming my child after him.
One word: BRAID. Developped by ONE MAN, hailed by the critic and downloaded by the thousands on xbox live, this title shows that single individuals with talent and vision can be immense success stories.
I put Game! together in my free time, and initially it had exactly zero art. A couple artists came upon it and liked it enough to start contributing art, and thus it actually has quite a lot of art now.
Web based games allow for very rapid evolution, and also means you can start putting it in front of users way earlier than usual. It doesn't take a lot of code to make something useful either, I'm still the only coder on Game! and that's just in my spare time. In comparison to game studios with several hundred people all working on a game compared to a few people working part time, it's amazing what you can still get done.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
You still have to agree to licensing terms to use XNA to develop games. These terms restrict what you can publish.
I've been getting into XNA development. Not to shabby. It definitely will open doors and let people who don't traditionally create games (or anything 3d, really) give it a shot. The documentation is pretty good and not as intimidating as the straight DirectX stuff. For starters, they dont assume you know everything about shaders, vertex buffers, etc. You should still grab the DirectX SDK's though, because the current XNA docs don't go as deep into things like HLSL or lighting.
You still have to know your math. Remember your linear algebra class in college? You better. Graphics programming seems all about the matrix.
In theory, the whole thing was designed to be portable. Your code should, in theory, compile down to the Zune, Windows and XBox360.
As for what you can publish in their community thingy? Dunno as I haven't tried. Something tells me you can probably route around it though. The reason for the community, it would seem, is simply providing a simple way to market and sell your game. Kinda like the store for iPhone apps.
Good times though. If you've never tried programming for DirectX or any kind of 3d stuff, I'd definitely give it a whirl. Coming from a web-developer background, this kind of programming is very different beast. Much lower level, you gotta worry about byte ordering and how to marshal data into video memory. Plus a lot more attention to performance... Make sure you have your old linear algebra book on hand though :-)
I developed this free indie game in 2 weeks, http://skunkhunter.oxyhost.com/ The only problem of keeping it alive is promotion. The time taken to promote it takes time away from following projects and unless you feel the need to throw money at it which in turn will have to provide a return it's not an easy task. Perhaps more sites are needed that sanction free indie games and catalog them in mass for people to download in their lunch breaks
Being a small game dev. company is still hard no matter what people say. Even if you charge less, give away source code to the whole game, dev. tools, no DRM, etc. people still compare your game to things like Crysis and WoW and expect that level of quality no matter who you are. Here is our shameless plug to enter the gaming market: http://magrathean.ca/project/incognito We never thought of this, but marketing the project will actually be harder than developing the game (which took 12 months). It will probably be another year before we can generate enough sales to create another one. One has to be optimistic at all times :)
...why the description of your bedroom? We don't need to know about your life, especially since you posted AC.