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."

Comments

mods

[Anonymous Coward]

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.