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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."
You can publish to XBOX without getting microsofts approval.
http://creators.xna.com/en-US/
The XNA Creators Club allows you to develop games for PC and XBOX 360.
You can then publish the games to the 360 and charge points for them.
(they get reviewed by the community to ensure that they do not contain bad things).
XNA is a managed wrapper around direct X that provides a nice layer of abstraction.
(Also I would like to quickly say that the Farseer physics engine is very nice).
Joopsy.
"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."
Not sure what the setup for the PS3 and Wii is but the XBox's community games are peer reviewed by other developers and not by Microsoft officials. XNA is also extremely easy to use and has some fantastic samples available.
I'd argue XBox community games is probably one of the easiest ways for indies to get into game development and have their games published to a wide audience. Even if you develop yourself and advertise yourself games you've made for the PC people still have to find your game in the depths of the web, whilst with XBox community games your game is listed right there on the consolate equivalent of a desktop for the user to find. It takes away the pains of marketing and distribution and even the low level parts of PC game development (you don't need to cater for different LOD for different spec hardware for example), it allows indies to concentrate entirely on the important part- game development itself.
Braid is fun times. There are plenty of others. Spelunky and Dwarf Fortress come immediately to mind. The guy that writes Dwarf Fortress supports himself on donations, which is pretty cool.
Another system (unfortunately windows only) is the Conitec A7 Engine. It comes with its own scripting language, support for other languages (C++, C#, C, etc...), its own level editor (Basic, but supports importing from other formats), its own model editor (Really really basic, but supports importing from other modelling apps like 3DS Max, Maya, Lightwave, blender, etc..), and a whole host of other features. Personally I used the engine in its older revisions (A5 Standard Edition and A6 Commercial Edition) and I know a lot about the engine has changed; and so has the community, so I am not 100% sure what the community is like now, however it did have a rock solid community when I had the time to dabble in game dev. This engine isn't necessarily as flexible as Torque, but I would put (Older versions compared) Torque and the A# about on par, Torques community and structure would have the edge though with their support for publishing, etc...