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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.
Maybe computer games will actually show some game design again instead of being graphics/physics engine demos.
mmmm...forbidden donut
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.
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!