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Economic Climate Spurring Independent Game Success
Eurogamer is running an opinion piece suggesting that innovation and creativity have been on the decline for years within the games industry. Now, with the threat of the economic crisis looming, game publishers are shying further from new projects and ideas, instead choosing to rehash popular IP in order to minimize the risk of failure. The upside is that their reluctance, along with technological improvements that make game distribution easier, is allowing independent developers to gain exposure like never before.
"This revolution will give us a new wave of developers who see games through very different eyes to those of their studio-bound compatriots. Forced to consider the financial bottom line, the technological bleeding edge and the whims of Metacritic at each turn, big studio development is by no means uncreative, but certainly has to follow certain set patterns. ... The studio system couldn't have created a game like Flower, the utterly beautiful PSN title which came out earlier this month; but more than that, it couldn't have created a persona like Jenova Chen, the mind behind Flower, who happily talks in interviews about evoking emotions, moving past primal feelings and 'maturing' the industry in ways that don't involve sex, blood and swearing. He talks about making games that don't empower gamers, but instead make them experience other things, other emotions. It's spine-tingling stuff. It's also commercial suicide — or would be, to a studio working in the traditional development context."
The current economic situation benefits developers who go for a lower budget since that way profit is easier to make. Indie games are low budget but many commercial games can have relatively small budgets too (Wii Fit anyone?). The current budgets needed to produce a so-called "AAA" title for the HD consoles has massively increased from the previous generation while revenue remained the same. The economic situation just accelerates what was inevitable: That these high cost epics fail to make enough money compared to their investment. I've read an analysis that this would happen and that was written before the crisis was even started.
The blame lies not with the economic situation, it lies with the companies themselves who throw gigantic amounts of cash at single games and then suffer when even one of them fails to live up to expectations. The economic situation is just a convenient excuse to make it look like this wasn't the fault of the people in charge.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The current economic situation benefits developers who go for a lower budget since that way profit is easier to make.
At one end of "low budget", how does an indie developer working on his first title come up with $12,000 for a year's lease on office space, $4,000 for your region's objectionability rating, and other things that the console makers demand of all developers (source: warioworld.com)?
In the name of spurring on independent production, are there any programs out there like SEUCK (Shoot'em'up construction kit) that average joe's can use to create games?
It's not Free, but I used The Games Factory by Clickteam for a few years. Even once I stopped creating the end product in TGF, I still used it for a while for rapid prototyping of 2D gameplay concepts. Even in 3D, there are plenty of PC-based game engines that can be modded using a scripting language.
I'd love to see a construction kit for SCUMM-type adventure games like the Monkey Island games. Perhaps open source to the rescue?
Something like this maybe? It was used to create "Zak McKracken 2" ... Linux version is in the works and set to be released later this year. It's not exactly open source but it seems to work pretty well.
There's an untapped market for ya. World of Goo and the Penny Arcade games seem to have sold fairly well on the platform. 2DBoy says almost 5% of games sold through their website were Linux versions after just 2 days. I buy these "small Indie games" because they respect my platform.
But didn't the publisher of World of Goo just file Chapter 11? :(
A huge catastrophe caused the huge creatures to die, and this helped the small ones flourish.
Just a thought.
I found PyGame to be fairly easy to use. Yeah, it does require programming but you aren't going to get as much creativity into a system when you're restricted in what you can do (tweaking parameters only goes so far) and anything that's sufficiently versatile to do anything programming can is going to be just as complex. Any restricted system is going to involve hacks for true creativity and when you're going to pretty much hack your system apart you can just as well learn programming, it'll probably be faster anyway.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Adventure Game Studio has been around forever. It's the toolkit used to build Maniac Mansion Deluxe.
The problem isn't the lack of programming tools - free or otherwise. The problem lies in assembling and supporting all the other talent you need: Story. Production design. Set Design. Characters and Props. Art and animation. Music. Dialog and Vocal Performance.
The generic game engine may be all you need to animate the underworlds of Grim Fandango or Bioshock.
But first they have to imagined, populated and given direction.
It's not free and it's Windows only but I've always liked Game maker.
In fact I wish there was something like this for Linux.
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