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Defining an Indie Game Developer
NinjaBee Games writes "A continual debate rages about the nature of making independent games. 'What is Indie game development?' This argument endures throughout the year, but it's almost never heard louder than right after the announcement of finalists or winners of an Indie game development contest. The debate currently is in full swing after Microsoft's recent announcement that they will be changing the name of the Xbox Live Community Games section to Xbox Live Indie Games. In light of this important debate, Brent Fox of Indie developer NinjaBee has written a blog post in which he claims he has finally found the 'clear and undeniable' definition of Indie."
An indie developer is the guy that says "Hey, I can code. I like video games. I should make my own video game! I have no visual or musical artistic sense, but that's just filler toward the end of the project!"
500 hours of coding later, the indie developer comes to realize that their game will fail miserably due to the fact that they underestimated how hard it would be to come across free graphic, music, and sound effect assets that reflect what the game is supposed to be.
That same indie developer then spends another handful of hours learning Blender to realize that the best they can come up with artistically is a sphere that's had its centre punched in that they euphemistically call a "bean bag chair" and try to completely retool their gameplay around that. Grand Theft Auto 5 becomes Beanbag Jumping World.
1,000 hours, many Blender exports, recording sessions in the bathroom bashing a plank of wood with a hammer to re-create the sound of wood cracking without buying some $100+ sound library and a crappy public domain tune later, they release their game on their webpage and over the next five years, approximately 3 people not related to the author check it out.