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More Devs Going Indie, To Gamers' Benefit
Wired is running a feature about how a growing number of game developers are abandoning jobs at major publishers and studios and taking their experience to the indie scene instead. Quoting:
"They’re veterans of the triple-A game biz with decades of experience behind them. They’ve worked for the biggest companies and had a hand in some of the industry’s biggest blockbusters. They could work on anything, but they’ve found creative fulfillment splitting off into a tiny crew and doing their own thing. They’re using everything they’ve learned working on big-budget epics and applying it to small, downloadable games. The good news for gamers is that, as the industry’s top talents depart the big studios and go into business for themselves, players are being treated to a new class of indie game. They’re smaller and carry cheaper price tags, but they’re produced by industry veterans instead of thrown together by B teams and interns. Most importantly, unlike big-budget games that need to appeal to the lowest common denominator to turn a profit, these indie gems reveal the undiluted creative vision of their makers."
Programmers are funny animals. Some of them work best in complete isolation. One person can pull off things that entire teams never dreamed of. A kid in their back bedroom, and a rainy summer, can generate a game quicker by any design-by-committee. Programmers don't naturally work in teams, they have to be taught - every serious CS course has a team-building component to it.
Lots of big names started off as tiny indies... Codemasters is the most famous example, most probably, and Valve has bought up indie teams before now. It's not surprising at all, the only surprise is that indie went "out of fashion" with some people for a decade or so.
The skill of programming a game is not about knowing Knuth off by heart, or finding mathematical shortcuts using integer arithmetic, it's about actually having a little vision and wanting to see it move around and make funny sounds. Once you know what you want to do, the rest is just slog-work to get it to work how you imagined. Large teams do sometimes miss the fact that, underneath everything else, there should be a game. Most of the "classic" games of the early 80's were written by teenagers in back bedrooms. Magazine cover tapes were full of indie material. Even large collect-a-weekly-parts programming magazines were written by what we would legally class as children (I know, I've spoken to someone on here that wrote a huge game for INPUT by Marshall Cavendish when they were a kid).
Indie development was around at the start of the Internet - almost the whole shareware scene was indie. It kinda lost sight of itself when huge powerful consoles became mainstream, moving into the "homebrew" and various other sidelines which, because of their dubious legal status, were never as popular in mass-media. Now indie has found its roots again. A teenager can knock up a game in a week and be selling it by the thousands from Steam, or direct from their own website. They don't have to worry about system architectures or OS or having enough processor power. They can be pretty sure that it can be ported to myriad systems and not have to worry about development kits for consoles.
I also think that indie and retro are often closely linked, because of this connection with old-time indie development. Retro remakes are popular, retro gaming magazines are everywhere - I was in London Stansted last week and there were FIVE different retro gaming magazines on the shelf - I couldn't believe it! People are happy to just play silly games that are no more complex than some Spectrum games of old - Facebook jollies, or five-minute play-throughs or even Flash/Java demos on the author's website (Altitude is very cool!). People are carrying devices that can run small games with ease and even buy them immediately and securely from their phones.
In fact, I've started programming on a game that I've been wanting to do for years because of all the indie development I see. I see how simple or retro games are coming back into fashion and it makes me want to code. Chances are that my code will never leave my PC but it's immense fun to be doing for myself - it's replaced quite a lot of other hobbies just lately - and very heart-warming to see my little sprites bop around the screen. Even my girlfriend likes the fact that there is a little game that she can modify and influence and has often said she wants to sit there and make dozens of sprites for it. She often asks what I've got "your little people" to do today. The beauty is that if other people think the finished article is good enough then setting up a store, Paypal link or even Steam distribution takes no time at all. And because I programmed it for the fun of it, it's ALL profit - I would have programmed if a time-traveller told me that I'd never, ever sell a single copy.
If you're working in the industry, and the scare-stories are anywhere near true, I'm not surprised that people are leaving their megalithic corporations that are trying to source funding for $60m games and instead want to see if they ca