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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."
Pay for the work wasn't worth it.
Pay in the gaming industry sucks. I left and immediately made about 15% more, the job was more stable, and less stressful. Went on to make much more later.
The second issue that really got to me was the stupid endless "crunch time". It was ALWAYS crunch time. Project management sucked so it was just some fat-ass bigwigs always just moving up the powerpoint milestones, while adding requirements at the same time. I got tired of the 50-to-60-hour work weeks.
More pay for less work. Only idiot noobs straight out of high-school could think much good of that industry. "I wanna make video games for a living!" says the dork who played video games for the last 15-years of his life (at 20).
Sometimes I think about the fun, and I might join some startup again some day, but I'd never work for any of the big guys again.
As an independent game developer, I must say I love my superfluous crap. If I couldn't throw in a couple unnecessary particle effects or shader effects, I don't know what I'd do.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Ok, time to make myself unpopular around here.
Personally, I don't welcome this news. I've given the indie gaming scene quite a few tries over the last few years, and tend to come away underwhelmed. Ok, there are a few titles I've liked. I guess Portal had indie-gaming somewhere in its DNA (even if the manner of its release, bundled with the Orange Box, was anything but indie). Limbo has an interesting style, though it's also a bit of a one-trick pony that wears thin about half-way through its (fairly short) play-time.
Ultimately, I like big-budget triple-A extravaganzas. I like high production values, cutting edge graphics and plenty of attention to detail. This isn't to say that every much-hyped big-budget game is good; in the year that saw the release of Final Fantasy XIII (and another bloody Kane & Lynch installment), this is blatantly not true. But if I look at the games I've actually pumped most time into and enjoyed the most over the last couple of years, I come up with titles like World of Warcraft (though I'm happily off that particular crack now), Forza Motorsport 3, Ratchet & Clank: Crack in Time, Uncharted 2, Crysis and God of War 3. Not exactly a list of indie titles. And despite me having given them a go, even the high-end indie titles like World of Goo and the Maw have failed to grab my interest for more than an hour or so.
I'm also generally skeptical that allowing creative types to express their "undiluted creative vision" is always a good thing. It's a gross over-simplification to say that big-budget titles need to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Ratchet & Clank: Crack in Time contains puzzles that are frankly on a par with anything I've seen in an indie game recently (the irony being that R&C's puzzles are all built around the old "push button to open door" mechanic, just infused with some fairly mind-warping twists). God of War 3 wasn't far behind. But when you get the "undiluted creative vision", what you're often (not always, I admit, but often) getting is a load of self-indulgent tripe from the creator that a competent editorial board would have cut not because they felt they needed to dumb the product down, but because it's not actually any fun to play. This isn't limited to games; for every director's cut in the movie industry that actually improves the original, there are half a dozen or so that just add unnecessary rubbish, ruining the pace of the film. Look also at what happens to books from authors who have become celebrities, once editors lose the confidence to challenge them; you get the kind of ever-expanding padding-filled tomes that characterise the later works of... say... Tom Clancy, J. K. Rowling and Stephen King.
I'm not denying that management and publishers don't occasionally demand dumbing down, but it's pretty clear that seeing the creative type as a poor, exploited victim trying to defend his flawless original concept from the nasty corporate villains is a misleading approach.
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