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What Was the Greatest Age For Indie Games?
jonyami writes: "Indie games have existed for as long as there's been something to play and something to play it on. From the humble Apple II to modern PCs, Xbox Live Arcade and the Kickstarter revolution, just what was the greatest age for indie games? A new article takes a look at the various eras, the top indie games and the future — which one do you reckon is on top?"
Never before has it been so easy to actually earn money with indie game development.
And things might be getting even better.
Easily the '90s
Doom was "Indie". Command and Conquer was "Indie". Hell, compared to the modern AAA teams large enough to fill a city church, Super Mario World was "Indie".
The difference between 1 guy in a bedroom making an ephemeral App, and 10-20 people in an office a timeless classic does not give the right to the former to be lauded as either innovative, avant-garde, or somehow good for the industry. Contemporary "Indie" developers are just as much of a cancer on modern gaming as AAA kilo-teams.
May the Maths Be with you!
I direct your attention to Chris Roberts' "Star Citizen" which has so far raised north of $43million purely from crowdfunding.
(Roberts was the mastermind behind the "Wing Commander" series.)
I dunno. Mesozoic?
Michael Orwin's Fungaloids for the ZX81... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
For "Easy access to the market" I'd say it was the 8-bit era, since all you had to have was an 8-bit computer, record your software on a tape and go to any tape printing facility with your "master".
For money I'd say it was the early iOS era, since Apple made nearly as easy and open as the 8-bit era to access iOS, and the market was not as fully crammed of competition as it has become later.
The 90's were already too difficult, hardware was a rapidly moving target (if you came from Amiga or the Atari ST in the 90's you had to start writing to DOS since both 68k machines never had a sequel with the right success, and then you would have ended up to reshape your abilities to write first for Windows and some weird graphical API, then ending up to write for Windows with either Direct X or OpenGL).
Crowdfunding is letting small creators getting easier access to better artists, musicians, but the market is still the same, and creating assets hasn't became easier than with the mobile resolution.
The 80's were great as it was easy to create games as a single person (no need for a real graphics artist for a long time).. And Now because of the easiness of how people can find your game, but it requires more people to actually produce something top quality looking..
Amiga for sure
Support PC, Mac and Linux will improve sales. Yeah Mac and even more so Linux is low in numbers, but certainly if the game is good Linux users are happy to throw cash at a good game.
I've been around, playing games at least, since the early 1980s. If by indie you mean `1 or 2 or 3 people making a living from writing and selling their games with more or less complete independence from bean counters and trend-mongers` then the answer has to be around then, up to around 1994 or so when powerful consoles took off, and the visual side of things was treated as more important (3d, video fmv, cd audio)...basically when it was seen that there was a lot of money to be made appealing to non-traditional gamers. The hobbiest side of things died more or less overnight, as you can't compete on those terms and there was (essentially) no internet for them to self-publish. It's possible again now, thanks to the internet, app stores etc but - perhaps i'm old and jaded - it doesn't seem as fun, or with as much variety now. But I suppose you could make the case that there's been a renaissance in the last, say, 4 years or so.
I'd say my greatest age for indie games was 23. I hadn't started grad school yet and was working part-tme as a bartender and playing in a band, so I had lots of time on my hands for playing indie games.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Apparently in this timeline, the world went from the Apple II to PCs, with nothing in between.
Board/Card games in the 90's, when publishing tools got good enough that you could start to do it all from home. That's indie gaming, not this bullshit.
Early 90s shareware was very different from late 90s and early 2000s mods. A bunch of eventually AAA titles and studios spawned out of mods for existing games. Things like Counter Strike, Team Fortress, the original DOTA. I'd put that in a completely different Era from the console scene and the shareware scene.
I can still play most of the indie games of yesteryear, and there's more new ones coming out all the time. More and more of them are free to play, or are included for a song with a humble bundle.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As a developer ? 5 years ago when you could easily breach out. As a gamer ? Today with the wide choice of quality indy game.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
What constitutes indie is one questions (and AAA is even harder to come to a consensus, even among my work peers) but that said...
As a child of the 80's, who adamantly played video games (e.g., Apple ][, arcade, 2600, NES, etc...) and got into professional game development over 10 years ago (I work for a AAA studio and my have my own gig for nights/weekends) I'd agree with those who say now, 2014, is the best time for indie game development.
Powerful engines and Middleware tools are accessible with licenses that fit indie budgets (e.g., Unity3d, Unreal4, etc...) as well as a swatch of free software for development. (e.g. Phaser: http://phaser.io/ Blender http://www.blender.org/ Love https://love2d.org/ Flixel http://flixel.org/ Haxe http://haxe.org/ )
The internet, as-is, provides indies with a way for
- distance-collaboration (Skype, E-mail, Groups, etc...)
- community building (Twitter, CMSs, Facebook, etc...)
- fundraising (IndieGogo, Kickstarter, HumbleBundle, Paypal, custom web-based donation system, etc...)
- advertising (game communities, news outlets, etc...)
Organizations, such as the International Game Developer's Association (IGDA, http://igda.org/ ) and events like the Global Game Jam, PAX (IndieMegabooth), and MAGFest also contribute to the community of indie game developers.
It is a great time to be an indie game developer in terms of accessibility and ability to achieve a sustainable income.
All games were indy. Sierra was in Roberta's kitchen. Well that's where see answered the phone anyway.
Can't post. Playing Dota 2 in a coffee shop
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
No, I mean the NSA knows, what amazon, Chase, and VISa all know. Which games Soukill likes. The shame, the horror.
That goodness Snowden put stop to it and is now cajoling so bravely with Putin. Brave man Snowen and non-bully Putin.
Let the bullies beat you up Soulkill. You don't want to violate their rights with NSA-like intrusions.
Say what you will about all the access devs have now, but it was that time when things were greatest.
People were still experimenting. Not just with concepts but core mechanics. Interfaces, everything. It was the wild west.
People weren't yet dumbing things down to make them more "Accessible", when you got a game there wasn't going to be another one in 5 minutes. The internet wasn't everywhere. People still had slow connections when it came around. You read magazines, hunted for games and traded with friends.
The early days were really the best for the entirety of computing. Sure, things are flashy, we have such powerful machines now. Those were the days of great games and great indie games.
Star Citizen is a prime example of the difference between industry alumni and what others might call "true indie" developers.* Apparently to succeed in indie games, you have to first move away and work for an established company. In the case of Chris Roberts, this involved relocating near Origin Systems and climbing its ranks.
* I'm aware that "true indie" invites comparisons to the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. But what's a better term for someone who builds a reputation without having relocated to work for a well-known video game company?
So let me formulate a similar assertion without NTS. Unlike the Commodore 64, the IBM PC had no hardware sprites, and it had no hardware scrolling prior to widespread use of EGA/VGA. And its CPU was too slow to simulate these things at a frame rate on par with arcades, the C64, the MSX (whose video was the same as that of the ColecoVision), and the NES. This limited what kinds of action games worked well on early PCs. PCs were fine for anything turn-based or with few moving objects, but something like Giana Sisters was right out.
I'm interested in what was going on 2006-2010 when games were being released as art. Small indie games with floating glowing objects, very non traditional game play, beautiful surreal aesthetics. I can't think of a single reference. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
You have the tech curve which was low and so the story and gameplay curve by necessity had to be high. Over time these curves hit a sweet spot which im in my opinion was the Super Nintendo (SNES). That was the golden era. Think of how many big franchises peaked then - Zelda, Mario kart (peaked early). It was fortunate that Atari made a a balls of the console revolution on some level because I grep up with Japanese culture hidden clandestinely in my games and consoles. The music, artwork and story lines - all heavily influenced by Japanese culture, especially the animation and music. I feel that Japan's gift to the world is not technology. Other countries do much better in that regard. The PS4 is all AMD really, and if it wasn't AMD it would be Intel or nVidia. We never really needed the likes of NEC. Japan's gift is their culture, and I consider myself lucky to have had it infused with my upbringing.
The SNES and Megadrive era, especially SNES imo gave us reasonable graphics - enough to not make u feel like u need more. It made the best use of what it had and filled the rest with story, and music and still defined computer gaming - i.e. it wasn't too real..
I always sucked at FPS games. OK, I'm gonna cast my spell of Getting Back to Work now. Good thing I'm wearing my +2 gloves of typing..
"Indie games" is a hipsterism that didn't even exist until the middle 2000's, so the only answer to the question is "right now".
At least, it was the turning point. It was a great engine, with decent (albeit buggy) tools. As it grew, and modders became more and more ambitious, you began to see some really unique full games (originally called "TCs" or "Total Conversions").
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
Back before the interne, I remember going to little stores packed with thousands of disks ranging from 99 cents to maybe 3.99 of programs and games from indy developers. Some games were free, you just bought the disk and some you cost a bit more. Most of the time the games were pretty bad, if they even worked, but now and then you came across some pretty good ones. At worst, if you didnt like the program, just delete it and you now had an new blank floppy disk.
Goat simulator legitimately kicks ass. I can't think of a better, faster, or wider distributed game like it that was made that well.
Plenty of rocks, sticks and pebbles for everyone's game.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
The best age was before there were even "indie" games and no one had invented the silly word. All developers then were independent of each other and there were no mega game corporations. Even EA used to be "indie".
Seriously, if someone asks a question on slashdot it would help if they define what the terms mean, such as what "indie" means with implications that it is better in creativity but lacking in resources or other political baggage.