The Future of Independent Game Development 35
The Guardian's Games Blog has an article discussing where indie game development will go in the next few years after its recent resurgence. The story follows the success of one small game studio, and suggests that the games industry will move to further embrace low-cost development. Quoting:
"The likes of XBLA, ... PSN and WiiWare represent a reasonable revenue stream for publishers and developers, especially with a recession looming. However, in-house staff may not have the skills required to punch out cool, hugely intuitive budget games, with little or no management. If you look at something like Geometry Wars from Bizarre Creations, the project was started in the free time of experienced coder Stephen Cakebread, and may never have happened had he been shunted on to different, larger projects. Instead, big industry players are reaching out to the indie scene to source talent."
Reach out to the indie scene (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
If that's what you think of Indie games, then I suggest that you check out World of Goo [2dboy.com]. It's very refreshing.
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If anything, it shows that all there's all kinds of ways to market your game and if it is enjoyable, people will pay for it.
Now, looking at this year's possibly popular indie games, I think C [crayonphysics.com]
Whats with the console obsession? (Score:5, Insightful)
Firstly, bedroom coding was NEVER dead. Fuck it, I should know, I was doing bedroom coding games back when I used to read articles in Develop magazine about teams under 100 couldn't make games, and I kept doing it when Peter Molyneux was warning everyone it was suicide to start a small dev company, and I'm still doing it now. The fact that mainstream media such as the guardian doesn't read our press releases doesn't mean we don't exist.
Suddenly, because there are some indie games on console games, people think "indie gaming is back!".
Bullshit.
True INDEPENDENT gaming will always be at home only on the PC and the Mac, and maybe the iphone, because these are the platforms with no barrier to entry. If your game is for XBLA or PS3 or Wii, then your game idea and code has to be approved by a committee of suits at one of those companies. That's about as un-independent as it gets.
True indie gaming is where someone owns the whole company, has invested their own money to fund, sell and promote the game, and earns all the revenue. The minute you have a 'distribution and publishing partner', things begin to compromise.
That's not to say that you don't get some awesome games from 'indies' on consoles, but to herald it as the home of indie gaming is just wrong.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Whats with the console obsession? (Score:5, Informative)
You can publish to XBOX without getting microsofts approval.
http://creators.xna.com/en-US/
The XNA Creators Club allows you to develop games for PC and XBOX 360.
You can then publish the games to the 360 and charge points for them.
(they get reviewed by the community to ensure that they do not contain bad things).
XNA is a managed wrapper around direct X that provides a nice layer of abstraction.
(Also I would like to quickly say that the Farseer physics engine is very nice).
Joopsy.
XNA (Score:2)
I've been getting into XNA development. Not to shabby. It definitely will open doors and let people who don't traditionally create games (or anything 3d, really) give it a shot. The documentation is pretty good and not as intimidating as the straight DirectX stuff. For starters, they dont assume you know everything about shaders, vertex buffers, etc. You should still grab the DirectX SDK's though, because the current XNA docs don't go as deep into things like HLSL or lighting.
You still have to know you
Re:Whats with the console obsession? (Score:5, Informative)
"If your game is for XBLA or PS3 or Wii, then your game idea and code has to be approved by a committee of suits at one of those companies. That's about as un-independent as it gets."
Not sure what the setup for the PS3 and Wii is but the XBox's community games are peer reviewed by other developers and not by Microsoft officials. XNA is also extremely easy to use and has some fantastic samples available.
I'd argue XBox community games is probably one of the easiest ways for indies to get into game development and have their games published to a wide audience. Even if you develop yourself and advertise yourself games you've made for the PC people still have to find your game in the depths of the web, whilst with XBox community games your game is listed right there on the consolate equivalent of a desktop for the user to find. It takes away the pains of marketing and distribution and even the low level parts of PC game development (you don't need to cater for different LOD for different spec hardware for example), it allows indies to concentrate entirely on the important part- game development itself.
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I'd argue XBox community games is probably one of the easiest ways for indies to get into game development and have their games published to a wide audience.
It's community games, not independent games.
Easiest way to get your game published to a wide audience is to write a flash game.
#2 is probably to bring it out for the PC, using DirectX. Lots of people can run it if you don't abuse their computer.
#3 is to do the same with SDL :P SDL/OpenGL games can even be ported with minimal pain (supposedly) to the PS3 (if not too demanding) or to the Wii (ditto) and will run on Windows and Linux.
Tying yourself to Windows is not really a big win IMO.
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"It's community games, not independent games."
Huh? By community they mean the indie community who are developing for the XBox, it's still indies developing the games, it's certainly not studios.
"Easiest way to get your game published to a wide audience is to write a flash game."
That's certainly the easiest way to publish your game to a potential wide audience but the key word there is potential, you still have to find that audience and attract it somehow, that's a lot of work, the web is a big wide open spa
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I thought you couldn't actually sell the community games? and even if you can, good old Microsoft will be taking their big fat cut of your game.
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Yes you can, you can sell them at 200, 400, 800 or 1200 MS points (I think those are the right ranges anyway). Certainly Microsoft does take a cut (up to 30% I think) but seeing as they're handling distribution and marketing for you I don't think that's terrible.
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You don't need your idea approved by Microsoft to begin development - just enough cash to buy a dev kit and proof that your company can hack it.
You *do* need approval to publish, but that's not what you stated.
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I'm not sure why you say "and maybe the iPhone". Anecdotal evidence suggests that the iPhone is the premiere platform for independent game developers right now. At least one small Mac game developer said that their first iPhone release generated more money in the first 3 months than all the Mac games they'd ever produced in the history of the company. And it's easy to develop for and deploy for, and the limited size and scope of the games make the smaller and more focused games sellable. The Apple Store
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Yeah but you're comparing it with MAC GAMING.
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I compared it with Mac gaming by saying it was orders of magnitude more lucrative. And the comparison was because it's easier to port games from MacOS X to iPhone since the OS is basically the same and the tools are the same.
It seems apparent, though, that with an installed base well over 10M units and an easy path to publication, marketing, and revenue collection that any small games house not considering the iPhone are leaving money on the table.
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The current obsession with consoles is monetization. Unless your game is purely multiplayer focused (where you have broad capabilities to prevent piracy) people will pirate your game. Secondly, if you do make it onto one of the commercial venues, you get exposure to a sizable audience. The console market has a higher barrier to entry, but if you can cross that threshold you're rewarded with a large & paying market (which doesnt presume success; you still have to make a compelling game). Having to pa
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I agree with you that bedroom coding has never been dead; with companies like "Introversion" showing that it's also possible to do it full time.
So all in all, I agree with your last sentence: that consoles aren't the home of the indies, but throw caution as wanting to differentiate "True" indie vs the rest of indie games.
Within the indepent game community, I'd say there are a variety of definitions as to what consitutes someone as "indie", but the vast majority (at least from what I've heard at the round ta
mods (Score:2, Funny)
when i think indie game dev i think mods. not like helpful mods that add stuff to a game, or add a neat feature or two, but mods that really change the way a game is played. because most indie game dev's won't write their own engine, and a lot won't even be able to license one, and frankly a lot of them that do license one probably shouldn't.
i played this one indie game once, possibly because of mention in a slashdot article. a multiplayer FPS where you could add/subtract terrain from the game world. anyway
Re:mods (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't indies license engines and why should those that do probably not?
There's lots of good AAA quality engines out there with cheap/indie licenses:
www.terathon.com
www.powerrender.com
www.garagegames.com
There's also lots of games that have been built on them by indies and been quite successful.
Re:mods (Score:5, Insightful)
because most indie game dev's won't write their own engine, and a lot won't even be able to license one, and frankly a lot of them that do license one probably shouldn't.
There are plenty of free or lowcost engines out there.
Torque (mentioned in TFA) is low cost and relatively easy to get into (mostly script based if I remember correctly).
Ogre3D is free, crossplattform, and in combination with openAL and a good (and free) physics library you can hae a kickass game engine in (relatively) no time.
And that's if you want to write some 3D game. If you want to stick to 2D, your options are even vaster.
I think the problem is that many people who think "I want to write games myself" should have watched THAT [youtube.com] beforehand.
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History repeats itself (Score:2)
big industry players are reaching out to the indie scene to source talent.
Like it ever did. This is just a sign of the video game industry maturing.
Fewer big titles can only be a good thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Indie gaming is alive and strong (Score:1)
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Independent development is a good way to go (Score:3, Interesting)
I put Game! [wittyrpg.com] together in my free time, and initially it had exactly zero art. A couple artists came upon it and liked it enough to start contributing art, and thus it actually has quite a lot of art now.
Web based games allow for very rapid evolution, and also means you can start putting it in front of users way earlier than usual. It doesn't take a lot of code to make something useful either, I'm still the only coder on Game! and that's just in my spare time. In comparison to game studios with several hundred people all working on a game compared to a few people working part time, it's amazing what you can still get done.
Keep it up we need more indie games (Score:1)
Being Independent is Still Hard (Score:1)