More Devs Going Indie, To Gamers' Benefit 137
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."
Quite (Score:4, Insightful)
indie games need to be good (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Quite (Score:4, Insightful)
If you read the article, the indie game "shank" they're talking about is released by EA. I wonder if they know that indie means something else than slightly "different" games?
Re:Read in the EA startup voice. (Score:3, Insightful)
Welcome them with your money and word of mouth advertising. They need it; and considering their budget is really small even a small sales volume will keep them in the green.
Re:Quite (Score:3, Insightful)
We all know... (Score:3, Insightful)
There will always be a market for quality.
Fluttermind saved my sanity (Score:4, Insightful)
I started out in the industry at 15, back in '85. At that point, everything was indie. There were no big studios, and the few existing companies funded very little.
Moving on 20+ years (cough), I quit Microsoft Game Studios in 2009. At the point where I left, there were teams of 100+ people, no one individual had much impact on the game, communication issues both up and down and across the team due to size alone made everything exceedingly slow and frustrating.
I left.
I started a new company - Fluttermind Ltd. - which has been going a year and a half now. It's still fun, and the distance has given me an interesting perspective. This is what I see.
The mainstream indistry is filled with passionate, talented people. The average Joe thinks these games are worth $50+. From my long-time nerd perspective, that's amazing. I dreamed of this day as a kid and it's finally here.
Don't demonise 'big' game companies just because they're big. That's not punk-rock. That's not anti-establishment. That's knee-jerk foolishness. Big company games are often awesome. I can't wait for Team Ico's next release - 'big' company funded or no. I am utterly enjoying Battlefield Bad Company 2. Amazing multiplayer - some of the best experiences I've had as a gamer.
'Big' games demand a lot of assets, each of which is crafted by a professional - no 'get your mate to paint a splash screen because he's got an A-level in art' crap here. Professionals and their assets are expensive, so publishers don't like taking risks very often. But it does happen. Fable and Shadow of the Colossus are both very weird, off-beat games funded by massive conglomerates and both great games. There are not that many others, but it's the same for Hollywood. For those of you saying 'Yeah, big budget movies suck, too' - I ask you to imagine an 'indie' version of 'The Matrix'. Or 'Lord of the Rings'. They'd really suck.
Don't demonise marketing. I've never had a single marketing bod tell me what to put in a game. Ever. Full stop. Secondly, the one thing more likely to cause you a trip to the funny-farm after slogging your heart out for 2-4 years is for your marketing to suck, or - worse - to not be there at all. It will kill your game. It will kill your company. It will kill your job. The end. Saying 'good games will win through' is like saying 'positive thinking cures cancer': I'm sure there are anecdotal cases, but as people here are usually keen to point out, causation and correlation are quite different.
As for the complaint 'games include superfluous crap'. If you think EA wants to have a team keep running at a burn rate of half a million a month for an extra 3 months so some guy can make a hundred extra guns nobody cares about, you've clearly never spent a minute in a steering meeting.
While some indie games are wonderful (Dwarf Fortress and Wierd Worlds are amazing) a vast majority of them are worth 10 minutes and little more. Note I didn't say 'crap', I just said 'small'. Like a Daffy Duck cartoon. I wouldn't hold 'Duck Amuck' against 'Schindler's List' and compare the two. It is foolish.
I admire anyone's initiative and ability to craft a game themselves, on a tiny budget (yup, I'm doing precisely that), but to pretend that indie means 'better games', or 'better people' is both incorrect and insulting.
Re:indie games need to be good (Score:4, Insightful)
What? Indie games need to be good, because otherwise they're mediocre, indistinguishable from the flood of other mediocre indie games. Mediocre indie games can't get attention like other mediocre games, since they don't have marketing as a back-door.
give me inspiration over slick production (Score:4, Insightful)
I think your sentiments are common, and also apply to other arts like music. Lots of people seem to like immaculate but (IMO) dull music. Personally, I'm happy with a few rough edges, if the ideas are good, because it reminds me that art is made by people. I'm sure this is influenced by the fact that I'm an indie musician myself! :-P
Programmers (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:give me inspiration over slick production (Score:2, Insightful)
I knew someone would mention music as a possible model. It does seem attractive at first glance.
However, while it is possible to create a piece of music using software worth $100 that is absolutely indistinguishable from something created using millions of dollars of studio time to 99% of people, the same is not true of game development. Indeed, a piece of music that sounds a 'bit rougher' or 'more live' may have an enhanced atmosphere, as it draws the audience closer to the shamanic act of performance. This isn't a factor when making games. Nobody wants it a 'bit buggy' or with 'slightly inconsistent textures'. And nobody wants to get closer to us. We smell due to not being allowed home for 3 weeks during crunch.
A four man team (one artist/animator, two coders and a level designer) can not create something indistinguishable from a $50m budget game. They might be able to do some tricks and adjust the visuals to work within their limitations, but they simply won't compete with Battlefield Bad Company, for example.
'Art' as a whole seems largely free of the budget/perceived quality link.
If we were talking about the automotive industry, for example, we'd never suggest that budget cuts were going to result in better cars.
Re:Bloated companies. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fluttermind saved my sanity (Score:3, Insightful)
I like Indy games because I perceive that they find it easier to take more risks with design and concept. Rather than release "Sports Again 2011" and "3D FPS WarSim: The Reiteration", they can release games that offer some novelty.
Not all their ideas work, not all of their ideas are well executed. But there's a zillion of them, so there's bound to be a lot of bad releases.
But also, guess what: there's a lot of bad releases among big studios, too:
Truly great games are rare from both major studios and indy developers.
But the odds that an indy developer is going to release a small, fun game that offers something new and doesn't cost $50+ seems higher than the odds that a large studio would. I enjoy games from both sources. But I honestly get more excitement from seeing what indy developers come up with.
Re:Experience requirement (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fluttermind saved my sanity (Score:3, Insightful)
You're... you're comparing Fable to Shadow of the Colossus? And you call yourself an indie game dev?
Seriously, what the fuck? Fable was an absolutely bog-standard RPG with real-time combat (if you could call it combat). There was nothing innovative in it - if you'd made the main character an elf it would have passed for an extra-bland off-label Legend of Zelda game. There was nothing weird, off-beat, innovative or otherwise interesting in the thing; the whole game was a very short exercise in playing it safe. Heck, when I'd finally found a good place to level up (after about 12 hours) I realized that I was 90% of the way through the game! That's not a full game, that's an extended demo.
Shadow of the Colossus, on the other hand, had all of those attributes you ascribe to it - but describing it in the same breath as Fable? I have to question your judgment there.