* “mainstream” avec scare quotes – AAA, big budget, core gamer games – whether that’s even remotely “mainstream” is another discussion.
Some of us in the game industry have a secret. We do our profession’s equivalent of putting on a bat mask, going out at night and jumping around rooftops chasing bad guys. The reasons vary – all I can speak about here is what fuels my particular passion, and how it’s changed my outlook for the better.
Love
The big budgets that define modern AAA development often put developers at odds with their own tastes. How many times have you heard some variation on “That would be cool, but it’d never sell”? Whether you hear that more as the voice of the devil himself or simple fiscal responsibility – the point is, devs can’t always run with the ideas that interest them most.
All that changes when you go home at the end of the day and slave over a hot debugger, on your own idea, of your own accord. Your primary motivator becomes your passion for the idea. This can transform your creative perspective completely. Often you’re making the game because it doesn’t exist yet, and you want desperately to play it. Artistic impulses don’t get much more simple and powerful than that. Can you imagine Dwarf Fortress coming into existence by any other means?
Creativity Within (Significant!) Limitations
The flip side to all that warm fuzziness is that you’re only one person, facing down an enormous, unknowable mountain of work, with no guarantee of success at the end of it all. If you get stuck on a tough programming problem for a few days, your project makes zero progress until you resolve it. If you’re collaborating with other folks for code or content, you’re depending on them to share your vision and enthusiasm, otherwise the whole thing falls apart.
This isn’t all bad though. Limitations define all creativity, and some truly amazing works have arisen from the most formidable of limitations. A good independent project embraces this. It pushes you in directions you might never have considered otherwise. It forces you to overturn assumptions and make creative use of your scant resources. There have been major artistic movements, such as the French New Wave of cinema, that have flourished by adopting constraints to better serve their focus.
Discourages the Use of Production Value as a Crutch
Modern games usually have a lot of content in them. Millions of dollars worth, generated by dozens of people over multiple years. You don’t have to be a jaded industry cynic to agree that it’s very easy to cover up a mediocre game design with all that content.
When you step into indie-land this crutch is kicked mercilessly from under you. You probably can’t make an epic story in an epic world with 100 hours of gameplay. That’s fine. There are billions of potential good games out there with none of these things and more of them need to be made.
Separation of Art and Commerce
I believe that every developer, mainstream and otherwise, has a long-term duty to both expand and sustain this medium. With lots of money on the line, however, most projects end up being much more about sustaining (namely, the company’s cash reserves) than expanding (namely, artistic boundaries).
Point being, big budgets and risk aversion go hand in hand. However as many have observed before, indie games can serve as the proving ground for ideas that could never gain a foothold in the mainstream industry. The pragmatic argument is simply that having one versus zero outlets for unproven ideas gives Art a better chance of flourishing alongside Commerce.
The student project called Narbacular Drop turning into the polished and highly acclaimed Portal is a very condensed, direct example of this effect in action. It all started with some students digging into a concept they found fascinating.
Conditions You to Many Small, Brief, Instructive Failures
You know what’s really scary about mainstream development? Sometimes you have to wait 2+ years to find out if you were wrong about an idea. The tech and content requirements of a design element take so long to come online, in the worst cases you’re committed to the idea even if the end result is highly flawed.
Conversely, you won’t get very far in indie development without learning how to “strangle your babies” – being the first and most unforgiving critic of your own ideas. You’ll learn to avoid becoming emotionally attached to ideas that aren’t panning out. Small scale ideas with iteration times of a day or less mean you can rapidly improve your sense for what works and what doesn’t. Will Wright said it best: “… Some of the most effective education is failure-based.”
There are lots of great “jam” type events such as Ludum Dare and the TIGsource competitions that are an ideal setting in which to do this.
Implementation Keeps You Honest
If your day job is a lead position, you may share my mortal fear of losing touch with folks in the trenches. There are plenty of ways to avoid this within the workplace, but making something yourself – having to think through the implications of everything, being reminded of all the little snags and technical compromises along the way – is also a great way to break down those barriers. The common term for this is “getting back to your roots”. I strongly endorse it.
Less Politicized, More Direct Interaction with Your Audience
If you’ve worked on an even remotely high-profile game, you know how scary it can be to have untold numbers of folks out there in internet-land who will be, with varying amounts of vitriol, unhappy if you mangle their baby or even just defy their expectations. This can do tremendous damage to your motivation and optimism.
Certainly this can still be the case on an indie project. But the odds are much higher that communities like the TIGsource forums will be a receptive, helpful audience for your efforts.
You know, I’d love to write more, but I really need to get back to work on my game. It’s callin’ my name! Hope this has been useful.
August 25th, 2008 at 10:54 am
This makes me want to get back to work on K2, but I’m having trouble balancing work time and home time, even though we’re not crunching or anything :/.
And yes, except for one, uh, incident, TIGSource has been a beautiful place to talk about games. There’s no insane expectations about your games being AAA polished things, and a great willingness to appreciate the cool ideas in a project despite the limitations showing through in levels of polish. It’s a great wall to bounce off.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:05 am
Thank you for this interesting article, it makes some of my thinking change. I knew the futur of gaming will go out of indie, but i didn’t think that big budget is the problem. I actually thought that regular game making companys will take the exemple of the emo-games [emo in emotions] or any experimental game projects. But if the regular game buyer changes, these arty games could come out from big companys…
I’m not sure the futur is really bright for experimental game devloppers who focus on anything else than selling problems…
August 28th, 2008 at 5:07 am
nice blog, thanks!
August 31st, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Cortout:
Thanks for the comment. I might not have been clear enough about it here given the focus, but I’m actually pretty optimistic about the potential of mainstream games to both generate powerful new ideas and build on the ideas of independent games. The two fields are complementary really. The entire medium will benefit the more exchange there is between the two.
September 1st, 2008 at 12:04 am
JP, first, thanks for the response. And I didn’t feel the optimism in the article because all the problems you listed about what was the problems that were overcome by indie, are the basis of allmost all game making company…
But if you believe in a potential change of situation, why should I not?
September 30th, 2008 at 12:56 am
Awesome post and I loved reading it. Find it so hard to get inspired lately, but this certainly helped.
Loser college kid salutes; this really rang true with everything I’ve heard from friends in the industry.
October 18th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Not having worked in the mainstream/corporate game dev. arena I don’t really have a comparison, however from talking to those who have, and even ppl working in other areas inside largish companies, I do see indie dev. as much more what I want to stay with,. . never have been a fan of big buisness. perhaps its just the pretention of being a struggling artist/game designer, that I cling to.
Well its a personal choice,. and I agree that some great stuff does come out of that system,. with its crazy resourses and giant groups of very creative people. I like your ideas.
December 1st, 2008 at 3:02 am
[…] vector poem » What I Get Out of Indie "You know what’s really scary about mainstream development? Sometimes you have to wait 2+ years to find out if you were wrong about an idea. The tech and content requirements of a design element take so long to come online, in the worst cases you’re committed to the idea even if the end result is highly flawed." – what triple A game devs get out of working on indie games in their downtime. (tags: gaming gamedesign development) […]