Jul 132010
I was recently asked to take part in a candid, water-cooler-style talk on what exactly being an “Indie Developer” is. Sharing the spotlight with me are two other chums; check out the header graphic:
I think they dawdled on the “What is Indie?” topic a bit too much, but there’s some interesting reading in there and it’ll only take a few minutes of your time. Check it out now!
5 Responses to “Indies at the WaterCooler”
Comments (5)
Thanks for the valuable contribution to the gaming world! It’s amazing how good an interview you were from your mobile home :)
Do you ever dip below the border to make it to Massachusetts?
Do you think story writers (without programming skills) have a place in indie game dev?
Oh man, are you wanting me to do another interview right here in my own blog comments for an article that links to an offsite interview? Because that’d be pretty cool.
Yeah, I wrote that interview while laying in the too-short-for-me van-bed. It’s a miracle I could even find WiFi!
We went south a bit to visit Intuition Games in Iowa, and crossed whatever states those were to get back into Canada again. Gotta say, racism in North Dakota and Minnesota is surprisingly scary. I thought we were through with this! Seriously, United States. What the hell?
As far as story writers go: HELLS YES! I have often struggled with actual, meaningful story and character creation in my games, and always just end up giving up and just leaving the temporary text in. Case-in-point: The mission text in SteamBirds is my 2-minute placeholder text that never ended up getting replaced.
The real problem with story-writers is paying for them. If there was a good story writer that also did sound – or art – or programming – s/he would be an invaluable asset to the team. But paying for story alone?… I might be convinced to pay for it, but most developers wouldn’t. You can argue for their cause until you’re blue in the face, but in the end, most devs would rank story and character below Sound Effects. And those guys are true ‘starving artists’.
I really want to see that change.
That was a great read!
Yeah the video game experience almost denotes something other than a heavily textual based experience. With RPGs and adventure games, I wonder if those genres actually are more like interactive fiction.
I think a hot looking game like Uncharted needed its story/writing to propel it beyond another pretty game.
I guess writers can offer their service pro-bono and just ride the success of that project and others until it leads to something paid.
Anyway, yeah hopefully we’ll get some cross traffic going :)
Yeah, I’d happily chunk out something — like, 5% net income – to a good writer for a big project. Maybe that’s unfair? I dunno, it seems decent to me. Most seem to want an hourly rate for their work though, which is hard to pull off when you’re a poor Indie dev.
Even with little text — stories like the one found in Braid are pretty entrancing. And I will state that I love Portal to death just for the plot/voice acting. If that game was a movie I’d watch it twice. The gameplay was just a bonus.