Deep Plaid

“Indie” used to mean: “made outside the corporate system”.

When that system is crumbling into irrelevance, does “indie” still mean anything?

Being indie is usually perceived as cool because it’s about rebelling against The Man…

…But when The Man is senile, and has no idea what he is doing, and is on fire… it doesn’t feel very cool to rebel against him.

Best to just leave Him be.

It feels like we need a better term than “indie games”. How about “games by people who haven’t totally sold out.”

That’s not very concise, so I guess we can keep calling them “indie games.”

…Or we could just call them “games.”

Games are dead. Long live games.

makegames:

Every now and then someone will ask me for advice on making it as a professional indie game developer. First, it’s a huge honor to be asked that. So I want to say “Thank you!” Second… damn, if I really want to help out it’s a serious endeavor. Of course, I could always say “Give it your best! Work hard! Be true to yourself!” and it wouldn’t be a terrible reply… just not a terribly useful one, either.

So here it is. Here is what I’m going to link when that rare situation arises again, because it’s too much work to write it up more than once! This is advice that I feel may actually be practical to someone who is just starting out as an indie game developer. Hope it helps!

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I just read a blog on Gamasutra about remote teams. I work from home extensively (and have been doing so entirely recently); I found this accurate and pointed out some interesting tools to me.

BUT I have to respond to this brief mention at the end: “If you have a really big project, get source control.”

I agree with this so long as “really big project” is defined as “a project that exists.”

Git is a hard to wrap your head around at first, but it’s free and once you grok it, you’ll find what I did: it’s an indispensable tool for not just a collaborative project, but for solo projects as well. The ability to locally branch your work; switch between branches; temporarily stash changes while trying something else; and do all these things without having to worry about ever losing work… these all things that are huge value-adds that even a one-man software project benefits hugely from.

All this is aside from the fact that you need to have an offsite backup of all your development work; source control also gives you this, along with a full history of your work. To me that’s a first-order benefit of source control that’s almost too obvious to mention, but apparently some indie teams actually do miss how important this is.

If your team is considering using source control, you should be concerned, because there’s no consideration to be made…! Get git, and use it!

In theory my favorite type of game are simple and elegant pure-mechanics experiences, games you can play for a thousand hours without quite fully mastering, games with incredibly deep and rich possibility spaces. In theory I don’t have much interest in games that are about story; story is a crutch and a sideshow, and has nothing to do with the core of what games really are.

In practice, this week I’ve been obsessively playing Lone Survivor, and finished it last night.

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