It’s never been easier to set yourself up as an independent studio. Open platforms such as Xbox Live’s Indie Games and iTunes’ App Store are democratising development on consoles as well as the PC, while tools like XNA and Flash lower the barriers to entry in terms of both cost and experience. Suddenly, designers who have spent years submerged within massive hierarchies – “devoting their entire lives to modelling footballers’ noses,” as Frontier’s David Braben puts it – can suddenly have total control of their own projects.
This comes at a price, however. The lack of gate-keeping on many new channels has created a gold rush, and with initiatives like Ron Carmel’s Indie Fund recently announced, a crowded marketplace is only likely to get busier. With ‘indie developer’ now applicable to anything from one- or two-man teams working out of bedrooms to squads composed of dozens of industry veterans, we checked in with a range of different designers to get a sense of the emerging independent landscape – and to pick up some advice for anyone who was hoping to navigate it.
Semi Secret’s Canabalt
A breakout indie hit of last year, transitioning from free browser game to an App Store bestseller with over 100,000 downloads, Adam ‘Atomic’ Saltsman’s one-button Canabalt is constantly mined for the secrets to its success. “I think Canabalt has maybe two salient ‘lessons’, but they are pretty obvious,” offers Saltsman. “ The first is that if your game is easy to play, more people will play. The other thing that I think I did right is managing to come up with an engaging look without using a lot of time or resources. If you want traffic and attention, make it easy to play and pretty. The trick, though, is doing that without ruining the game entirely.”
James Silva of Ska Studios, creator of The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai and I Maed a Gam3 W1th Zomb1es, agrees. “Start small. I just got a Twitter mention from a guy who said he’s starting a game company and his first game is going to be epic like Lord Of The Rings. Maybe we live in a universe where that’s possible, but I just can’t see that working out. If you just set out to make something akin to games from the 8bit era instead, not only will you be completely bowled over by the complexity involved in things you took for granted, but you’ll be one step closer to making something, well, slightly epic.”
The Dishwisher creator James Silva
Silva’s put his money where his mouth is. Zomb1es is a simple top-down shooter with a charming sing-along soundtrack, but it’s gone on to shift 200,000 copies on Xbox Live’s Indie Games platform, making it by far the biggest seller in an environment where ‘hits’ are often measured in mere thousands of downloads.
“I thought Zomb1es would get a little notice for being kind of funny,” admits Silva. “The fact that it did as well as it did still confuses me, but I have a few theories: people love the song, people hate pretentious, unfamiliar gameplay in a title that they’re not willing to invest a lot of effort into, and people love short, tightly-packed experiences that don’t repeat and don’t drag. It’s not like I had any of those things as goals when I made the game, though.”
It’s impossible to imagine Zomb1es surviving in the traditional marketplace, but fellow developer Jarrad Woods, aka Farbs, who left a job at 2K Australia to make his own games, such as spaceship shooter/construction kit Captain Forever, suggests that indie development remains – by necessity – a place to do something different in. “I think the key to making it as a not-quite-broke indie developer is just making interesting games. As a solo developer, I can’t compete up at the top: the man-hours total that goes into a mainstream FPS is longer than my entire lifespan. Instead, we indies have to work where the larger studios don’t, back around the game design foundations. We have to invent new genres, revive the dying ones, or find new ways to meld old ideas together.”