While browsing the burgeoning and alltogether laudible Devbump I came across the following article:

The 6 Indie Mistakes

“Nobody knows how to make games… being in the game industry has made that abundantly clear.”

Goddamn right. Preach it, brotherman!

Occasionally, while wandering the Intertubes, you find yourself reading something that, you feel, could have come directly out of your own mouth. Or fingers. This is such a case. This is exactly what I didactically hit my Game Design students over the head with again and again and again. Every rash, intelligent young wants-to-be-a-designer commits these foibles. I certainly did. I think a better title for the article would have been “The 6 Sins of Naïve Game Designers.”

So, while I greatly enjoyed this article, I have a few small gripes. To enumerate:

1. He’s actually talking about student projects and the naïve mentality of those who’ve never created a game before, not indies per se. There is nice some crossover – such as warnings about scope, (tacit) warnings about project management, and the superfluousness of excessive documentation – but in a few cases he’s a bit out of line. Some successful indies do program, create art, write music, handle bizdev, and market their games themselves. Jake from Rabidlab comes to mind, as does Jonathan Mak from Queasygames, Pixel, Hampa, Kenta Cho, Mark Heatley and numerous others.

Some things are self-evident. Some things are so self-evident that you feel you needn’t describe them ahead of time… How your revolutionary natural-language parser is going to work, how “getting an education” will effect your character’s stats, or how role playing elements in a multiplayer game will affect actual gameplay. “Clearly it will work.” Yes, but how exactly? If you can’t answer that question about fundamental or key gameplay properties, you’re not ready to start making your game.

This is a perfect example. Cliff Harris doesn’t need this advice, but the bright-eyed students in my Gameplay and Game Design class who want to start their own game studio right out of college do. This is fantastic advice, by the way, and exactly what I push upon my unwitting students. I have them come up with some crazy, wacky idea for gameplay, then force them to create a board game version. Their cries of anguish are musical; a cacophony of epiphany.

2. I strongly disagree with the following statement:

“The really stand out games, like Half-Life or Zelda, take teams of a hundred people 3 years to make. Anything remotely close to that, or beyond that, is way out of scope for your first project.”

Perhaps I’m waxing semantics Nazi, but I bristle at the notion that “stand out” games can only be made by huge teams and over many years. Tetris, his scope example, was made by one man, Alexi Pajitnov. The original Legend of Zelda was created by four people. Now, perhaps these are unfair comparisons, coming as they do from the ‘golden age’ of game creation. More recently (and from the list of ‘noteworthy games’ on Chris’ own site) the Katamari Damacy team was remarkably small, around 25 at its height. Gish, without which Loco Roco could never have existed, was created by three people. Flow and Cloud were created by tiny teams. And so on. The points about scope are well taken, but we’re re-entering an era where one person or one small team can make a game that changes the face of gaming. The channels are being primed – on the Wii, the 360, the PS3 – and developers are getting wise. It’s only a matter of time.

I think a vital part of being truly “indie” is ‘making the game I want to make.’ Unfortunately, in many cases this is either a game that nobody but you wants to play, or a game that is a direct clone or derivate of another game, often a “SHMUP” or hackneyed Furry RPG. One could make a whole list of indie ‘sins’ along these same lines, but they would be different than this list (usability, interface design etc…) Cheers, though, I will have my students read this.

By the way, this gentleman is a badass: “Have I mentioned what I’ve been working on? Right now I’m polishing up Guitar Hero 2, trying to get it ready and out the door. Which leaves me little time to do anything else at the moment… sorry friends.” No worries, buddy. I’m sure it’s taking a long time to put all those Dragonforce songs in there. If that’s not what you’re doing, I’ll stab all of you with sharpened toothbrushes and push you, collectively, into a pit of rattlesnakes. While wearing rocket skates.

Love,

Swink

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