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Nine Paths To Indie Game Greatness

By David Marsh

[The rise of the independent gaming movement is a vital one, and in

this in-depth article, game development veteran Marsh showcases nine
methods that indies are using to develop games with fewer resources.]

I am a game developer. I have shipped multiple titles across the PC,

console, and mobile platforms. After six years of working in the industry
I began questioning my desire to continue developing games, and left
the industry to try my luck with other endeavors. After leaving, I
re-discovered my passion for creating games through the burgeoning
independent games community.

My introduction to game development started with a level editor that came bundled with a copy of Quake. From the
moment I got my first level to compile and was running around in something I had created, my desire to learn how to
develop games was set in stone.

The power to create these interactive worlds, limited only by what I could imagine and my technical ability was
exhilarating.

Eventually, I contributed to a few mods that later ended up being commercially developed, and which acted as the key for
my entry into the world of commercial games.

More than a few defunct game studios later, it had sunk in that commercial game development requires a wide multitude
of forces and considerations to be taken into account over the actual development of the game (and many times at the
expense of it).

The more I came to understand this, the further I felt I was drifting from the roots of what had excited me initially about
game development. I wondered if there was any place left to create games in the same spirit of the mods that I had
started with. It was through this question that I discovered the growing movement of independent games.

What are the practical differences between commercial and independent developers? When a commercial company starts a
new project, more often than not it is asking: "Who will give us the resources we need to make payroll?"

If the studio is fortunate enough to have some kind of existing leverage, it can ask "who will give us the resources we need
to make the game we want?"

When an independent developer starts a new project, they usually ask: "How do I make the game I want with the
resources readily available?" That is, if they even spend the time to think about the resources they are going to need
ahead of time at all.

Some less experienced with the process of development will forge blindly ahead without giving this much thought at all.
But the most successful independent developers work around the set of resources available, without treating it as an
obstacle to be overcome -- but rather, a box to operate within.

Many game studios are crippled by the amount of resources they require to keep operations going. I have seen plenty of
companies that operate "contract to contract" with little hope of ever breaking out of the cycle. The studio growth required
by the increasingly resource intensive modern crop of games is many times unsustainable. In fact, the problem seems to
be getting worse.

According to a report by the BBC, "Back in 1982, the Japanese company Namco produced Pac-Man for $100,000. Now, the
average PlayStation 3 title is estimated to cost $15m. Even after adjusting for inflation, that is still a significant rise. While
production costs have tripled in recent years with the introduction of next-gen consoles, sales and revenue have hardly
changed."

Independent developers usually operate with very limited initial resources. By operating without a loan of resources, they
create a development environment for themselves free from outside influences or restrictions. The only obligations they

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hold are to themselves as developers and the people who play and purchase their games.

Here are 9 methods independents are using to develop games with fewer resources:

1. Efficiency in Design
Design around getting the most bang for your buck. Think of your game as an engine, where developer resources are the
fuel and the output is player value. Imagine how much developer fuel the Counter-Strike engine required to output so
many hours of entertainment compared to how much fuel had to be poured into the Halo engine to get a commensurate
amount of entertainment.

The two engines might not be on the same scale, but the efficiency in terms of resources consumed is radically different.

Efficient design choices to utilize could include:

Multiplayer
Making a single player epic saga with hours and hours of linear consumable gameplay is not very efficient. A well designed
multiplayer game that simply gives players a set of rules to play by can provide an infinite amount of gameplay for a
fraction of the time spent creating content, as well as dramatically increase a game’s lifespan.

User Generated Content

If you don’t have the resources to make large amounts of content yourself, why not give players the tools to do it? An even
better argument is that it is almost a certainty that players will come up with things for your game that you would never
have created in a million years.

Line Rider is a popular flash sandbox type game started by Slovenian university student Boštjan Čadež. In Line Rider,
players draw a landscape which the player character, a little man on a sled slides down. This is a pretty typical example of
what an average player might come up with after spending some time with the game.

It’s not terribly exciting, but there is a group of people that when given the chance to be creative, will initiate a nuclear
arms race with others in the community to see how far they can stretch the system they have been given. Those people
come up with things like this.

Garry’s Mod is a $10 Source Engine mod written by Garry Newman that unlocks low level functionality of the engine for
players to experiment with in real time. The "gameplay" part of Garry’s Mod is exploring the creations of other users, many
of which have evolved into their own scripted games within Garry’s Mod itself.

An example of this in action is this video of a player creating a robot out of Half-Life 2 props. That’s about what you might
expect people to do given the power to animate pieces of the game. But then of course there are those people who look at
the tools you have given them, and take things out of this world. Here is a list of other benefits your game could see by
utilizing the player base’s resources.

Procedural Content
If done well, the ability to create an endless amount of content for the frontloaded price of designing the generation system
can provide for exponential efficiency.

As Introversion Software explains, "For Introversion Software’s latest game, DEFCON, the only real content that we made
was the audio. Almost everything else in the game is generated from publicly available information -- the locations of

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cities, longitudes and latitudes of the various coastlines and country borders of the world are all freely available on the
internet. DEFCON was in development for about a year. Introversion’s Darwinia, on the other hand, has about 10 hours of
game-play from hand-built content, and took 3 years to develop." Another Indie favorite that utilizes procedural content
generation is Dwarf Fortress.

Avoiding Photorealistic Art Direction

Any game that utilizes a photorealistic look is immediately in visual competition with games like Crysis, and the amount of
resources it takes to compete on that level is growing every year.

As David Hayward muses in this article, "Art assets as we know them are expensive, with costs rising in each generation of
hardware. This is a catastrophic obstacle that cannot be ignored, as it means that only the largest publishers will be able to
afford photorealism with current production methods."

Re-Exploring the explored with modern technology

One way to get results with fewer resources is to explore themes and designs from 15 or 20 years ago with technology
from today. Kokoromi’s Fez is quite literally a new angle on old school pixel platformer games.

At first glance, the game is a straightforward 2d sidescroller, but the modern technology twist is revealed when the entire
scene rotated 90 degrees and reveals the world to be made entirely of "Trixels" or 3d pixel blocks.

As lead designer Phil Fish explains, "Since the rotation mechanic and level design might not be immediately easy to
understand, I wanted everything else to be. So I just took a bunch of objects and things and concepts from these old
games to give gamers a point of reference. A lot of Fez's design, besides the 2D/3D mechanic, is very oldschool for that
reason. I wanted it to have a kind of 'comfort food' appeal to it."

Besides having a visual appeal, abandoning popular modern game design issues to explore new ideas through some of the
most experienced legacy design choices in gaming is a very efficient development path. Trade bump maps for bitmaps and
shave off a dimension or half. The popularity of retro classics on Xbox Live Arcade, as well as retro-styled hits like
Geometry Wars give a sense that gamers might not mind the loss of fidelity.

2. Utilize existing free, cheap, or open technology

There is no shame in climbing on the backs of others, especially when you are trying to make the most with the least.
Counter-Strike, as I have mentioned previously, is perhaps my favorite inspiration in this respect. Counter-Strike started
as mod of the original Half-Life by Minh Le and Jess Cliffe, along with the help of others in the mod community.

By only performing basic modifications to the Half-Life engine (changing game rules, weapon behaviors, creating new art),
Counter-Strike came into being with a budget of roughly $0 (minus spare time spent).

The fact that a game which started with that budget went on to become one of the most popular and recognizable
multiplayer shooters in gaming history still inspires me to this day. Just a fraction of the free or cheap technologies to look
at are:

Rendering: Ogre, Irrlicht, HGE, Panda3d, Crystal Space, SDL

Game Engines: Flash 9(AS3), Shockwave, C4, NeoAxis, jME, Torque, Unity, Blitz, id Tech 3, XNA, Multiverse, Adventure
Game Studio, Game Maker, Wintermute, Scrolling Game Development Kit, Source, PopCap Framework, metaplace?

Physics: Bullet, PhysX, Farseer, Box2D, Motor, Chipmunk

Networking: RakNet, SmartFoxServer, HawkNL

Scripting Languages: Lua, Python, GameMonkey, Ruby

Sound: OpenAL, SDL mixer, DUMB, irrKlang, Audiere, MikMod, BASS

GUI: AntTweakBar, Guichan, Navi, LibUFO

For a much longer list of free-ish game development libraries/tools, check here.

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3. Distribute digitally
"The independent game movement is also a major new trend, moving the industry (finally) onto the Internet for real,
embracing digital distribution chains and unique gameplay." – Raph Koster

The ability for developers to deliver their games directly into the hands of their audience is an enormous step forward in
terms of efficiency. The resources required to distribute games over the internet are microscopic compared to the cost of
pressing, packaging, and shipping physical copies of games to stores all over the world.

Throw technology like BitTorrent into the mix, let your fans carry the weight and reduce your distribution cost to literally
nil.

Red Orchestra is a World War II shooter that started off as an Unreal mod. After winning the "NVIDIA $1,000,000 Make
Something Unreal contest" they were granted an official license of the unreal engine, and were set to find a way to
distribute their game.

Tom Buscaglia, the lawyer helping the Red Orchestra team recounts, "There was a great deal of interest in the commercial
version of the game from several publishers including Midway. And we worked for months trying to close a deal. But
eventually it became apparent that even though the folks on the product acquisition side were very interested in the game,
the marketing folks were not going to green light the deal because their retail buyers had not heard of the game and would
not put in significant initial orders necessary to minimize their risk. So, no deal."

As a fluke, they got in contact with Valve, who had recently launched their own digital distribution service, Steam. The
team figured that Valve would only be interested in Source Engine powered games, much less a WWII themed shooter that
would directly compete with games in their own catalog. "To my surprise, the folks at Valve were not only interested, they
were straightforward and easy to work with. A real pleasure. So, in short order we had our digital distribution deal in
place."

Buscaglia adds, "Digital distribution means more ways to get your games directly to the players with as little 'middle man'
action as possible. That has always been the great promise of the internet and it’s great news for developers. Heck, higher
royalties, you get to keep your IP and direct access to your user base. It’s hard not to believe."

4. Develop on open platforms

As any professional developer could tell you, getting a game onto closed game platforms can require a lot of resources.
New digital platforms on consoles such as Xbox Live Arcade, which serve as more favorable outlet to less resource
intensive games, still hold many of the downfalls of a closed platform.

Jeff Tunnell, a founder of Garage Games, the company behind the Live Arcade title Marble Blast Ultra states on his blog
about Live Arcade game budgets, "The industry standard arms race will quickly make the top end $300,000 budget a
cheap product. Right now, I wouldn’t consider attempting to make an XBLA game with a $100,000 budget. Development
kits and Certification (QA testing) would eat up half of that, not leaving much for the actual game development." Jeff also
adds that if current trends continue, "This will inflate rapidly".

Besides the rising costs associated by competing on a closed platform, there is the issue of your game fitting into the
platform holder’s catalog. Jeff describes the situation as such, "slot approvals are getting hard to get. In fact, I liken
XBLA360 slots to the 'Golden Ticket' in Willy Wonka. If you get one, you are set!"

By developing your games on open platforms like the computer or the web, the resources you would have spent fulfilling
the requirements of a closed platform can be saved.

5. Collaboration
An integral part of developing with little resources is collaborating with others who have the resources you need. Indies
look for other developers with a similar focus or that might be willing to collaborate or trade in lieu of a more traditional
business deal. Unrestrained by the clout of commercial competition most developers actively participate in online
communities and share the most intimate details of their development processes.

Sites like TIGSource and Indiegamer are both hotbeds for developer discussion and collaboration along with many others.
The desire for collaboration can hurt as well as benefit, as passion and enthusiasm tend to be a more fickle force than a
paycheck.

The most successful collaborations are centered on developers that share a very similar set of goals and motivations. While
there is plenty of pro-bono works in the independent sector, it does also host many developers who contract out their
services.

6. Consider less traditional monetization methods

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There could be more efficient ways to monetize your game other than the traditional means. A game designed to be played
for free could still be monetized in a variety of different ways. Advertising, micropayments, virtual item sales or even sell
your game while it's still in development.

Similar to how the advent of Google’s AdWords revolutionized monetizing content on the web, technology is providing
alternate ways to make money other than the traditional fixed-price for a box of goods model.

One example is a website run by Gene Endrody, MaidMarian.com. He makes multiplayer 3d games using Shockwave that
players can access directly in their browser. Instead of charging players directly to play the games, they are made free to
play without any restrictions.

By removing almost all barriers to playing his games, MaidMarian.com attracts 1.5 million unique visitors a month, and up
to 4,000 concurrent users, which generates a comfortable amount of revenue solely through advertisements on the site.

By the time Gene left his role as a technical art director at Radical Entertainment to focus full time on MaidMarian.com, he
was already earning more than his day job by attracting visitors to roam through his virtual worlds.

7. Redefine success
A game developed with a fraction of the resources of a blockbuster game does not need to sell a blockbuster number of
units to be merited a financial success. Many independents don't spend resources trying to develop features that will cater
to the mass market. Often, they spend their resources on what they feel is important for their game, and let their target
audience be gamers with the same tastes.

One case in point is Gish, which was made by developer Chronic Logic who has been so open as to share their sales stats.
The figures show an approximate total income of $121,000, an amount which might be a drop in the bucket to many larger
game studios. But to a team of 3 developers who took only 6 months to make the game and whose budget (not including
time) was only $5,700, the amount warrants enough of a success for a sequel.

That does not mean indies never pull the big bucks. RuneScape is a java-based MMORPG created by brothers Andrew and
Paul Gower. After getting a basic version of the game operating as a project during university, they implemented an
optional membership service that provided paying players with access to additional areas, quests, and items. The players
who don't pay are still monetized by advertisements displayed above the playing window.

To any developer looking at the game, it would jump out as a game made with few resources. It doesn't have flashy
graphics, or a soundtrack specially recorded by a choir. The gameplay must ring true with some segment of gamers,
however -- today, Andrew Gower is the 654th richest man in the UK.

8. Use alternate sources of funding

Once you significantly reduce the amount of resources you need to develop a game, the number of opportunities to find
different methods of funding rise exponentially.

Mount & Blade is a medieval combat simulator/manager/role playing game. Developed by another husband and wife team
from Turkey, the game has developed an incredibly enthusiastic community following. The game is in a constant state of
development, and while there is always a free demo -- players can purchase the full game for a rising cost as the game

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develops more features. The earliest of adopters might have gotten the game for as low as $6 where as the price of the
most recent release is $22.

Once you have purchased a license to the game you always have access to the latest version. Amazingly, these developers
have replaced the role traditionally filled by game publishers with the gamers themselves. As of this writing, it has even
supported them enough to grow their team to six full time developers along with a number of contractors. It would be hard
to imagine this method of operation being very viable if the developers were not limiting the amount resources needed to
support development.

Unknown Worlds Entertainment, an independent company made up of two full time developers and a collection of others
spread around the world are working on sequel to their Sci-Fi Shooter/RTS hybrid Natural Selection. In order to offset
some of their development costs, the team created a casual Sudoku game in 10 months (though they started selling a beta
after 5).

Charlie Cleveland, Game Director of Unknown Worlds, in a presentation at the 2007 GDC, admitted that creating the game
took more time away from their core development than planned, but found bootstrapping through a casual game much
more attractive than pitching their main game to investors, writing business plans, or trying to convince others to give
them the resources.

9. Get Personal
If you are developing something that strikes a chord with gamers, the community surrounding your game can be a very
powerful and free (or cheap) resource. Put your fans in charge of marketing your game, use them as moderators, allow
them to create content.

Fraxy is a unique top down space shooter that consists entirely of user-constructed boss battles. The game comes with a
easy-to-use editor that lets users create complex and unique boss machinations and then share them with the community
for everyone to play. By giving users a framework to be creative within, instead of simply something authored and
experienced once, Fraxy is using its players as a resource to provide gameplay limited only by people’s imaginations.

Kingdom of Loathing is a dead simple browser based parody MMO. In this satirical adventure game, the hero is a stick
figure which forges through zones like "The Orcish Frat House" and "The Misspelled Cemetary" while battling creatures
such as "ferocious Sabre-Toothed Limes" and "Ninja Snowmen".

The fuzzy personality of the game has proven to be a hit with fans who have grown the game to over 1.4 million accounts
registered, through not much else but word of mouth. There is a large and active forum community surrounding the game
as well with over 57,000 forum users discussing gameplay, helping others, participating in contests or posting fan artwork.

There is such a sense of community around this game that players have created a 24/7 internet radio station, with
DJ-hosted music shows as well as discussion segments about the game that often play host to the developers. Kingdom of
Loathing is free to play, however there are opportunities to "donate" and in return receive special items which are very
useful inside the game.

According to Wired, a sizeable number of players choose to donate, "the game has earned enough in donations (its only
source of revenue) for creator Zack 'Jick' Johnson to quit his day job and hire six employees to help deal with bugs,
servers, and the in-game economy. There's even a black market on eBay where $1 buys about 480,000 units of the
game's currency -- hunks of meat."

In Conclusion
These may not be totally new concepts to many game developers, but there are many misconceptions about what
independent games are limited to based on the method of their development.

Many developers assume that there is a large insurmountable gap in between commercial and independent games. On one
side they see the big budget blockbusters and on the other they see "match three" puzzle games, and assume that there is
a vast chasm in between where nothing can exist.

In reality, more developers are staking out claims at various places in the middle every year. As technology marches
forward and access to the global community becomes more accessible, developers are inevitably being given more chances
to exist at new places in the market.

All professional game developers should be aware of the growing independent games community. By taking a look at
Independent games, developers might find some inspiration for solutions to the challenges they face. By the looks of
things, you might be bumping into more Independent games whether you are searching for them or not.

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