The indy group''s a great idea. This should really be considered by everybody. Something similar but not quite like xgames3d. Where they advertise for you and take care of the market details for you and you can focus on making great games. If anyone who has more time on hand than me takes the initiative to get something like this rolling, please let me (and everyone else) know.

Oh yeh, someone said that it''s hard to come up with good ideas when you''re on a budget. Last time I checked, it didn''t cost anything to think. Now I know in the industry time is money. But with a semi-large group of smart people around, you wouldn''t think it would be that hard to come up with original ideas. But I see where they''re coming from, if you had to choose from using the same engine from your last hit game with a few minor modifications and starting from scratch with a new idea (where the former would probably sell more than the latter), I think we would all choose the former. That''s all folks.

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I'm fat, you're ugly. I can lose weight.

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"We are the music makers, and the dreamers of the dreams."
- Willy Wonka

If I am correct organizeing something such as this has been discussed a few times before in various posts in the past and I have been a supporter of it since the first time I hear Myopic Rhino and some others discussing it. The problem with it is it will more then likely take some strong financial backing to accomplish alot of the things that people have been discussing. I would LOVE to see this come about and actualy take form. I hope that eventually someone with some knowledge of what it would take would take will take the inititive and get things rolling. Since a few guys I know and I have decided to develop games full time on no budget and all keep our what non programmers consider real jobs we could DEFINITALY benifit from such and endeavor.

As a side note we have our first commercial game(well we are hoping at least) in full swing and I will be able to offer some screenshots and more info in a couple weeks....I don''t believe in hyping something that isn''t completely together yet Anyway we should have it finished around the end of the year, we sadly will miss our deadline to try and get it published for the holiday season but thats life as an indie i guess

OME

quote: Original post by cliffski

if a game isnt finished, we dont want to buy it.

Then why do you do it anyway???? Reading down this post all I see is people whining about the games not being good at this, good at that etc. Well, you can only thank yourselves?? Take a minute and think about it. Time and time again we see games - even though the are full of bugs, and so on - selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Why is this? Because all of us gamers buy these games - myself included - buy these games, regardless of knowing the hell we will go through? Looking at the sales these companies achieve, why would they NEED to spend more time developing the games.

This of course is not the ONLY reason - my guess is publishers wanting to see results from the developers. Okay, admitted, I''m sure the developers themselves have a hard time releasing a product full of bugs, bad playability etc., but they have these two options: (1) Sell the game now, and make lots of money anyway, (2) Develop for another 2 years (thus loosing money those 2 years) and in the end making the same amount as the first choice. Which do you think they would select???

I''m not saying that everyone or anyone in particular is doing this, just saying that in general this is how the industry works? If the customers are there, why spend more time on the game?

Regards,
Martin

hi,

"This of course is not the ONLY reason - my guess is publishers wanting to see results from the developers. Okay, admitted, I''m sure the developers themselves have a hard time releasing a product full of bugs, bad playability etc., but they have these two options: (1) Sell the game now, and make lots of money anyway, (2) Develop for another 2 years (thus loosing money those 2 years) and in the end making the same amount as the first choice. Which do you think they would select???"

Fixing after a release is so expensive and the bad reputation you gain from that is much more worse than another round of testing
and profiling the product. See Blizzard, Lionhead etc. for example, they really try to get the job properly done.
A major issue is the development process in most companies. In my
opinion their development process is not structured enough, and they often tend to start on the wrong end. Starting with implementing a superior class 3D engine before you have a may
rude looking but playable prototype costs them too much time.
(That''s what Sid Meier is always doing.)
But wherever the pure sales guy''s rule they produce chaos.
The dont''t know anything about development and all they are keen on is screenshot, packaging and all the non substantial things.
Have a look at the Dilbert Zone comics. There is more truth in what you see there than you may would believe.

cu

Peter

Hi there,

since it was me who came with the idea of the "indy scene" thing, and having received this very positive echo from all of you guys, i think it is now time to try to make it happen. I will create a concept on paper about what the goals and rules are. If i will find a way to realize all that, and that means from the manpower and from the financial aspects, i will start that. Through the past i have achieved almost all of my goals, which included writing a game and puplish it all over Europe in the mid eighties, having a family and a house and also a very good job. From these experiences i know the first thing you really need is a vision and belief in the things you do. But this "indy" thing cannot be done by a single person, so i need your assistance. So everyone who want''s to participate should fell free to email me.

phemmer@c-s-k.de

Another question is, if we should disuss that furthermore in this
newsgroup because it is originally planned to be for programming
issuess ? Please give comments.

Thank you very much.

cu

Peter

i would agree with the people who say we''re not the average game player... i don''t know how many times i thought "wow that''s cool" when playing halflife and diabloII for the first times, and i am convinced that most other players wouldn''t give a flying fuck, because they have no idea how difficult it is to come up with solutions to certain problems. (such as turning off the ability for others to loot your dead body - obvious, you may say, but in diablo they didn''t have it, so it''s not as obvious as it may seem if you don''t know the solution.)

also i thought it was amazingly cool that they had environment mapping on the guard''s helmets in HL - most of my friends didn''t realise it was mapped any differently until i pointed it out, and even then they didn''t realise what was so good about it.

but i disagree with the original poster about FMV - for some games, such as C&C it''s absolutely vital to maintain the gamer''s interest. And even games like HL which don''t actually have FMV, have almost as much work put into the scripts which make the story run along - it''s a much better solution, but it will take a whole load more development time.

The things I hate about todays games are:

a)Innovation. What is the point in © laws, when daylight robbery can still occur by rebadging a title, changing it by a mere 20% and then flogging it off for $80 in a store. Everybody rushes out, buys it, sits down and then says "damn, why did I buy this game". They say "My ''old'' PIII 800EB is tiring out if this game won''t work on it". And thats what its like.

b)Hard disk inefficiancy. How many 1s an 0s do you need? There are 8388608 of them in 1Mb. An integer variable on most computers\compilers is between 2-8 bytes depending on if its long or short or whatever. Programmers don''t care much though, because as long as people buy iy, who really gives a rats ass.

Things must change...

Lucas

Jeez im a controversial dude, all mys posts end up going over 1 page...

I thought id chip in again to agree with lucasdg. Some modern game are HUGE. I dont understand why. I resent having to spend 6 months downloading a demo. Case in point is Deus Ex. Now it does look to be a damned fine game, but the training mission takes place in somewhere covered with marble floor. Why? so we can show off reflections and environment mapping? who gives a damn?
Make a game like Deus Ex run on a pentium 200 and im impressed, but add a lot of ''cool'' effects that push up the minimum spec to sky high levels and that isnt cool.

As for the FMV, I just CANNOT understand why people want it. All it does for me is bring home the contrast between game engine quality and real video quality, making it obvious how far we have to go. I can cope with a dialog saying "You know have a level 1 sword master" in SHOGUN. I dont need 5 minutes of video of a bloke waving a sword about to tell me, it adds nothing to the game, and just dents my wallet more.

DOWN WITH FMV.

http://www.positech.co.uk

Yeah, definitely a good idea, this indie-game thing. I mean, this really is a good chance to use the advantages of the internet; how much more than a lot of dedicated people and a website to hold all the games, all the news, the community stuff (Gamedev.net ?) do you need? After you have that, you just have to make this site known very well on the net, you have to make a good "internet-advertising"-campaign, but I suppose that doesn''t take nearly as much money as a real one. You would really have to create a "virtual meeting place" or something like that for the whole indie-game scene, where people help each other, where your games are getting marketed (sorta like with xgames3d) etc. I mean, of course this is already pretty much what gamedev.net is all about, but it would just have to be even bigger, and it would have to support the really indie-like games; it would have to give someone who makes, say, a textbased game, which is really original and innovative in some way, a real chance. It would have to be a plattform for everyone who can add something to the scene, who has good ideas and can just make good games, regardless of money or anything like this. So yeah, I''m all for it and supporting it.

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Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind...

The people here are FAR from the "gaming public".

You don''t know how many times I get invited to a LAN party, for instance, and the first thing they say is, "Dude let''s play some Unreal! That game K1X A55!!"

Sigh. Anyone want to play a real game?