indie games in "AAA" genres

makeshiftwings · 2006-03-11T01:47:30

There is a basic principle that small, independent developers tend to follow when creating games: that you can't compete with the big boys, and that rather than try to create an FPS better than Quake or an MMORPG better than WoW, you should target a niche group where there is less crowding, and market to them. I can't argue with that; overall, it is very sound advice. The problem, to me, is that most small indie games turn out to be puzzle games, spaceship blasters, obscure flight sims, or turn-based WWII strategy games. And I don't really like any of those. I was hoping to get some ideas from other indie devs and see how a small, independent, low-budget game might succeed in one of the big-name genres. First, we should set some ground rules: no assuming that your team of two programmers and an artist is somehow "so good" that they could recreate Half-Life 2 from scratch in a month. We need to be realistic and expect that we will have far less artwork and content in general than most retail titles. Also, no relying on a publisher or investor swooping in to give you millions of dollars or set up a ton of servers or give you a hundred customer service employees, which means certain ideas, like standard MMORPGs, are right out. The game needs to remain underfunded and understaffed throughout its whole life time, in true indie tradition ;) Also, I'm assuming the game will sell through shareware or other internet-based sites, have a small marketing budget, and generally not make it into retail outlets, so there will be a smaller user base, again, throwing out certain concepts like "the MMORPG that will beat WoW". So, here are some ideas I have, first, general ones that apply to all genres: Dealing with Less Content - Indies can not realistically make an RPG with 60 hours of quests, or an FPS with 200 missions, or 100 different monster models. Two alternatives are: Episodic content: Instead of a 60-hour RPG for $60, you could sell a 10-hour RPG for $7.99, with the hope that if it sells well, you could make part 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. I think this method has a lot of advantages: with smaller games, you have more chances to listen to player feedback and try out new ideas without worrying too much about losing a huge investment of time and money. Players win because if it turns out they don't like a game after buying one episode, they've only lost a sixth of the price if they'd bought a full retail game. However, the episodic model hasn't proven to work that well in real life, for various reasons. Some players are just turned off by the idea of a small game, and wouldn't waste their money on it, even if logically six small games should equal one big game. Similarly, against logic, a lot of people are LESS willing to spend money on something with a low price than something with a big price, because they assume anything with a low price is low quality. Procedurally Generated Content - This is a method that a lot of indie games use now. For maps/levels/quests/etc, you come up with a set of rules and let the computer randomly generate content for the player. The good part is you then have infinite content, and infinite replay. The bad part is that procedural content can often start to seem repetitive and shallow, especially if the game or genre in question usually focuses on things like story or dialogue, which is notoriously hard to generate procedurally. Player Generated Content - Retail games are now realizing that this is the wave of the future, and I think indie games need to take advantage of it. Offering a good construction set to your players and letting them trade their creations to other players is basically like getting an entire extra art and design department for free. The good news is that a mod community can keep your game going well beyond its original life expectancy, offer the players the chance to make the game their own and fix any little problems that might otherwise stop them from liking it, and in general solves a lot of the problems of people not wanting to buy your game because there's not enough content. The bad news is that making mod tools and an easily moddable game requires additional time, and you generally can't release a game that's JUST mod tools; you need to do plenty of your own content as well in order to get people hooked. Genre-specific: FPS - Unfortunately for the indies, FPS's are often marketed by their graphics. It's unlikely that an indie could pull together a better graphical engine than whatever Quake/Unreal is doing AND fill it with better artwork than the latest iteration of those games. I'd say trying to compete graphically with retail FPS's is hopeless. Instead, you could focus on other aspects that FPS players like, target niche audiences within the FPS audience, or try to bring an alienated niche market into the FPS fold by offering something different. For example, multiplayer online modes are veyr important to hardcore fans, and they might be willing to play an FPS with bad graphics if it offers a unique and balances online mode. You could make an FPS with no single-player campaign, one that maybe focuses just on a particular style of match: deathmatch, or Capture the Flag, or something more esoteric like Unreal 2004's Onslaught mode. If you put all of your effort into creating just a cool variant of Onslaught Mode, with some unique weapons and vehicles, a good mod tool, and didn't try to do anything else that FPS's do, you just might be able to gain some ground. RPG - Unfortunately for the indies, RPG's are often marketed by their huge number of quests, hours of gameplay, or number of weapons/spells/classes/races/whatever. It's unlikely that you'll be able to create a standard RPG with more quests than Baldur's Gate 2 or Final Fantasy X. There are a few areas where an indie RPG might gain ground though. First, story. Plenty of RPG entusiasts proclaim "the story is the most important part", though there may be some debate as to whether they're telling the truth. It's difficult to say what makes a "good" story, but I think an RPG could get an audience if it works with settings or themes that the retail system thinks are unprofitable. Putting your game in a different setting than standard fantasy or sci-fi, like germany in the world war, or the 1970's american disco scene, or "mars, during the victorian era, but there are robots, and everyone has telepathy" might be enough to garner a niche audience that will forgive your game any other flaws it might have. Even in a standard setting, certain themes might attract a niche audience: adult/sexual themes (the retail avoids them, but we all know there is a disturbingly large audience out there dying for elf porn... :/ ), intellectual/philosophical/political themes directed at older gamers (the retail circuit is often accused of "dumbing things down" so as not to alienate players), etc. Yet another method to gain an audience would be to focus solely on a certain aspect of RPGs at the cost of all else. Say, the battle system, leading to a tactics-style game with minimal quests and plot, but lots of random battles. Or reverse it, and downplay combat/skills/equipment, leading to more of a Sims/interactive fiction game where almost everything is resolved by story and dialogue choices. This post is already too long; I'll leave it to some other people to respond or post some ideas for other genres. :)

Game Design and Theory Game Design

Started by makeshiftwings March 06, 2006 05:16 PM

26 comments, last by jbadams 18 years, 11 months ago

DarkZoulz

106

March 08, 2006 06:16 AM

Quote:
Original post by Frequency
Is that a threat? :)

lol. If you feel threatend, I guess it is?

Do indie developers actually make any money? I mean, enough to keep a company up and running with employee saleries, office costs etc. Sure, making games is fun. But you'll want to be able to earn a living by doing it. At least, IMO.

jbadams

26,386

March 08, 2006 07:32 AM

Quote:
Original post by DarkZoulz
Do indie developers actually make any money? I mean, enough to keep a company up and running with employee saleries, office costs etc. Sure, making games is fun. But you'll want to be able to earn a living by doing it. At least, IMO.

Some of them, yes. In some cases enough to live off (as well as sustaining the business), often just as a second income, and many simply make some extra spending money, but have a good time doing it.

I think most of what I would have said if I'd arrived earlier has already been said, so I'll just contribute to the prompting for more originality by suggesting that people may be interesting in taking up the challenge of Dogma 2001, or that defining a similar set of contraints yourself could produce some interesting concepts.

- Jason Astle-Adams

JBourrie

1,204

March 08, 2006 11:37 AM

Quote:
Original post by DarkZoulz
Quote:
Original post by Frequency
Is that a threat? :)

lol. If you feel threatend, I guess it is?

Do indie developers actually make any money? I mean, enough to keep a company up and running with employee saleries, office costs etc. Sure, making games is fun. But you'll want to be able to earn a living by doing it. At least, IMO.

Enough to pay salaries and office costs, yes. Do indies make millions of dollars? Not unless you're PopCap Games.

To some people, though, $100k a year salaries are less important than enjoying life. And I'd rather make $40k and make great, new, innovative games, than to make $80k+ making generic licensed hack-n-slashers that make me hate my job.

There is a breaking point, where the salary isn't worth it, but often this is also because the games made ARE just the quick licenses (GBA movie-licensed titles and such) but they aren't innovative and new anyway.

Of course, making $80k+ AND great new games would be nice :)

Check out my new game Smash and Dash at:

http://www.smashanddashgame.com/

makeshiftwings

Author

398

March 08, 2006 04:46 PM

Quote:
Original post by DarkZoulz
Quote:
Original post by Frequency
Is that a threat? :)

lol. If you feel threatend, I guess it is?

Do indie developers actually make any money? I mean, enough to keep a company up and running with employee saleries, office costs etc. Sure, making games is fun. But you'll want to be able to earn a living by doing it. At least, IMO.

I'll be happy if I can make as much as an indie game dev as I do as an indie musician. And let me tell you, the indie music and art scene has learned to live in some pretty abject poverty but still make it seem glamorous. ;) When worse comes to worse, I contract out to a real game company, or, if I want to get paid more, nearly any other type of computer-using company in existence (games are a poor choice to try to get rich on).

My initial post was actually specific that we WEREN'T talking about relying on getting a big publisher and "going corporate", and that I was mainly referring on internet distribution, not retail. "Indie" goesn't have a strict definition, but I'd say if you've got a large contract with a publisher, a bunch of employees working full-time, and a game going into retail stores, you're not indie anymore; you're just the president of a company instead of a programmer.

makeshiftwings

Author

398

March 08, 2006 05:13 PM

Quote:
Original post by Kazgoroth

I think most of what I would have said if I'd arrived earlier has already been said, so I'll just contribute to the prompting for more originality by suggesting that people may be interesting in taking up the challenge of Dogma 2001, or that defining a similar set of contraints yourself could produce some interesting concepts.

Personally, I don't think those dogma rules are set up well. The original film dogma rules were legitimately about forcing concentration on story and characters, whereas these dogma rules seem to translate to me as "omg fps and rts are the suck, puzzle games are awesome. everyone has to make puzzle games." The rules basically say no 3D, no current-day consoles, almost no violence, no standard character-centric gameplay, no character-centric story.... really, the whole thing screams to me "I made a game about matching colored blocks together and I'm the most innovative guy in the world," which is part of the whole problem with puzzle-maker indies.

sanch3x

483

March 10, 2006 09:40 AM

Quote:
Original post by makeshiftwings
Quote:
Original post by Kazgoroth

I think most of what I would have said if I'd arrived earlier has already been said, so I'll just contribute to the prompting for more originality by suggesting that people may be interesting in taking up the challenge of Dogma 2001, or that defining a similar set of contraints yourself could produce some interesting concepts.

Personally, I don't think those dogma rules are set up well. The original film dogma rules were legitimately about forcing concentration on story and characters, whereas these dogma rules seem to translate to me as "omg fps and rts are the suck, puzzle games are awesome. everyone has to make puzzle games." The rules basically say no 3D, no current-day consoles, almost no violence, no standard character-centric gameplay, no character-centric story.... really, the whole thing screams to me "I made a game about matching colored blocks together and I'm the most innovative guy in the world," which is part of the whole problem with puzzle-maker indies.

I agree. Tablet pcs are a new thing and the use of a pencil instead of the mouse can make for some interesting gameplay (see the Nintendo DS) but under Dogma 2001 you're not allowed to make a new type of game play (edit: which would let tablet pc users play with their machine). I think the code could be more realistic if it was reworked. Hardware accelerated 3d cards are pretty common nowadays why can't we use them? It's all rubbish I tell ya.

edit: Games shouldn't be marketed as "Get a better pc so you can play with better graphics" and instead "Play our game it's really fun!"

(note: great graphics & great gameplay aren't mutually exclusive)

My dev blog, I guess...

jbadams

26,386

March 11, 2006 01:47 AM

Keep in mind he wrote that back in 2001, so it's a few years out of date now, and I'd agree that the rules listed are showing thier age, but I posted that mainly as an example of some unusual rules you could try developing under in order to encourage trying something different - I happened to have a link to that handy, but there are similar things out there, and you could certainly come up with something of your own.

I certainly wouldn't rule out hardware accelerated graphics for one thing, and I don't really think the original author would either. If we take a look at his justification:

Quote:
Justification: By adopting a simple, well-known display standard and sticking rigorously to it, both designers and programmers are freed to concentrate on tasks of real importance.

It doesn't hold up so well anymore. Some form of hardware acceleration is pretty much guaranteed with a gamer these days, so if I were writing up my own set of rules to follow I'd probably instead restrict the use of pixel shaders or requiring too much video memory, as a way of updating the rule somewhat.

Quote:

I agree. Tablet pcs are a new thing and the use of a pencil instead of the mouse can make for some interesting gameplay (see the Nintendo DS) but under Dogma 2001 you're not allowed to make a new type of game play (edit: which would let tablet pc users play with their machine).

I think you scanned over the rule a little quickly, take another look at it:

Quote:
3. Only the following input devices are allowed: on a console machine, the controller which normally ships with it. On a computer, a 2-axis joystick with two buttons, or a D-pad with two buttons; a standard 101-key PC keyboard; a 2-button mouse.

Justification: Most games that depend on gimmicky input devices are crummy games. You must not waste your time trying to design for them.

The intent of this one is to prevent you from using gimmicky controllers. The touch-screen on a PC is effectively the controller that ships with it, and would therefore be allowable. The touch-screen on a DS would also be allowed under these rules.

In any case, the idea is simply to try something different, and I think that's always a good thing - Dogma 2001 is just one example of a set of conditions you could apply in order to encourage thinking 'outside the box'.

- Jason Astle-Adams

indie games in "AAA" genres

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