Indie Development

Indie Development

In this blog post I will be writing about an indie game and explain what the people within the team were responsible for, and what skills they would have needed to make the game a success and also report on how the developer got their game to market, how it was distributed, and what the pros and cons of indie development are.

Independent video game development is the process of when you create a video game without the financial support of a video game publishing company, they are solely run on whatever the indie developers can afford, which at times can be nothing at all, but the success when your games does sell are tremendous, if your game cost £10 and you might sell 500,000 copies then that's a lot of money heading your way which could be invested into their next game or other way to improve the game such as add ons. While large firms can create independent games, they normally designed by an individual or can be a small team of as many as 10 people, smaller indie development companies could even be run by as little as only 2 people depending on how how complex the game can be. Also these games would take years to be created from the ground up or even can be created in a matter of days or even hours depending on the design goal, participants and complexity. A great example of a small indie development company which only had 2 people running it would be the creators of Super Meat Boy, which was designed by Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, their development team only consisted of them and their game was a huge success. 

Indie – Short for “Independent”

Indie Game – A game created by individuals or s small team generally without a publisher or financial support.

The indie company I chose to use is Playdead which is a Danish development company. They have most notably released the game Limbo which is a puzzle-platform game and was released on July 2010 and is an exclusive games title for Xbox Live Arcade.  The core development team was around 8, somewhere concept artists who would produce characters for the game and others would be programmers, they would input the correct code into the game which would enable the player to play the game after a while they expanded to around 16 at various stages with freelancers. Initial development was funded by the Danish Government grants. After a year of Xbox exclusivity Playdead released Limbo for Playstation 3 via Playstation Network, for Microsoft Windows via Steam and Mac OS X via the Mac App Store.

The developer company Playdead released the game digitally rather than in boxed form. After the first two weeks released on Xbox Live Arcade, Limbo gained more than 224,000 players on the global leaderboads.

Next I will be writing about some of the pros and cons there are for being an indie developer:

Pros:

•          Bragging Rights – When all your work pays off in the end.
•          Knowledge – Improve in skill and increase intelligence.
•          Freedom – Freedom to do anything you want in the game.
•          Control – You are your own boss.
•          Opens Opportunity – Earning Money, Sponsorship, and Fame?

Cons:

•       No Funding – You can’t cover expenses, sometimes for more than the game.
•      Make It or Break It – You would have put alot into your project, but sometimes you just don't make the cut.
•      Limited Resources – You rely on your skills and creativity and also have a limited time.

Solutions:

•          For Money – Partner up with other start-ups with investors.
•          Sign up to kickstarter.com

For Assistance:

•          Be active in the community composed of other developers.
•         Have something to attract the good ones.

For Practically Anything:

•          A lot of communication.