Utah Indie Night - Spring 2009
Wow. Time flies. Doesn't seem like that long ago we had the last Utah Indie Night. Seriously. Has it been an entire quarter year already?

This time, the meeting was at NinjaBee again. Fortunately, Steve Taylor had let the restraining order against me lapse, so it was fun being at my old stomping grounds. Plus, Steve got to rib me repeatedly about having NOT finished and released Frayed Knights yet, which is not an unfair criticism. Why haven't I, anyway? Dang. I should quit writing this and get back to work...

But instead, I keep writing...

Anyway, the night began sans introductions with a pretty sizable group with Darius Ouderkirk offering a formal presentation on choosing an indie game project. As simple as it sounds, this was an awesome talk that would make a great chapter in a new book on the business of indie games. Simple yet profound. He discussed how to choose and scope an indie game project so that you will be more likely to FINISH and release your game. If only one in ten indie game developers followed this this advice, we'd probably have three times as many indie games out there today.

He tried to convince him to put the notes on his website. He promised he would, but then he ran away when I released him from the headlock, and I didn't see him again during the evening. I hear he showed his tower defense game, which I'd have liked to see, but since I was showing Frayed Knights I didn't get to see everything. But in his talk, he focused on three main points: Know yourself (your skills, limitations, and passions), know your audience, and finally know your project.

Funny, the kind of project you SHOULDN'T take on is a game like Frayed Knights. D'oh. I am so boned...

While several games were being demoed on the main floor, I only got a good look at Darkened Dreams 2 and Vespers 3D. Darkened Dreams 2 has morphed somewhat - rather than being an RPG with a really kick-but toolset, the focus is now on it being more of an awesome RPG construction kit with an RPG included. Curtis showed off the editors (now looking much cooler with Peter's finished art), and they are getting pretty sophisticated.

It also crashed a couple of times tonight - so it's not QUITE ready for prime time yet. But it's looking much nicer.

Vespers 3D... wow. First of all, I'm beginning to think Mike Rubin is at least borderline OCD, because this game he's making has a level of attention to detail that puts all of us to shame. How does he do that? I'll tell ya, when this game comes out, you'll want to play it just to wander around the lavishly detailed, beautiful world. The monks' abbey is ... freakin' unbelievable. And just when I think that the game can't get any better, he shows new stuff that makes it look even better. I'm pretty stunned.

And it's being done in plain ol' TGE.

An amusing conversation concerning this - and our own lack of releases - went along these lines:

Someone asked about the game, and Mike said it was based on an old, award-winning IF game. I said, "Well, it's old NOW; it wasn't old when you started."

Mike laughed and agreed. Then Steve said that Mike and I should have a contest to see who releases their game first. Steve said the loser should give the winner something readily available and cheap by that time, like an air-car or the cure to cancer.

A couple of minutes later, I asked about the games engine, and Mike noted that, like me, he's still using plain ol' (customized) TGE. "So we're both using pretty old, creaky tech," I commented to people glued to Mike's monitor looking at the amazing visuals. I wondered what I could do to make my visuals look half as good.

"Well, it's old now. It wasn't old and creaky when we STARTED!" Mike announced with a grin.

Touché.

Steve Taylor also showed a bit of their awesome and popular XBox 360 game, "A Kingdom for Keflings." I am totally his worst friend ever for not having bought this game yet. (I have hardly touched my XBox 360, but to play a song or three of Rock Band with friends, in three months!) It looks awesome. I said it looked like what Black & White wishes it had been - if only they'd gotten over what had sounded like a good idea after a couple of pints at the pub one night, and focused on what would have really been fun.

As for me, I demoed what I had of Mournhold for Frayed Knights. This proved somewhat challenging, because there's a lot of dialog in the first few minutes, and I felt really awkward demoing... well, stuff you read. It would have been more awkward if we'd had voice-overs, because the room was noisy and you could barely hear the game. So for the most part, I skipped through it, saying stuff like, "imagine funny dialog here..." and moving on. I got repeat chuckles every time I had Chloe cast "Power Word: Defenestrate," so I guess that one turned out okay. I need more spells like that.

Besides, it gave me the chance to conference with Xenovore over his work in progress, Mournhold Castle. While it needs texture work, and a lot of it is unfinished, it is coming along very impressively. This gave us a good excuse to get together face-to-face, go over some details, and make sure we had the same expectations. So we got work done at the indie night. Yet another valuable purpose for the evening.

As always, it was an awesome and inspirational time.

UPDATE: Greg Squire has a write-up on the event you can read here. And here's the first part of Darius's articles about choosing projects.

Labels: Indie Evangelism

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