Three Tales of Indie Game Development …

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 24, 2010

Imagining riches with your l33t indie game-making skills? It’s definitely possible. Here are some reflections on some semi-recent projects grounded firmly in reality. One is a traditional single-player game for PC that I thought (at the time) would be a sure-fire hit, blending one hit game with rock & roll mystique. Another is an indie Massively Multiplayer Online game. And a third is a follow-up to a hit iPhone game.

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Chopper 2 Post-Mortem

There are some outstanding excerpts I can’t help but note. On Chopper 2:

“Initially, I saw Chopper 2 as roughly twice as complicated as Chopper 1, so thought it would take twice as long. But this was a mistake. I’d neglected to think about all the complexities introduced by the relationships between all of the new features. An analogy would be a number of people shaking hands. Two people means one handshake, but double it to four people and you get six handshakes. Much of the coding complexity is in the handshakes.”

Been there, done that, and he is SO correct in ways that many gamers and inexperienced game developers do not realize.

And a note in the comments about how Cliffski misjudged his market:

“When I did KRL, I was vaguely targeting the casual games portals, but I screwed up. The game was too edgy and unpolished to be casual games fare, and too simple and cuddly to be hardcore games fare. In retrospect, having some sex and drugs with the rock n roll would have been much much better. Huge variety of equipment for the band would have been better, too.”

Good stuff to think about.

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: Read the First Comment



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