so yeah, this guy david marsh is such an expert on creating indie games that he has an endless parade of hits. lets count them all, shall we. oh wait THERE ARE NONE!!! hey jackass, instead of telling others "how to be indie" try making your own game and have it be a massive hit!
and let us not forget david's infinate wisdom: "Avoiding Photorealistic Art Direction" gee, tell that to pixel, the creator of cave story, which is the most successful indie game in recent memory. see, he makes games that he wants to see, he doesn't listen to posers like you. go play some american piece of trash and let creators create whatever they want!!

how is Pixel's art direction contrary to avoiding photorealism..?

Most tips aren't just for independents, more like beginners to making games.

I don't like that article, mainly because the advice it gives ignores the entire point of indie games.

An example is 'don't make single player games, make multiplayer games, because it's more efficient'. That kind of implies that the reason for making games is efficiency; it's not. What if a developer prefers to make single player games? Multiplayer games and single player games have a differing audience, people who play one don't usually play the other, and developers who are good at one aren't always good at the other. I think it's a bad idea to for someone who likes single player games to decide to make multiplayer games on the idea that it's more efficient and they could make more money or get more players that way.

The other advice the article game is similar, but that one example should do to illustrate the overall problem with the article (that its premise is that indie developers should strive to be efficient is mistaken).

To illustrate what I mean, I'm currently working on a single player game, which should be pretty long, require tons of resources, and take me and the other people working on it more than a year to complete.

And sure, I know that I could probably be more efficient if I used procedural content (random map design or whatever), or if I used fewer resources and didn't see the need for two to three hours of music and 40-60 animated enemy sprites and custom sound effects and a detailed story with a lot of dialogue and voice acting and all that.

But that's the kind of game I like to make, and which I think I'm best at, and which I think a lot of people enjoy more than games that are random dungeon romps like Diablo or multiplayer shooter matches that last two minutes. Multiplayer games and games with procedural content can't really attain the same type of experience or depth that single player story-based games can. It's not that one type of game is superior to another, but they do serve different needs and I'd hate to see a world in which the only games we had were multiplayer open gameplay procedural toys like Second Life or Spore.

Paul -- I think the list is not so much direct instructions (ala "follow these 9 sure steps to success!") but rather is just saying, "here are ways people have thought about design to get interesting projects that are of a scope they can manage". So it's not saying "compromise your artistic vision to reduce project scope," but just, "if you're this part of your project is undecided, here are some ideas that have worked for other people." If you're in the initial 'deciding on a project' phase then thinking about project scope is a reasonable thing to do.

So ... in that context I think it's reasonable?

I guess if someone has a history of trying to make games that are beyond their ability to make and never finishes them it might be a good idea to reduce the scope and workload, but if it's at the cost of making types of games that a person wants to make and isn't excited about, it's too high a price to pay.

Besides, it's not even really about artistic vision, it's more about what types of games people like playing. If someone loves playing and making, say, adventure games (like Dave Gilbert for instance), telling them it'd be more efficient to make a top-down online shooter or a simulation seems ridiculous.

I just think the whole idea of 'getting the most games/players with the least effort' is questionable in general.

I found the article to be very interesting and a good read. But I also found that it just kind of presented much of what I already learned about indie into one article. I wish I had read it years ago.

FWIW, this would be very good reading for all those folks who come into a forum and say "I want to make a MMORPG like WoW but with better graphics than Crysis, do I need to know C++?" :)

I'm glad to see that at the very least the article is spurring some discussion which I think is great. I am not, ( nor do I ever claim to be in the article ) an expert on indie games, although I would say that I have a fair amount of experience in the process of game development in general. I did not write this article as a sermon on what developers should be doing, or to claim that these things are essential. These are merely personal observations and reasonings from the last few years that I have been following the indie game scene and comparing and contrasting it to commercial game development practices. They are simply opinions, and as opinions of course you are free to judge them as rubbish, or perhaps they might spur some further consideration - which I hope will be the case!

David, thanks for sharing your insights in this article. It was an interesting read for me.

I do agree with Paul that a desire for efficiency should not compromise one's vision. If the reason for making games is just to make money (and there's nothing wrong with making a living, mind you), one might as well work for a mainstream developer or go into a different, more lucrative field of work altogether.

But I take David's point that very successful games (in the sense of winning the attention of players) have been created by small teams or individuals with very small budgets.

It would probably be foolish for one person with no budget to attempt outdoing a commercial game with a multimillion dollar budget and a diverse team of programmers and Hollywood production artists, on its own terms. But independent developers can create games that are every bit as engaging as commercial titles, and more so, by tackling ideas the big guys won't touch and doing so with a personal, uncompromising approach.

The passion for an idea has to come first, THEN the means to accomplish it. If it takes ten years to finish, so be it.

I read the article as a way of telling mainstream game developers how others have solved some problems they are facing. In that context, it is great advice.

I think it's a good idea to, as Scrooge McDuck said, "work smarter, not harder." But I think working smarter and not harder shouldn't mean you should radically change the types of games you make. And most of the best indie games I've played didn't follow these nine paths to indie greatness -- Aquaria is a notable example, it has tons of resources and took years to make, and is pretty successful despite that.

I think it would be very hard to find an example of a game that follow ALL of these methods, most of the examples in the article only employ one or two. But I think Aquaria is actually a good example of making some efficient design decisions, whether conscious or not. It's 2d nature dramatically lessened the amount of work it took to create all the beautiful artwork that in in the game. Also, it did not try to be photo realistic, and as such could get away with including or not including whatever graphical features they wanted. Aquaria might also be viewed as re-exploring the same concepts as ecco the dolphin or other exploratory 2d games, but with modern technology to streamline the process. They also distributed digitally, and on an open platform as well. Bit Blot also took large steps to develop and mobilize a fan base, the game was widely championed and evangelized by the indie game community.

I actually wanted to fit Aquaria into the article but was not able to. I think it's a great example of the kind of successful decisions some independent developers are making that might be used by others.

In terms of efficient design decisions, Aquaria also (IIRC) switched early on from pure frame-by-frame hand animation to a skeletal animation system to make the high-res 2D art feasible.

"It's 2d nature dramatically lessened the amount of work it took to create all the beautiful artwork that in in the game."

Actually I'm not sure about that. 2D can take even longer to create than 3D in a lot of cases. Chrono Trigger took just as many artists to create all the sprites as Final Fantasy 7 used to create all the models, I heard. But I see your point (and Zaphos's point) on the other parts of Aquaria.

But it also strikes me that just as no game can do all nine, no game can avoid all nine. So saying that Aquaria does a few of them isn't evidence that those nine things are actually useful, it's more like evidence that you can't avoid doing some of those nine to some extent. In other words, even if it's true that most great indie games do one or two of those, that doesn't mean they're great because they do one or two of those, there are just as many non-great indie games that do one or two of those too.

even if building a 2d asset vs. building a 3d asset took a similar amount of time, building a fleshed out environment that will be beautiful in a 360 degree view is an order of magnitude more time consuming than creating a two-dimensional environment. I would assume for things like game rules and scripting, animation, etc - you would see similar differences.

True, although FF7 didn't have a 360-environment (even though at the time it was the most expensive game to create in history). And there are low-budget 3D indie games with one or two artists which have a nicer 3D environment than a lot of mainstream commercial games: The Path and Endless Forest (both by tale-of-tales) are good examples of indie 3D games which look as nice or nicer than many mainstream 3D games.

I haven't made both types of art assets, but friends who *have* made both 2D and 3D art for games tell me that 2D can take just as much time to create and most of the time actually takes more time to create, so I'm going by their judgment until I try it myself. I think this is primarily because 3D models are so flexible; if you need a table you don't have to start from scratch, you can find someone else's example table and modify it to your liking, whereas with 2D, if you need a table, you do have to start from scratch, every time, and from every angle.