Procedural Content
If done well, the ability to create
an endless amount of content for the frontloaded price of designing
the generation system can provide for exponential efficiency.
As Introversion Software explains, "For Introversion Software’s latest
game, DEFCON, the only real content that we made was the audio.
Almost everything else in the game is generated from publicly available
information -- the locations of cities, longitudes and latitudes of
the various coastlines and country borders of the world are all freely
available on the internet. DEFCON was in development for about
a year. Introversion’s Darwinia, on the other hand, has about
10 hours of game-play from hand-built content, and took 3 years to develop."
Another Indie favorite that utilizes procedural content generation is Dwarf Fortress.
Avoiding Photorealistic Art Direction
Any game that utilizes a photorealistic
look is immediately in visual competition with games like Crysis,
and the amount of resources it takes to compete on that level is growing
every year.
As David Hayward muses in this article, "Art assets as we know them are expensive,
with costs rising in each generation of hardware. This is a catastrophic
obstacle that cannot be ignored, as it means that only the largest publishers
will be able to afford photorealism with current production methods."
Re-Exploring the
explored with modern technology
One way to get results with fewer resources
is to explore themes and designs from 15 or 20 years ago with technology
from today. Kokoromi’s Fez is quite literally a new angle on
old school pixel platformer games.
At first glance, the game is a straightforward
2d sidescroller, but the modern technology twist is revealed when the
entire scene rotated 90 degrees and reveals the world to be made entirely
of "Trixels" or 3d pixel blocks.
As lead designer Phil Fish explains, "Since the rotation mechanic and level
design might not be immediately easy to understand, I wanted everything
else to be. So I just took a bunch of objects and things and concepts
from these old games to give gamers a point of reference. A lot of
Fez's design, besides the 2D/3D mechanic, is very oldschool for
that reason. I wanted it to have a kind of 'comfort food' appeal to
it."
Besides having a visual appeal, abandoning
popular modern game design issues to explore new ideas through some
of the most experienced legacy design choices in gaming is a very efficient
development path. Trade bump maps for bitmaps and shave off a dimension
or half. The popularity of retro classics on Xbox Live Arcade, as well as retro-styled
hits like Geometry Wars give a sense that gamers might not mind the
loss of fidelity.
2. Utilize existing free, cheap,
or open technology
There is no shame in climbing on the
backs of others, especially when you are trying to make the most with
the least. Counter-Strike, as I have mentioned previously, is
perhaps my favorite inspiration in this respect. Counter-Strike
started as mod of the original Half-Life by Minh Le and Jess
Cliffe, along with the help of others in the mod community.
By only performing
basic modifications to the Half-Life engine (changing game rules,
weapon behaviors, creating new art), Counter-Strike came into
being with a budget of roughly $0 (minus spare time spent).
The fact
that a game which started with that budget went on to become one of
the most popular and recognizable multiplayer shooters in gaming history
still inspires me to this day. Just a fraction of the free or cheap
technologies to look at are:
Rendering: Ogre, Irrlicht, HGE, Panda3d, Crystal Space, SDL
Game Engines: Flash 9(AS3), Shockwave, C4, NeoAxis, jME, Torque, Unity, Blitz, id Tech 3, XNA, Multiverse, Adventure Game Studio, Game Maker, Wintermute, Scrolling Game Development
Kit, Source, PopCap Framework, metaplace?
Physics: Bullet, PhysX, Farseer, Box2D, Motor, Chipmunk
Networking: RakNet, SmartFoxServer, HawkNL
Scripting Languages: Lua, Python, GameMonkey, Ruby
Sound: OpenAL, SDL mixer, DUMB, irrKlang, Audiere, MikMod, BASS
GUI: AntTweakBar, Guichan, Navi, LibUFO
For a much longer list of free-ish
game development libraries/tools, check here.
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As an owner of an Independant company, I find the biggest challenge to be balancing budget and content within short project timelines.
I'm not saying that all developers are taking this road but we may quickly see the path that is commonly taken by big wig publishers like EA to "push pretty graphics and people care less about the game play". I'm not stressing at all that a game with "all looks and no brains" will win Game of the Year but we see this trend every time another eyegasmic game comes out and gets an 8/10 score where it otherwise would have gotten a 5/10.
I'm only pleading that developers tread lightly and don't look to Big Brother for examples on how to tailor this young industry. If independent games grow to the production level of current AAA games then we may never again have the opportunity to see small upstarts creating successful products. There should be a real push on all ends to keep the Indie flavor alive and avoid put out "beautiful blond" games.
One thing I think you should have mentioned is that indie game developers should listen to the players more, especially about faults in the game. Too many times I've seen the attitude of "I'm a programmer, so I'm automatically a genius game designer" or "You don't know programming, therefore you couldn't possibly have anything worth listening to." I have tried playing dozens of indie games that suffered from fatal flaws, glaring omissions and obvious imbalance, and when I visit their websites I see many people commenting on these flaws in the forums, yet rarely do I ever see the indie game programmers address these issues. More often than not they just ignore everybody.
This is especially sad during beta testing. There have been several games that I participated in beta tests where all they were looking for was bug reports. Any and all comments about how to make the games more enjoyable were ignored. As a result they came out with well-programmed games that nobody played more than once.
And I can't tell you how many times game programmers have shut me down because I didn't use the right buzzwords or I suggested something that was different from the norm. I can see how this comes about, you work so hard on coding your brain defaults to a certain logic standard, I've seen this in artists and other people many times. But really, how can you come up with new and innovative games when you immediately shoot down concepts without even trying to think about the possibilities?
And as for asking for FPS from a racing game, that kind of off-kilter feedback comes with the territory, but if a large majority of your beta-testers and/or players ask for the same thing, then you should give it some thought. For instance, one game I beta tested a player suggested they replace all their confusing stats with just three main ones with subcategories that would be introduced slowly as the players advance. Considering how the game was structured this made a lot of sense and would have made the game a _lot_ easier to play, so most of us testers agreed with the suggestion even though it would have changed things significantly. They said "No" quite firmly and stated that the game was supposed to have large pages of confusing numbers so the players could "explore" and "discover" strategies on their own. Most of us couldn't even figure out how to play the game completely, much less discover strategies, so we dropped out and the game didn't even make it out of beta.