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.