Indie Advantage (more upbeat ;))

[cliffski]

After the big discussion about the power of portals, it would be easy for a struggling indie to become despondent, but I think it worth reminding ourselves how comparitively easy we have it compared to making a retail game.
I work for a major UK developer full time (some of you know who...) and I worked at another big develoepr before that, so I've seen it from both ends (and can contrast my own indie games progress with the work on a 'triple A' title). I'm always amazed at how much more efficient the indie development process is. I'm sure we can all think of a billion reasons why we have an advantage. Heres some to start off...
1) No milestone deadlines (and therefore no hacking in short term bodges to please publishers that need recoding
2) No real admin overhead (no office rental, no HR/legal/accountant costs)
3) 100% creative freedom
4) No expectation to push the hardware, so very little need to do any R&D graphics wise
5) Shorter development times (no burnout problem)
6) A 90% cut off the profits rather than the 20%-30% you get from stores
7) No employees, so no office politics/personality clash/meetings/communication problems/coding style wars
8) Much faser compile times ;)
9) No having to learn other peoples code (its all yours...)
10) Working from home
11)Totally consistent 'vision' for the game, everyone on the game agrees on the concept and the execution, because you ARE everyone.

Number 3 is the biggy for me. If I suddenly get an urge to include homicidal giraffes in one of my games, they will go in, and nobody can stop me ;)
So generally life aint so bad guys!

[Fost]

Yeah! I once spent a day (yes an entire day) justifying why I was making a model for a game to my studio manager. I recognise that it's improtant for management to keep a handle on things, but the discussion should have taken 2 minutes. He basically had nothing better to do with his time and was picking my brains for ways to cut development time (to no avail sadly). I had to point out to him at the end that I could have actually finished the model that day.

The other good thing is that there is no dead wood on your team (if you aren't developing solo). Money is too tight to support it. I'm sure anyone who works in a big studio is aware of a few people who've found a dusty corner to hide in where they can get away with little or no work. I actually know of an artist who never did any work but spent a year working on a 3D animation that he then released on the web. People like this are a pain to have on your team. It's great to share a vision with other like minded people.

[Devman]

I work at a mid-sized company doing software development, and the product I have worked on the past 3 years has released about 4 times. One of the most annoying software problems we have at work is being backwards compatible for all these versions. We have a plugin architecture with about 20 different plugins, and we must work with all versions of these plugins, even ones that released 6 years ago!

So indie development has the advantage of not having to worry about upgrading/downgrading backwards compatibility!

Woohoo!

[Lerc]

1) No milestone deadlines (and therefore no hacking in short term bodges to please publishers that need recoding
Games that just drag on and never seem to finish
2) No real admin overhead (no office rental, no HR/legal/accountant costs)
No benefits of having your own office/hr/legal/accountant.
(actually I have an accountant and would give a lot to have an office where I could work in peace)
3) 100% creative freedom
Feature Creep
4) No expectation to push the hardware, so very little need to do any R&D graphics wise
You get to see a lot of cool things that you won't be able to use for a few years. I could quite handle using a pixel shader for some things (2d on 3d hardware gets really funky when you factor in shaders)
5) Shorter development times (no burnout problem)
Ha! I'll tell you the neverending story of Gus sometime
6) A 90% cut off the profits rather than the 20%-30% you get from stores
It's a balance, you get 90% of much less. On a karmic level you feel better though. You did the work, you get the money
7) No employees, so no office politics/personality clash/meetings/communication problems/coding style wars
No pre-paid graphic artist means incredibly slow art development.
8) Much faser compile times ;)
9) No having to learn other peoples code (its all yours...)
10) Working from home
Nappy Changing
11)Totally consistent 'vision' for the game, everyone on the game agrees on the concept and the execution, because you ARE everyone.

I'll give you 8,9 & 11, But I use Blitz and Delphi a full build is under 3 seconds in both :-).

Actually I'm not terribly serious about any of it. That's depending on how I'm feeling though. Fost says that you don't get dead wood on your team. Somedays I feel like I am the dead wood.

[Andy]

Disagree on points 1-9,11. And not sure if 10 is good with my two smaller ones running around my knees.

Seriously.

[NuriumGames]

Never worked at a game company but I developed some software as an IT consultant. For sure I prefer to work as an independent developer, hope to be able to stay in the course.

About my IT consulting experience:

1) Milestone deadlines.
It was even worse, we had absurd milestones. I had one of 2 weeks that evolved into more than 6 months.

2) Admin overhead.
I was truly amazed to see the big amounts of money and time needed to do simple tasks. I remember a project where the director always (I mean ALWAYS) left any meeting after 15 minutes, of course she later needed an special meeting for her.

3) Creative freedom.
Of course no freedom at all, people will decide what you have to do. For example they may decide that you have to start coding NOW, when you (the programmers) are absolutely convinced that you have to plan before.

What I hated mode were the incompetent bosses, and I had many.

[MrPhil]

You forgot:

12) You only have to deal with your own level of insanity

Once, I was working on project where one of the tools was suppose to be delivered the day before Christmas (I know I know, who’s brilliant idea was that date!). The whole project was running behind and so around October the Manager told us to halt all work on the tool, which we objected to but he assured us that the client was okay with the change in priorities. So we went about our way and then four days before the delivery date he comes, and I'm not kidding you, says, "Let’s take a look at that tool we are delivering at the end of the week!" :eek:

All the developers just sat there stunned. Finally, one of the contractors spoke up, "Yeah, uh... do you understand the definition of the word halt."

Super funny to look back on, but at the time I was so shocked I couldn't appreciate the humor.

[EpicBoy]

Of course no freedom at all, people will decide what you have to do.
This is something that people need to learn to accept - it's called being a professional. It's not a club or a social gathering - it's work. If you're not the owner, you're going to have people telling you what to do and you'll be expected to do it. Just because you're making games doesn't mean there aren't schedules and very real deadlines that need to be met.

Yes, there are incompetent managers but there are also just as many prima donna employees who don't want to take direction from "the man".

[tolik]

What?!? Managers?

[RedKnight]

I disagree with the first commandment :cool:

I believe that most developer should have a Deathline.
no matter how Small or Big your project is, you should have deathline telling you when to quite and start a new one.

[cliffski]

1) wasnt deadlines it was MILESTONES.
big developers don't stick to their deadlines any more than indies do. witness duke nukem, doom 3 half life 2...
MILESTONES are the problem. People end up spending ages putting together a particular build of the game that has feature x and feature y hacked in at the last minute because they are in the publishers schedule. once the milestone is passed, that code is then unhacked and redone from scratch, wasting everybodies time.
if you dont have a publisher, you dont have to waste anyones time in keeping someone external to the project happy. When i write code for my games I wrote the most important bit of code next. It might not change the way the game looks or plays yet, but I dont need to show interim builds to anyone, so I can have a sensible schedule, not a 'board-of-directors' pleasing schedule.

[SonSon]

No pre-paid graphic artist means incredibly slow art development.

This depends on your assets. My partner and I both come from the mainstream games industry as graphic artists. We have an extra-fast art development. :p

[EpicBoy]

Milestones are a necessity for getting games out the door. You need to know when feature X will be working in order to plan the things that depend on it.

You may not THINK that Doom3, DNF, etc have internal milestones but I'll guarantee that they do. You can't do a project of any size with any efficiency without them.

They might miss them, but don't kid yourself - they have them.


It might not change the way the game looks or plays yet, but I dont need to show interim builds to anyone, so I can have a sensible schedule, not a 'board-of-directors' pleasing schedule.
BTW, 3D Realms, id and Valve are independently owned and financed - so who are they putting together these supposed hacked up builds for?

[formfarbeminze]

re 9) and 11):

i think it is an advantage to have to deal with the fact other programers have to understand your code as well. you will program "cleaner" then and add proper commentary to your code. the same principle of examination apllies to the game design: chances are your 'homo giraffes' aren't that brilliant an idea as you thought. who's going to tell you that if you're are aproving your own design alone?

[Jim Buck]

Whoa, there's a pretty big difference between "homicidal giraffes" and "homo giraffes". :D

[Damon DuBois]

1) wasnt deadlines it was MILESTONES.
big developers don't stick to their deadlines any more than indies do. witness duke nukem, doom 3 half life 2...
MILESTONES are the problem. People end up spending ages putting together a particular build of the game that has feature x and feature y hacked in at the last minute because they are in the publishers schedule. once the milestone is passed, that code is then unhacked and redone from scratch, wasting everybodies time.


I can vouche for this. Deadlines have there use and in the next game that my partner and I are doing we've decided to set deadlines for ourselves. The problem is when the deadlines like cliffski says are MILESTONES and set by an external company. A deadline set internaly just to keep things on track is flexible and will get moved if it gets in the way. Milestones set by an external company(publisher) is different. They are ussually NOT flexible and can cause some very rushed, wastefull--hacked in-- coding to be done that just ends up needing to be re-done after the milestone. I've personally witnessed this over and over again in my company for several years now. It's very wasteful.

[cliffski]

anyway... generally this post was supposed to be an upbeat and positive post so indies could look on the bright side. it seems that some of us find that quite difficult to do ;). The more I read about busines, marketing, NLP etc, the more I believe in positive thinking. I think concentrating on all the negatives can really put a damper on your productivity.
think positive guys ;)

As for the giraffes being a bd idea. thats true, but sometimes great ideas do seem wacko to other people until they are implemented. The opposite view is design by commitee which is how hollywood blockbusters tend to work. You end up with very safe, very predcitable and very samey ideas that way.

[Andy]

cliffski - you are right as always etc. but... ;)

Look what are you trying to propose to young guys - do what every you like and you will be on the top of the hill. :D

No way guys! If you will not build your small (down to one man) company with the shape of the real business - with milestones, deadlines etc. - you will loose. No one company made something good without good and competitive schedule.

I suppose so,

[Coyote]

The bigger an organization gets, the greater the overhead you get for communication. Every person you add to the team decreases your theoretical maximum productivity --- by how much depends upon how good your management & practices are that you have in place. (That doesn't even begin to address the initial drop in productivity you'll get from adding a new team member on a programming team, as he pulls everyone else's productivity down to help him get up to speed).

So whenever you talk about big teams, big companies, etc... you are gonna find a lot of laughable crap. Keeping it small protects against a lot of that - but not all.

The coolest thing for me is that a low-overhead indie can survive in a niche that nobody else can. Like Jack's sports management games. Or old genres abandoned by the mainstream now. Or brand new and fairly original (nothing's truly original, after all...) concepts.

But the #1 thing to me is being in control of your own destiny. Yes, a lot of it depends on luck and factors outside of your control, but ultimately you are the person responsible. For good or bad.

[DragonsIOA]

For me, building a bigger team has really paid off. When I first started Scream Machines, I was responsible for everything so I had to stop coding often to create a model or some other art asset. Eventually I brought in a modeller, but since I'm the only full-time person, I still found myself having to stop coding to make art. Now that we have two part-time graphic artists and a part-time sound engineer, I can focus strictly on the code. So far we all have compatible visions of what we want to accomplish, and having a couple of people around to bounce ideas off has proven invaluable.

[Sirrus]

Thoughts on RCT3 Brian?

[DragonsIOA]

Thoughts on RCT3 Brian?

Well, I used to be a big RCTfan until RCT2 came out. I lost interest in it at that point for some reason. I've checked out the demo they released, and it looks promising if they fix the graphical glitches, and the bonehead lack of Athlon t-bird support. I wish they would have updated the track building system more so you could make more realistic designs, but I understand why they didn't. I'm looking forward to its release since my sales jump whenever something new for RCT comes out :)

[Chigley]

The allure of creative freedom and getting away from the grind of game development is a big draw for me personally. That said, I feel it is still very important to approach an indie project with as much discipline and planning as possible. Deadlines are a good thing, as is scheduling, a detailed design and a plan.

One important skill is knowing when to "finish" a game and let it go. It's easy to sit on a game and polish it and tweak it and change stuff forever if there's no real end planned. At some point you have to say. "Right, that's it, time to release this thing".

[JaffaMused]

...If I suddenly get an urge to include homicidal giraffes in one of my games, they will go in, and nobody can stop me...

Now that's a game I'd like to play :)

[Chris Evans]

Aside from creative freedom, a lot of things I enjoy about being an Indie don't have to do with development at all.

- No Rush hour traffic.
- I can wake up whenever I want to.
- I can take a break whenever I want to.
- I can spend time with my family.
- Did I mention no rush hour traffic?

This makes my development work much more enjoyable, even during a crunch.

But I guess I'm veering off-topic a little bit...

I think one of the biggest advantage of Indies is efficiency. For example, right now if I need a software package and I have the money, I can go out buy it the next day if necessary. At my last company, if I needed a software package, I first had to get it approved by my managers. This meant I had to write a formal proposal. Then I had to wait for approval. Then once it was approved, I had to wait for the purchasing department to order it. Finally after it's eventually ordered and arrives at the office, it then bounces around in the internal office mail system for several days. If someone is on vacation, it's even longer.

All and all, at a big company it can take over a month and half to receive a software package you needed yesterday.

Also, has an Indie developer you can quickly recognize a problem and then react appropriately. In a big company, it's very hard to change course when things are looking bad. Often times things are allowed to get a lot worse before something is done.