Independent-Minds posts

Independent Minds aims to take various aspects of indie gaming and present them to you each week. From game round-ups to design elements to interviews with prominent members of the scene, it's an exploration of what makes indie gaming great as well as what makes someone an indie.

For the game developer, nothing is more important than the longevity of a game. Will people be playing your opus a year after release? Ten years after release? The answer should be yes, but the ways to extend the life of a game are often overlooked. There are many different methods to add replayability, including multiple story paths, procedurally generated content, and non-linear gameplay. However, the best way, and the one that has ensured the survival of games like Unreal Tournament or Half-Life, is allowing players to fiddle with the content themselves. The more your players can tweak the game, the more they will play it, and that's a lesson all developers should take to heart.

Independent Minds aims to take various aspects of indie gaming and present them to you each week. From game round-ups to design elements to interviews with prominent members of the scene, it's an exploration of what makes indie gaming great as well as what makes someone an indie.

Part of any successful game project is not just the code and art aspects. While they are obviously very important, so is the amount of time that you do them in. Take too long and you will lose your potential audience or be eclipsed by the latest new game. There's many different ways to managing the amount of time you spend on a project, but in the end, nothing beats good ol' administrative prowess. Planning is the fastest route to game completion, and any smart indie developer, whether conceptual or completionist, plans in some way or another. There's lots of different aspects to planning, though!

Independent Minds aims to take various aspects of indie gaming and present them to you each week. From game round-ups to design elements to interviews with prominent members of the scene, it's an exploration of what makes indie gaming great as well as what makes someone an indie.

There's a section of game design that a lot of designers, professional and otherwise, often overlook. They get too caught up in making their game beautiful or deep that they forget one of the most important parts altogether. The element that crosses the border of form and function to merge the two together into a coherent experience. I am talking about the interface, and it's one of the most important part of any game design. We've even mentioned it before on Independent Minds, but it really requires more in-depth viewing. After all, overlook your interface or design it poorly, and your game will suffer from a lack of players and kill your market! And that's not good at all.

Independent Minds aims to take various aspects of indie gaming and present them to you each week. From game round-ups to design elements to interviews with prominent members of the scene, it's an exploration of what makes indie gaming great as well as what makes someone an indie.

Sometimes, when developing a game, you come across a really good idea (or a lot of really good ideas) that you just can't incorporate into the game at release. Or maybe after release you find that your game is absolutely ridden with more bugs than a graveyard gone fallow. You have two options: Leave it alone, or bring your considerable developer muscles to bear against the problem. While each game should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, the general consensus is that no matter your position as an indie or accomplished developer, you should take control of your project after release and guide it. After all, if all developers simply abandoned projects immediately after completion, we wouldn't have such great games as World of Warcraft or Team Fortress 2!

Independent Minds aims to take various aspects of indie gaming and present them to you each week. From game round-ups to design elements to interviews with prominent members of the scene, it's an exploration of what makes indie gaming great as well as what makes someone an indie.

There's a division in the indie community. No, I'm not talking about who likes top hats and who likes bowlers, but rather whether an indie game that is merely a concept of a potential full game should be given the same treatment as a game somebody spent the last few years working on to perfect. Frankly, it's way too complicated to even bother with discussing how to classify them. Instead, this article is about which one you should choose, given your personal preferences. Each has benefits that the other does not, and fits a specific kind of person.

Independent Minds aims to take various aspects of indie gaming and present them to you each week. From game round-ups to design elements to interviews with prominent members of the scene, it's an exploration of what makes indie gaming great as well as what makes someone an indie.

While you can certainly make a compelling game with no story (look at Tetris), it is definitely better to make a game that is compelling both in narrative and in gameplay. That's what this week's Independent Minds is about: penning your game's story. There's a lot of different ways you can go about this, many of them completely valid. There's also a lot of pitfalls along the way, though, and many a promising game writer has fallen into these pitfalls. You don't want to be one of them, do you?!

Independent Minds aims to take various aspects of indie gaming and present them to you each week. From game round-ups to design elements to interviews with prominent members of the scene, it's an exploration of what makes indie gaming great as well as what makes someone an indie.

Well, maybe not handicapped, but certainly accessible! Accessibility is an incredibly important aspect of gaming that nobody really pays attention to. Accessibility is really simple: how easy is it for a new player to come in and pick up your game. Most notably, you must pick up and hold your new player's attention, even if they don't completely understand the game right from the very start. In a way, this tied into both ambition and the principles of good design, but it goes a little farther beyond that into knowing your players. It's a guessing game, really.

Independent Minds aims to take various aspects of indie gaming and present them to you each week. From game round-ups to design elements to interviews with prominent members of the scene, it's an exploration of what makes indie gaming great as well as what makes someone an indie.

There's a pretty wide range of genres out there, from RPG to RTS to simple side-scrollers. There are also mixes that turn out to be incredibly phenomenal, such as Deus Ex or Warcraft 3. In each of these genres that are loved and hated by just about everybody under the sun there are certain gameplay elements that continue to repeat themselves over and over agin. I'm not talking about story or tropes, but rather the actual gameplay and how games made by completely different companies have very similar elements and progression. So snuggle up to the fire, because it's time to do some good ol' fasioned research.

Independent Minds aims to take various aspects of indie gaming and present them to you each week. From game round-ups to design elements to interviews with prominent members of the scene, it's an exploration of what makes indie gaming great as well as what makes someone an indie.

There's quite a few options for the budding indie game developer. Do I go with this concept, or that one? What do I do about getting more teammates onto the project? Where am I going to get the money to live while I work on this? Where are my pants? One of the most important of all, though, is the question of doing a browser-based game or making a standalone game right off the bat. This week, let's take a look at some of the best browser game engines available for a developer to use on their way to indie stardom.

When considering an engine to use for the web, there are three primary engines that are used widely. This is not counting PHP-based browser games such as Tribal Wars, by the way. The engines are Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flash, Unity, and Sun Microystems Java. Each has their advantages and disadvantages, and appeals to a specific kind of developer or audience.

Independent Minds aims to take various aspects of indie gaming and present them to you each week. From game round-ups to design elements to interviews with prominent members of the scene, it's an exploration of what makes indie gaming great as well as what makes someone an indie.

If you ask any respectable indie developer about making your own game, the very first thing they are likely to tell you is to be original. However, for the budding developer, being truly original is quite hard. Abstracts of design haven't yet fallen into place in that designer's brain, and the influence of the games one plays will likely be seen heavily duplicated in the end result of the game they are working on. It's easy to copy those that have done it before, and it's relatively safe. However, to forge new ground and be original, risks must be taken. People don't really like risks all the much.