design 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.

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.

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 a folly that many a budding amateur designer falls prey to when starting out, and that is the folly of ambition. They have these grand, sweeping visions of complex games that simultaneously entertain and emotionally affect those who play them. Games which have a main storyline that is over 50 hours long and sidequests that push the hours count into the hundreds. The problems with this is that with such ambition comes a price, and generally that price is motivation. Few independent game developers end up finishing games of such amazing complexity due to the massive amount of time required. However, there are ways to both avoid this overambitious thinking as well as turning it to your advantage.

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.

The biggest fallacy you can run across in a game project is thinking to yourself, "why golly, design is an easy job! All I have to do is come up with ideas and implement them!" There is no trap larger than this, and its one that many an aspiring developer has fallen into. So what can you do to prevent this from happening? Know the basics of design, marketing, and writing. They are pretty important to learn no matter where you end up in a development cycle, and you can apply those same concepts to other jobs as well. So here we go!

Orisinal: Morning Sunshine is a website devoted to the very core of the principles behind casual gaming. With 59 tiny Flash-based games, there is something to please every palate, from the light shmup action of V-Force to the puzzle play of Bauns to the coordination challenges of Floats. Additionally, every game is illustrated with style, using subtle gradations and washes of color not typically seen in Flash titles, making each experience feel more rich and elegant.

Boiled down, the underlying gameplay element of each game is wonderfully simple and thoroughly addictive. And each can be imagined as having been the result of following a random idea, a "what if" scenario. It would seem, then, that there is no such thing as a bad idea for a casual game. How, then, does one determine when to expand an idea into something more complex?