Becoming Indie

Weapon of Choice creator Nathan Fouts left mega-studio Insomniac to make games on his own terms. But is it worth the trouble? And will anyone follow his lead?
2/2/2009 7:30 PM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 4

Store woes

Unless you've been in a coma -- or consumed in a World of Warcraft raid that began two years ago and still hasn't concluded -- you've watched the economy collapse on itself, taking the games industry with it. Every day brings a new report of massive layoffs or a studio's closing. While one might expect such a grisly economic climate to discourage people from making the leap to indie development, it's quite possible the opposite is true.

Ian Bogost, assistant professor of game design at Georgia Tech and founding partner at Persuasive Games, argues that studio layoffs and closings have the potential to spur tremendous growth in the indie games sector.

"Where are these people [who get laid off] going to go? What are they going to do?" Bogost wonders. "There's a pretty natural flow of folks in and out of the games business -- mostly out and back into the software business. But it's possible we will see more small efforts and even studios emerge -- like the guys who split off from EA to make World of Goo [2D Boy]."

There's a romantic notion of developers jumping ship to work on indie projects for absolute creative freedom, but the reality is that it's sometimes a matter of needing to pay the bills. And it's easier to hire yourself than to update your resume and go in search of game industry jobs that are already in short supply.

"Creative control wasn't the reason I started working as an indie developer, to be honest," says Scott Campbell, co-founder and director of indie studio Fuzzy Bug Interactive in Birmingham, England. "For me, it was a matter of needing to put food on the table and pay my rent. It was only after we got a little bit of stability that we could allow ourselves creative freedom ."

Campbell's Word Soup started out as a touch-screen pub game in the UK, but has quickly become one of the Xbox 360's top-selling Community Games. "You live in a closed box when you're working as a coder," he says. "You're just one gear in the whole mechanism, whereas you've got to see the big picture when you're doing a game by yourself."

Having been a weapons designer at Insomniac, on projects like Resistance: Fall of Man and the Ratchet & Clank series, Fouts naturally centered his debut project, Weapon of Choice, around over-the-top guns. (And his 2-D, side-scrolling, acid-laced homage to Contra gives you plenty of things to shoot.) Once he'd indulged his primary area of expertise and the initial adrenaline rush had worn off, however, he found himself paddling around in the deep end without arm floaties.