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 3 of 4

"I was writing down all my ideas for operatives and weapons, thinking, 'I have so many good ideas; I'm so glad I did this!'" Fouts says. "A couple months in, after writing my level-editing software, I realized, 'I can't make levels! What should I have the player do? Walk flat? Go in a hole, maybe? Up a hill?' I had to read up on sound effects -- frequencies, editing, blending. I had to learn from scratch the most obvious, basic things because I realized I just didn't know how to do everything."

One of the freshest ideas in Weapon of Choice is a mechanic called "Death Brushing," in which the game lapses into slow motion when you're about to die and a giant, menacing skull materializes onscreen -- in case you need a more straightforward cue to leap to safety. The skull looks like something a budding heavy metal junkie might doodle in the margin of his high-school algebra textbook.

"That stuff is so much fun to draw, and you get a zero-percent chance of doing it [in a major studio]. So many 3-D games are bent on realism, and all these artists working for game studios are making cabinets and office chairs and bottles. Wouldn't you rather be drawing a skull with moss on it and nasty fangs?"

Like Fouts, Campbell came out of school and ended up at a large studio. It dawned on Campbell that a programmer might spend an entire project toiling away on the game's front end -- the opening menus -- and never touch actual gameplay.

Bogost, for his part, doesn't view creating indie games and working for a major studio as an either-or dilemma.

"There is a difference between industrialized ideas and independent ideas," he says.

"There have always been examples, even at the highest levels, of people who have the heaviest pressure on them and still manage to get stuff done on the sly. Take Rod Humble, who runs the Sims division at EA. It doesn't get any more 'videogame corporate' than that; he's an executive vice president. But occasionally he makes whacked-out art games that [represent] exactly what he wants to do, and people play them."

Designing games, Bogost points out, is significantly different from other independent creative pursuits like, say, learning the guitar and starting a band. Designing games is primarily a technical craft -- and, as such, it requires a herculean amount of computer-programming know-how. As a result, there are far fewer examples in our culture of people designing videogames in their off-time.

"I've played some of these Community Games and I'm blown away," says Chris Satchell, head of Microsoft's Game Development Group. "They didn't spend $25 million on production, but it doesn't matter when you've given the gaming world a new, innovative concept."

800-lb. guerilla marketing

Now that there are more channels available to indie games developers, not to mention a modest-sized financial carrot to incentivize their efforts, maybe we can expect a surge in the profile of indie games and the people who make them. Let's all take a momentary break from Left 4 Dead multiplayer and observe a moment of appreciative silence for indie developers who've busted their asses so that we can enjoy the gaming equivalent of art-house films, community stage plays, Polaroid photography and blog-based citizen journalism.