Indie Game: The Movie

June 20 2012

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I watched this documentary last night, and found it quite interesting. Sure it is about indie game development, but there is some IxD in there for sure. I like the way that the game concepts are presented and dissected, where these indie games are reflections of individuals, human beings reacting to society or having strong creative vision outside big blockbuster titles.

Ouff, it looks like a terribly demanding but rewarding experience. Kudos to the filmmakers and the indie game developers featured in there. The film captures truly personal struggles, strong emotions and very rough moments.

http://buy.indiegamethemovie.com

June 23 2012

It is a great production and the stories of Ed/Tommy and Phil are very honest. Buy the film and support a good project!

June 24 2012

Indeed a great return on investment for 9.99 USD :-)

I feel we should try to do more game design work, simple but fully functioning game. I think the challenges of real gameplay and having others interact with one’s creation is quite powerful.

Anyone has suggestions for game engines that are approachable for IxD designers? I know about Unity3D and Löve. It seems Javascript could be nice and a good intro to scripting for the web in general.

June 24 2012

There are so many good game engines today that it really boils down to motivation. Unity3D and Gamemaker are widely used, but the first does not have to be more advanced than what you can do in Processing. Indie games has shown that good game rarely has to do with performance, but rather an idea (think Nidhogg, Proteus and JS Joust). This is good news, since most developers I know say that you will probably make ten pretty bad games or prototypes before you make something you would spend some more time on (hopefully together with someone else).

For the past two years I have been going to Nordic Game Jam (biggest of all the Global Game Jams — http://nordicgamejam.org/) in Copenhagen. Whether you are a programmer, game designer, sound designer or artist you find a team and make a game in 48 hours. There is no better way to get introduced to game development. If someone want to host a gamejam at the institute I think we could collect a good bunch of people.

I would love if more people would be excited about knowing < discussing < making more games. Hopefully we can make some ground work this summer to make it easier for people to experiment with games and controllers.

I do not think anything of this made any sense, so you should probably watch Petri and Martin talking about making your game juicy!

http://youtu.be/Fy0aCDmgnxg

June 27 2012
Mikko permalink

I need to watch this soon.
About making games, I agree with Adam, it just boils down to motivation. But, the end-product brings a lot of satisfaction to the creator, because games have everything, design, moving images, logic, intelligence, soundscapes, ambience and emotion, creativity and vision and most of all, fun.
There are quite a few logic brick based engines that are simple to start with no programming required to do simple things. Choosing the engine also depends on what kind of game you want to do. As there quite a few game -type based engines that won’t cater to the entire spectrum of different types of games.

Gamemaker is probably the best to start with, but also quite expensive.
Blender is free and you can definitely plug custom controllers in to it with a little effort in Python, but it has some complexity because it’s a full-blown 3d-modeler.
Unity and UDK are quite complex and powerful since they are able to create complete 3d experiences.
Pygame requires some python knowledge.
And the other free/crossplatform ones like Löve and Moai are usually Lua-based.
Construct2 is HTML5/js, but only for Windows and only 2d, maybe parallels for osx people.

That 48h gaming jam is probably the best way to do a simple experiment with students in creating a game, or maybe a bit more, a week?

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