Indie game development in the real world

It's a pretty rough hobby to stay active with, this whole indie game development hobby thing. If my job isn't asking for a ton of my time outside of a reasonable work schedule I find myself compensating by winding down way more than I would. But that's not going to cut it for indie game development. You've got to be immersed in a project to produce anything. An hour here and there just isn't productive in any sort of software development.

I've started writing a game I'm calling Rhythm Shooter. It's about as shallow as it sounds like. You control your small pixelated 2D avatar with your mouse in a top-down shooter. There's a persistent song. To shoot to the left and right you need to click to the downbeat of the music. To shoot up and down you need to right click to the upbeat, that is, you'd need to play syncopatedly with right clicks. You can alternate between left and right clicks but the bullet stream will be lighter for all 4 directions.

I like the idea because I think it'll produce a strong feeling of synesthesia with the player. This should be particularly synesthesic because not only are you asking the player to play to the rhythm of the song but your asking him to play his own beat to strategically get through a situation.

Rhythm Shooter would be easy fun. It's a small project as long as I kept it as a small project. And I'd get another shot at producing something other people found fun.

But it's not happening anytime soon. I'm at the critical point of a project with one of my company's biggest clients. I'm busy. In fact, I shouldn't write anymore. It's late.

Storyteller is why I like indie games

Storyteller, like a lot of indie games, simulates to us the dormant expressive power of the video game. It only takes about 15 seconds of playing this small flash app to deeply appreciate it, though you might find yourself messing with it for much longer.

The staff at playthisthing.com, as always, does a professional job at describing what Storyteller about:

"Taking more pages from Braid than Storytron, Benmergui's Storyteller takes a vertical slice of causality and serves it up for ready manipulation. Instead of pushing a story forward from the perspective of a protagonist, acting in a linear, causal manner and then adapting to the changing flow, you play director and reader all in one. Simple click and drag a character to change their situation and relationships with the other characters. The combinations are quite interesting, and the play feels less like acting out a role and more like puzzling through quantum physics."

This game brings to a light the relationship between narrative and simulation. While interpreting Storyteller as a deconstruction of the fairy tale, just think of what it would have taken to narrate this idea.

The emergence of meaning in this game is what's profound here. While some of the gameplay still means something violent, the gameplay as a whole gives us a small glimpse into the future of a medium capable of being about what stories are about.

Games are just awesome

I'm Ken Grafals. I go by Baseless Rook in various places. The video game is the most exiting art medium today. It's just recently started to rapidly mature as a medium. I've set up this blog because I want to participate in this development. I'll talk about games that I feel I have something to say about and I'll talk about some of my own game development.



A couple of months ago I released my first Game Maker game called Specter Spelunker. You can play it here.