Just some final thoughts on the IGF…
I’ve been following the IGF for years now, and each year, games get better and more polished… Trends are pretty obvious, but not so much as to claim the indy movement is starting to be a seconds, low-budget mainstream.
Why are indy games becoming more polished? Well, you could say that now you have more money to make the games, since they’re real businesses, but I don’t think that’s true for the most part… One thing I feel that has changed are the tools: indies have access to better tools, and that leads to better games, since they don’t have to focus on what they can do so much and can twist the existing technologies and tools to conform to their vision. The other thing is that the indy community is strong and sharing, and that sharing of ideas leads to the strange notion of “more experienced devs out of the box”, in which even a person that’s never done a commercial game before can learn from the experience of everybody else and not start from scratch. Indy game portals are also becoming more widespread and better channels for distribution (Steam, XBLIG…), and the fact that we’re all more connected (through YouTube, Facebook, you name it), helps these games to get more awareness…
All in all, it’s a great time to be an indy, and I sure hope to jump on that bandwagon soon! 🙂
Games on the IGF have always been experimental in nature, but while there’s more “normal” games there, there’s also more experimental titles, that defy established concepts, stuff like “Hazard: The Journey of Life” or “Achron”… Sure, most of them won’t become commercial successes, and some of them are just experimental for the sake of experimentation, but they’re an extremely important part of the indy ecosystem (and even the mainstream environment, now that they’ve started paying attention).
I’ve seen loads of twists on old genres, like Spectre Spelunker Shrinks, which takes an established genre and changes or adds some game mechanic, and that just works…
Multiple platforms also seem to be the rage, with games getting releases in a series of devices (specially handhelds… lots of games are comming out for iPhone, iPad, Android and PC, for example), which is a very positive move; it makes for better software development processes and expands your target audience, which is extremely important in the indy market.
Finally, there are some timid (and not so timid) forays into multiplayer (and massive multiplayer); these used to be the bastion of the AAA-publishers, but now indies are starting to move in that space, not only in the project phase (which we’ve seen millions through the years, kids trying to make the next “super-awesome-MMORPG” with a one-man-team), but in the released phase, with examples of success (Minecraft anyone), and potential success (Infinite Blank).
All in all, the future’s looking bright for indy developers, and if the IGF is a window that shows us that future, we’ll have a whole new slew of awesome games to play!
I’ll take my leave now, but before I go, I’ll leave you with a nice video:
Those guys at Loading Ready Run are crazy… 😀