Disclaimer: I helped Kickstart this movie, I am personal friends the creators, Jamie and Lisanne and the subjects, Jonathan, Edmund, Tommy and Phil. I did the Dutch subtitles and I'm in the credits twice.
AAA drives some innovation, but that innovation is usually technical. I love my AAA games, honestly, I'm still a sucker for Assassins Creed, I bought Mass Effect 3 on day one, I loved Rage (for its throwback gameplay and its amazing weapon feel, not its engine, what do I care about the engine?) and I still wish I had more time for Starcraft.
The indie scene/mentality can simply take more risk. AAA studios wouldn't make Amnesia or Deep Sea. They wouldn't make Storyteller. They wouldn't make GlitchHiker. They wouldn't make Johann Sebastian Joust. They wouldn't make Fez or Super Meat Boy or Braid or Journey. They wouldn't push the boundaries because the average consumer doesn't want the boundaries pushed too far.
Thus, indie games leap and AAA games look at what works and crawl after them. Minecraft sold millions? Let's allow for more player expression in our next AAA game. Amnesia offers tense, horror through minimal means, let's make Dead Space 3 scarie...oh wait.
Pretentious is a word I often hear about Indie Game: The Movie, and I'm going to politely disagree. This movie isn't about games - it's a movie about the journey of a few people trying to make something personal and creative and the hardships they encounter while doing exactly that.
They're not making games for money, they're making these games because they personally feel the games they're making should exist. Indie developers, and I am one of them as half of Dutch indie studio Vlambeer, get extremely personally attached to a project.
I've worked in bigger teams before Vlambeer, but the stakes on my current projects feel higher. I am 50% of the face, of the name, connected to my game. Our fans talk with me directly, mail with me, tweet with me... at times I feel that the game, or half of it, is me.
The project I spent most time on cost me 9 months. These people worked on their games for years - without any certainty, without any money in case things went wrong, without a huge development team to keep them motivated - they worked on it because they
had to.
Even then, so many points in the movie hit home so hard. The ups and downs and stress and despair - they're in every game production. I can honestly say there are moments in the movie that made me well up and there were moments that made me grin like an idiot. I was sitting in a room with 3000 game developers at the Game Developers Conference and I could sense that many of them were on the same emotional rollercoaster I was.
If being closely attached to your passion project is pretentious, then hell yes, I'm proud to be pretentious. I'll just call it personally attached, if you don't mind.
Indie Game: The Movie is important to me because it was the movie that finally allowed me to explain to my dad that this is what I do. This is why I fly around the world, this is why I work crazy hours, this is why I'm on TV or in the newspaper, this is why I can't stop talking about the games I work on. This is why I didn't go work at NASA, like you wanted me to.
And know what? He understood.
Business guy and developer at [url]www.vlambeer.com[/url] - bringing back arcade since 1956.
