when i was young, we didn't think of game houses as these multinational megcorp conglomerates that cant be touched with a very long stick in regards to content and quality of games.
EA was down the road from me in southport qld when i was a kid.
we would raid the dumpsters for disks code wheels and joysticks with the wires cut, that never stopped us until the police made patrols and security guards with dogs and padlocks finally stopped the dumpster runs. it was junk to them, we asked first if we could play with the broken games and stuff, they said ok once but got fed up or realized we were salvaging games.
ripped manuals taped back together, joysticks rewired code wheels roughly cut back into shape.
after all that nonsense we would raw copy the games and give each other a copy and play it to death. the point is if you want it bad enough you can do it but it takes sacrifice.
as kids we thought we were doing no harm, however we were doing warez in the 80's.
it allowed us to step up to amigas and from then it carried on until apples and then pcs loomed.
back then you could remake a lot of games that were being produced except for maybe when the amiga kids came and totally blew my mind out the window with what that machine could do, but before that it was and still is possible to create a game with that kind of game play.
It still is today but the market has moved to mobile phones. however no one says you cant do a 2d for pcs etc..
One of the biggest aspects in todays driven game development is realism. we are heading to even more realism with each step. I like realism, but i prefer graphics and shiny with great game play.
Atari cartridges like space invaders, pacman, frogger, tanks. etc were $90 AUD EACH! back in the day, no one would consider a game like that to be so expensive today, so are we basing price on REALISM? or are we balancing gameplay and visual gratification as well as audio gratification to base the price of the game?
I got my texas instruments ti99a and made pretty cool 2 player games with joysticks in 2d for my bro and I. I would spent hours finding hex values of 4 x 4 patterns on grid paper to make the graphics. lol i had to code on the computer to do graphics at the start. sucky max plus plus.
paint on the apple plus and deluxe paint on the amiga was a revolution that led into what we have today in regards to image editors.
When the amiga came I was more interested in other things except for pure gaming, never touched code for a few years and things got so far ahead I let it slide more. DBC was the first product to get me excited about making a game. I was studying java but the fact of blitting in the day was terrible for 2d games, DBC had easy 3d which pinched my eye.
In front of you now is the possibility to make a very cool game, it doesn't have to be massive in size. it doesn't have to have 50000 rare items but the potential to create these amounts can be partly coded, the rest is media content size that seems to throw the individual developer.
the amount of media could be created by one person but only if it was procedurally, think of one generic shaped 3d hammer and think of code that warps the generic shapes vertices into different shapes and paints over the texture in different ways.
This way the indi developer just has to work smarter to achieve the same media results.
It would never match hand crafted material but it stands to reason if executed well.
Procedural media may not match the realism push found in todays games, however there will be a time when the functions are so complex it will be hard to tell. by that time there will be games with truely over 1 million variants of the same game artifact. mesmerizing to think it can get that fat, but it will one day, the envelope just keeps going with the size of the pcs.
I can see a few types of coders, pure math brains who cant draw, pure art heads who cant code, and then a mix in the middle. Identify that in yourself and work on your weakest aspect once a week and you will eventually produce an amazing creation.
I wish i had the time to complete DT, Im going to buy the AI pack because multiple A* path finding monsters is kinda hard for this art brain.
Even mods sometimes lose focus, same with multinational game companies as well as indi developers.
The fact that you can build your Ideas into a game without sitting in a cubicle at work while at home in your pjs dreaming of anything you want instead of being told what to do as fast as possible is the true magic of game development.
Building your favorite game or recreating something already created is your choice. Not a manager or boss etc. Doing weird stuff that might not be commercial is as positive to the game development industry, sharing concepts and ideas fuels more creativity.
yes indi developers can do it with great focus and time.
I wish i had more time to assign but getting a job to pay the bills gets in the way when you move out etc.. plus your GF and family and friends who dont have the passion you have for deving games try to thwart your time and study.
it can be done if you have time and knowhow, money is not required however it attracts the smartest and clever artist so they can be comfortable in life.
Your game doesnt have to be the next Huge thing but if you craft it well and polish it with love, people will see the merit and remember your game and perhaps donate to you or buy your next game.
the fact you probably spent $50 - $500 for the software and $1000 for the computer to make it shouldnt be a problem if you stick with it and make enough games for people to choose from and purchase to return a small profit.
if your in it for a profit then drive your game on pure business mechanics, if your in to make a fun game people will see the fun and pay you for that pleasure.
Just dont be frightened of the large companies, they have 30 million more reasons to be worried then your dev studio.
