In my opinion, what do I think defines an indie game? One word: heart.
I’m talking about the pulsating organ within your chest that fills arteries with warm blood. In other words, Indie games are all about warm blood. That’s why people are always talking about the Indie Spirit; one sip of Indie Spirit and you’ll feel warm all over. This also explains why a few commercial game companies are able to make games with heart. It’s because they have the Indie Spirit!
Somehow I landed myself the CA position for GDC, leaving me speechless flabbergasted fühlen fantastisch.
My final semester of Game Creation Society begins in a week. I can’t believe it’s been four years. But don’t put this old man out to pasture yet! I’ve got enough time for one last game, one final statement before i go. But should that statement be?
I thought about it for awhile, musing over development methodologies or design philosophies that might solve some of the problems that we’ve been running into. In the end, everything seemed to pale in comparison to big issue: how do we as a club continuously improve the quality of our games?
Well, the solution is obvious: I must lead by example and harness liquid awesome, pouring it into the cast-iron mold of gaming excellence.
No turning back now, it’s time to rock ‘n roll.
Lest I miraculously get a chance to be a CA at GDC, I’ll likely have to make some sort of decision amongst the remaining pass options. Looking at the options, other than the fact that each of them is a financial equivalent of a kick in the balls, these passes otherwise share little in common, catering to the fact that we as developers are segregated into our own little niches. By skipping over the parts of game industry that don’t interest us, we save a bundle. What a great deal.
Or is it? I for one don’t like that we have to choose between the indies and the professionals. By separating these two groups in the most effective way – that is by instating both a monetary and temporal barrier – we arrive at a suboptimal situation: main conference goers will miss out on the ragtag indie gamedev insights and methods, while the indies can only sit outside closed doors and imagine what juicy industry secrets are being discussed. And the students? Well they can more or less stand in the hallways and hope to “network” with random passers by.
While I’m not proposing some sort of communist distribution of passes, surely there must be some better arrangement that lets us get a slice of both worlds for less than the cost of a shiny new laptop?
