Anyone else feeling this?

Okay. I'm a full-on programmer/artist, so I love coding, especially in Blitz. Moreover, I love making exciting/original computer games.

BUT!

These days, even the INDIE games field is becoming overrun with increasingly impressive & complex games. Even though I put almost all my free time into game-making, it just doesn't seem to be enough any more. More & more & MORE games, demos, engines & other programs are coming out with such high quality that I'm starting to feel left in the digital dust, buried in bits & bytes... You get the idea.

I doubt that I'll ever stop programming; apart from anything, the situation I just described is a challenge in my view, and I LOVE a challenge. It's just... I dunno. It just gets hard to stay motivated sometimes, working on your indie game that you think is awesome, when you suddenly see about a dozen other games at once that all look just as good or better than yours.

It also makes it hard for the modern game PLAYER. There are now more great computer games than you could play in an average lifespan, and they're still coming out at a rate of knots. In fact, it's almost overload. I mean, seriously; how do you even begin to choose what to play? Make one choice, and you miss out on somthing else, or vice versa.

I guess what I'm saying is that I love the way things are developing right now; the creative rush, the explosion of new ideas, the opportunities. I just wish things would slow down enough that we could actually enjoy them for a bit.

I think it's just the other way around. More and more crappy engines and demos come out every day, but noone has beaten the Crysis quality yet.
It's hard to find a good engine for a decent price, or even a good game.

You're actually putting the pressure on yourself here. Aquiring better programming and artistry skills comes with practice and learning new techniques. Hopefully, this will benefit you on the long run. The good thing is, you are never alone in this journey, and you can always outdo yourself by learning from experience of others, not only our own. I learned that patience is key when making a game or a source code module.

Keep on truckin'

The better you become at something, the more you realise how much you 'suck'.

I say don't worry, be happy :)

These days it's very popular for every `individual` to be an ultra-human, capable of being a movie star, a rock star, a dancer, running their own company, multi-millionaire, owning a mansion, driving huge cars, president of the USA, super-muscular athletic bodies, being on tv, `having it all` etc. People more and more want to be capable of everything - a kind of superhero ego-frenzy, particularly in the USA.

Also the world is becoming a much smaller place and accessibility has greatly increased freedom and possibilities. Everyone is blurring their sense of what they `can be` based on an increased sense of unification across the world, which I think has a lot to do with the internet, as well as the hugely increased availability of and exposure to games and gaming hardware advances.

So many people now think they can be `just like` their heroes and that they themselves can become the hero. I think this is probably a more prevalent attitude in the USA because the UK for example is much more a group entity who really don't like anything new that stands out from the old too much, or any individually who fancies themselves as being more special than others - but I think in the UK too this attraction to being `the one` is on the rise. And of course it floods into every industry, not just games.

In the game industry there are now companies who put so many millions of dollars into a single game that the humble bedroom programmer couldn't hope to in any way compete with that level of financial backing, resources, manpower or time. The gap has widened a lot and it will continue to widen. 100 million to develop a game? No problem. Okay maybe a billion.

Inbetween those top-of-the-industry giants and the barely-scraping-by-with-no-money-to-spare solo developer, there is a huge range of developers with different abilities, tools, team sizes, business development, etc, and usually it seems like whoever is near the bottom of the ladder will gradually work their way up the ladder, as if magnetized by the huge success of the industry giants. So everyone's trying to outdo everyone else, and everyone's trying to have an even better more successful game, and everyone wants a piece of the pie. The standards will keep going up and up and up.

But, there will always be a bottom to the ladder. If you think of yourself more in terms of where you are on the ladder `absolutely` rather than `relative` to where all those ladder-climbers are, you might get a better sense of there being a market for your level of capability. There are people out there who will only buy games that cost a lot of money or meet a given standard, but there are also plenty of people with lower standards who will buy something smaller or less polished. It's not that you are being outperformed by others so much as that you're trying to keep up with the rising tide rather than identify your strengths and use them.

As always, and I agree, it is a challenge and you can try to rise to it, pursuing that ever evasive `better than others`. But don't lose sleep over it man, keep doing what you love. When the current crop of indie games has become sufficiently advanced there will now be yet another new band of simpler and less-advanced games being made which will become the next uber-indie group, and so it goes on and on.

The more the industry shifts to a more advanced level, the more new levels are introduced at the bottom of the ladder. I think in part that casual games game about largely because of the hugeness of most modern titles - their huge growth left a vacuum that needed to be filled by something a lot less intense or involved. And now casual games are getting to look almost as advanced and diverse as many old retro games. You're starting to see shootemups and platform games with a slightly more cutesy-easy look-and-feel. The engines are getting more advanced. Soon casual games will probably get so advanced that people will start saying they are too complex and then you'll get super-casual games, a whole new class of gaming.

Not really, no. There are still flash games coming out which were made in a few weeks/months and are getting shedloads of plays and making a bit of money too. Unless you're into gamemaking to make a living, I don't see that it matters. There are still plenty of ways to get a lot of eyeballs on a good game, regardless of the tech.

Besides, many of the big new indie games are very achievable. Games like Braid, for example, are all about ideas. Technically, there is nothing in there which most of us couldn't do. It's just a game of bigger and better ideas. ( And it's a bit too pretentious too, but that's beside the point. )

This is why I paid £75.00 for Leadwerks Engine 2 - a current and next gen engine.

It even got me using BlitzMax!

Wow... Thanks guys. I am - for once - truly humbled by your intelligent, sage thoughts & advice. I guess part of my problem was - once again - my drastically oversized ego coupled with my competitiveness, which was ultimately spurring me to be "THE best," even though it's pretty much not humanly possible for one person any more. Well, not as far as marketing goes, anyway; skill levels are still on a person-to-person basis.

Anyway, you're right, all of you; each new "lower" generation of developers moves forward at their individual pace to become "higher" generations. Since I couldn't possibly design, create & publish a new Crysis-type game by myself, it's ridiculous to even expect it; I may as well try jumping the Empire State Building. ^_^ In the meantime, I'll just go back to jumping my own small hurdles, one by one... Who knows where I'll get in time.

You've helped me greatly, and hopefully helped others who read this thread; thank you!!!

I blame Hollywood.

To be honest, as i get older (i am 33) i care less about graphics and bells and whistles (and i have never cared about sound since 'pc speaker' disappeared and adlib/soundblaster took over. As long as its atmospheric, clear and preferably in stereo i don't really care). I find just as much "suspension of disbelief" (as my current 'read' so well-puts it) in a 2D game as i do in a 3D. Or old 3d -vs- new 3d.

In fact i find -more- immersion in a game like tachyon's Eschalon or a muliplayer game of baulders or NWN with the missus than i do playing more modern 3D milestones like crysis or the halos. (almost like with impressionist art, a lot is left up to the power of your own imagination, not -all- of someone else's. (Or book -vs- film to put it another way) i believe there will always be a market for both.)

I love food too, but i will never eat every dish in the world, and cannot cook for s**t by pro-chef standards. However, i -enjoy- cooking and some people genuinely like what i cook. (...usually. ;)

Adam

I do feel this - the quality and what's expected of 'indie' titles has ramped up in the last couple of years. To do everything yourself is becoming less and less a practicable solution. I'm thinking for my next game I'll programme everything myself using simple placeholders, but then outsource the job of converting the placeholders to gameready assets. This will require spending some money and managing the process, which not all indies will be willing to do.

But there are some mitigating factors. The first is that there's a lot of scope for artstyles that are abstract and simple in content, but which engage the player's imagination. I've been playing through Penny Arcade's latest - good fun with a distinctive style. Likewise American McGee's 'Grimm', or Insecticide. In many ways, Crysis is a failure of imagination on the game developers' part (Lumooja!).

Secondly - episodic gaming. With the rise of portals such as Steam, it's become very easy for the public to download a slice of 'gaming goodness' with the understanding that they're getting a few hours entertainment (for a reduced price) - not a full game. Again, I've recently played through Penny Arcade's offering - not a full game but fun. Having said that, the examples I've given would still be a bucket load of work for even a small team. Perhaps with the acceptance of episodic gaming, there might be room for smaller episodes again? E.g. if Insecticide is a full 'hour' then maybe indies can produce a 'half-hour' show?

Perhaps there are so many games out there that they all sort of blur together now, and since it's so easy to get access to a 1-hour demo of most games you can just keep hopping around to the next thing, sample it, and move on. If today's lifestyle is all about `I'll have a bit of this and then a bit of that` pick and choose laziness, then perhaps trying to sell games by giving people too much of a free ride is counterproductive. I was reading one blog thing where they suggested it would be more effective to make a harder sell, or to limit how much content and access time you initially give. I'm not sure I totally agree with that approach though.

It is possible to focus on techniques of content generation that are procedural or computations, which in a way is kind of like applying `compression` to your time and energy. If you can concentrate your design and implementation down to the essence of what it is, and make it potent and flexible so that it can produce variety at relatively less expense, then you can potentially create a `bigger game` with less effort. Optimizing your approach to development in this way would be as if you applied a compression algorithm to your game development process and to the functioning of the engine and how the whole thing pulls together. Any of you who know anything about compression will know that you can sort of compress the not-so-important details and focus greater resolution on the more important aspects. So it really comes down to getting more efficient time-management wise, and writing the kind of games in the kind of WAY that gives you maximum results from the least effort. This is why there is an abundance of vectorgraphics, glowing lines and all the rest of it these days. It's quick and easy to get the computer to do the work for you.

You definitely can overcome a lack of material if your game has a deeper meaning, is addictive, or is simple enough that you can get into it easily. There are lots of little flash games around, like Boomshine, which are very basic and simple but it doesn't stop them being popular, because it really doesn't require the appearance of the game to be realistic in order for the meaning and content to be entertaining. You can focus more on the impact of the game and its subtle undertones, rather than the shallow appearance.

Well the big players saw that 'indie' games made money, so theyve taken over. You cant have a few bucks going to non studios.

I feel overwhelemed constantly... so to take myself motivated I put less emphasis on graphics (which I'm awful at) and more on story/writing. My games may not be accepted with anybody, but at least I can enjoy making them without feeling the pressure.

I think there are two issues here:

1. It may be easy to feel overwhelmed by the idea of competing with multi-million dollar budget commercial games, but personally I think it would be stupid to just give up. Of course you're never going to independently do the work of 100 people, but that's no reason not to try. All you can do is keep up your skills and strive to be the best at what you do. If you're expectations are too high, don't worry about what you can't/didn't do, be glad about what you can/did do.

2. It's easy to be overly ambitious when taking on a project, especially as an independent developer. As an indie developer, you need to realize that you are limited, whether you like it or not, and work within those limitations as best you can. This doesn't mean you have to compromise the quality or "feel" of the game you want, but simply that you may need to think of more creative solutions to the problems usually solved with "brute work force" by the mainstream game industry. For example, rather than focusing on extreme graphical realism, it might be more productive for you, and even more pleasing to the end user, to try a more stylized approach to graphics.

In the end all that matters is how much enjoyment the end user gets out of your game, so in this respect indie developers definitely have a chance against the large high-budget game development studios. All you need is a little creativity, skill, and hard work. Remember, the "secret weapon" of independent developers is their ability to try out new, innovative gaming concepts, unlike the multi-million dollar game development studios who almost always "play it safe" with remakes, sequels, and endless clones.

Reason that indie games are harder to compete with is that there are a lot more developers with commercial game experience forming teams and developing games. Plus there are a lot of big publishers and business investing in indie devs.

Not to mention every city having courses in game art, design and programming. It's now a actual subject you can study for. Just 10 years ago hardly anyone went to college to do game dev. There were no courses and no tools, libs or engines for people to pick up for cheap that were capable of much. Now everyone and their pet monkey is doing it.

Even in 2003 when we did Aerial Antics, there was only really B3D, torque, and Darkbasic. If you were into sado masochism you could use crystalspace, and torque wasn't that far behind on the art front.

I know the feeling Adam. A few years back I managed to make an indie casual game myself then another one with the help of one artist, both on low budgets. After that I realised that the days of making games in 3 months and a low budget were gone (at least if you wanted them to be at all successful). There was a phase where casual games took maybe 6 months and could be done with a moderate budget, but those days are gone now too (well you could still make one but it might not get in the top 10 on various sites). Nowadays development time can be a year for top games and involve huge amount of art and top quality sound etc. Basically production values in games have skyrocketed in the last few years. This is great for game players but tough for one man bands. That's why people are forming teams and why the big budget studios are doing better as they have some financial clout.

As for playing games, yeah there's soooo many it's crazy. I don't play any mainstream PC games at the moment (shame as I love FPS and RPG games), I hardly play on the consoles and handhelds (and there are TONS of great games for TONS of different devices), and I don't get enough time to test out casual games which I should do for my job. Also I rarely now play the brilliant flash games and freeware shooters/platformers that are all over the net. And I don't play mobile games at all! Really I need to cram about 10 weeks in a real week and not do anything else apart from play games to see everything decent! I guess I just have to cherry pick stuff and enjoy it in what spare time I do get.

It does seem to me as though there is a lot more 2D graphics being produced these days especially in the casual arena, whereas I used to think it had seen its day there seems to be a lot of talented pixel artists out there.

I too feel the quality part constantly Adam, but I invest on new ideas, not repeating the same ones over again, so the lack of motivation doesn't take over for me.

You don't need to be an artist to be a programmer, you only need the art of code. While it goes against my personal behaviour, if you feel your coding is sufficient, there is a ridiculous amount of graphic artists out there looking to be part of a team, just as programmers are. Be as picky as your skills can be; just don't waste anyones time, or you'll lose integrity, which is probobly the most important attribute towards starting something public.

Do what you're passion tells you.



A lot of us are like that, just not the growing majority =(