Indie development is a challenge. One man, two men, three men, whatever number man team you have it isn’t easy. Without the budget or manpower of the Triple A title publisher and studios, it’s a tough venture and usually a passion project. From personal experience and from watching multiple documentaries, such as Indie Game: The Movie. I understand and can relate to the trials and tribulations of the indie developers.
Developers of such titles as Super Meat Boy, Fez and Braid have all been through different hardships when it comes to making and publishing their games. What McMillen and Refenes went through was a tragic, yet amazing story. With the limitations that Microsoft set on them, the inability to put the game out on the Wii, it’s amazing they kept it together for as long as they did and get the game out. Yes, this is not at typical indie story, more like an indie darling story, but it shows just how tough these indie projects can be. Super Meat Boy ended up becoming a smash hit and eventually worked its way to multiple platforms outside of the Xbox 360, such as Wii U, Switch, PS4 and Vita amongst others.
On the other hand, you can have developers such as Phil Fish. Fish is one of the indie developers that give major publishers disdain for the little guys. Fish had too large of and ego and gave companies such as Microsoft a hard time about his game. Yes, Fez was a good game. Was it the greatest game of all time? No. Was it what Fish held it up to be? No. After dealing with him and his tirades later on, nobody wanted to work with Fish. About five or six years ago, I co-founded a podcast called The Ranting Gamers and later changing it to Paper Voxels. We discussed Phil Fish on one of our podcasts due to talks of Fez II at the time hitting news outlets. One of our on-air personalities ended up getting into a discussion with Fish online that didn’t end well. We discussed this topic afterwards and, needless to say, it didn’t go over so well with some, including Fish. Without going into this any further, Phil Fish has been a problem for indie developers in the past, but thankfully that isn’t the case these days.
Check out this link to our old podcast site: https://therantinggamers.blogspot.com/
Personally, I’ve had experience in the world of indie development. Around 10 or so years ago, I worked with a friend developing a mobile game when the market was still rather new. I worked on assets and he worked on programming, unfortunately problems arose in development and the game kept getting pushed back. My friend changed up the gameplay and style of the game to get it to run on the current model of iPhone at the time. Eventually, problems with Apple popped up as well and the game eventually got shelved permanently. Later, the same friend and I decided to build a first-person action game based on ideas we had come up with years before. I had recently built assets for an FPS and he had recently finished working on a project for EA Sports on the last PGA Tour title. We had gotten into the planning and very early development stages and, unfortunately, that’s where things halted. He ended up getting married and moving to Australia for his wife to finish her medical degree. The game never saw the light of day beyond the basis which started as a class project of mine with a one room environment.
To conclude, seeing how successful and unsuccessful indie developers have struggled and worked on titles over the course of time clearly shows it’s a challenge. These stories and trials should not discourage but should encourage independent developers to keep going and to not let the roadblocks stop you from finishing or getting to the end of that development tunnel. Work hard and you’ll get there. Never give up and face the challenges head on.
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