GDC 10: Savvy Indie Solutions to Design Problems

Aquaria, Canabalt, and Monaco. Two games you should have already played, and one you’ll likely wish to play when it comes out. Even if you don’t recognize the names Alec Holowka, Adam Saltsman, or Andy Schatz, one can’t deny the quality of their work (hell, even Jim liked Aquaria).

The three designers teamed up for my second Indie Games Summit talk of the day, “Savvy Indie Solutions to Difficult Development Problems.”

Hit the jump for my summary.

Saltsman immediately set up that the talk wouldn’t be another “AAA sucks, indies rule” rant. Instead, the talk would “compare and contrast things we can do as smaller developers…not things that studios won’t do, but things that in many ways, they can’t do.”

Is having a lot of money and people a good thing, or a bad thing?

Alec Holowka took the stage first. Suddenly jumping back to a discussion of who he was at sixteen, Holowka talked about the anxiety of being a part of a larger community while also striving for self-identity, and understanding all these connections.

This is like the position games are currently in. People keep asking: what are games, ultimately?

Games are a subset of interactive multimedia, made of components like gameplay, scripts, and so on. Holowka claims we don’t really review movies like we do games – we don’t give Citizen Kane‘s cinematography a 9/10, we just call it a movie. So, don’t split up the different aspects of design; what’s interesting are the connections between the different aspects of design, and how they work together.

If games are a subset of interactive multimedia, what kind of subset are they? “But do we really care?,” Holowka asked. “Games are still a wild west.” They’re a hugely unexplored space that can’t be explained by a few easy labels. We’ve got mainstream games, indie games, Tale of Tales “notgames,” which Holowka claimed could just as easily be called “poo-poo games,” because both labels are equally ludicrous. As is the term “art game,” because all games have some inherent artistic value — saying something is an “art game” is like describing a color as “blue blue.”

When it comes to designing a game, Holowka argues that different designers focus on different ideas of what games should be: Jenova Chen starts about feelings as a starting point, while Jon Blow might talk about systems. There are many different inspirations for games, and opinions on what they could be. This is a good thing.

Holowka’s inspiration for his current game, Marian, was a single character and the world she lives in. He refers to the process of exploring this world as storytelling, but not in a linear narrative kind of way — it’s about making sure that the player is meaningfully drawn into a world moreso than scripted events.

Still, Holowka argued that stories are still important to games. Mario needs to be a plumber fighting in mushroom kingdom, because otherwise the game is just a bunch of boxes hitting other boxes. FF6 has losuy gameplay, but the story is great (illustrated by a screenshot of Celes waking up on a beach and taking care of the old man). If you could combine the story of saving the old man with better gameplay, it’d be amazing. It’s about context.

Players see moer than just the raw components, so why not encourage players to explore emotional spaces rather than just physical spaces? Story-based indie games allow players to hear the voice of the creator more clearly than a game that was essentially designed by committee.

Next, Andy Schatz took the stage, promising to focus on the specifics of “what you can do as indies that can’t be done” by larger studios. Schatz worked for AAA studios from 1998-2005, at which point he went indie. He’s currently working on Monaco, which I’m sure I’d like if the IGF build could run on my computer.

According to Schatz, the main difference between AAA production and indie production is team size. “This may seem obvious,” he says, but this results in drastically different games, and even what games you’re capable of making. When your team gets large, you have to keep your pipeline full – you end up doing concurrent work in order to keep the team busy, rather than finding the best parts of the design and building on those “shining gems,” as Schatz called them: “pipelining…is your enemy, focus is your friend.” The best indie stuff takes a single cool concept and then builds the rest of the game around that.

As an indie, you could also focus on niche audiences – big companies aren’t going to make nonviolent games or kids’ games. You have nobody to pay other than yourself, so it doesn’t matter if your target audience is tiny.

If you’re designing a AAA game, you might approach your game as a comparison to other games. Schatz worked on a “Sims-killer” for Microsoft a while back. You can’t do that as an indie, though, because you don’t have the resources to copy a bigger game. AAA developers might try to make the next great game in an existing genre – “the same basic arms race the industry has been in for the past twenty years,.” as Schatz explains it – but again, indies don’t have the resources for that, so it’s not even worth trying.

Instead, indies could come at their games from what Schatz called a business/Meta-game approach. In other words, FarmVille.

Or, you could create a game for an unfulfilled market, so you aren’t competing with existing products. Or, you could use a thematic or character-based approach: AAA studios won’t do this because it’s hard to describe what a game will feel like if you’re making a game about a world, or a particular character.

Finally, you could use an open-ended approach where you treat your game’s development as a stream-of-consciousness experience. Schatz calls this a “bad idea,” however, because there’s a difference between exploring a design like the kind the Experimental Gameplay Project is based on, and just hurtling through development without any clear direction.

Licensing-wise, indies – Schatz phrased this carefully – have more “legal agility.” You can license cheaper music that doesn’t have to be exclusive to your game. You can use open source stuff. People love Monaco‘s music, but nobody realizes Andy didn’t have the music specifically made for it.

Also don’t be afraid to participate in the indie community. Schatz was making a game about dinosaurs that he eventually abandoned, but he went on to sell the dinosaur models he used to Flashbang Studios. Flashbang went on to use the models for Offroad Velociraptor Safari. Schatz joked that maybe he should be getting some royalties from that.

The talk had already gone over its alloted time as this point, so Adam Saltsman had to rush through his portion of the talk.

He acknowledged that large companies like Valve, who make games “even indies can’t crap on,”  break production into really small teams in the same way indies naturally work. Same deal with Pixar, Treasure, Blizzard, and Id. It’s not a coincidence that small teams can make really great stuff.

Why is this? Probably because of communication. Team members also take personal responsibility when the team is smaller, and they feel a need to be significant to the team. “People need to matter.” Small teams are also a “natural filter” for good design solutions for problems.