Inspiration

[Teeth]

Hi all!

Great job Moonpod on creating an excellent game in such a short time as an indie developer. I've read the post mortem and it's very interesting. Asteroids has always been a favourite of mine and all my game ideas start with that game underneath it all. I was both happy and jealous that an asteroids game of such quality finally made the big time. I wanted to do it, you cads! Trouble is once you get your job in mainstream development you have no spare time to code the things you really want, and even if you do you don't want to do any more coding. And even if you get past that and make something, it doesn't belong to you, it belongs to your company. Funny thing is, it was my old DOS asteroids game that got me the job in the first place, effectively extinguishing its own development.

If I may, a couple of questions:

1: To which games would you say you looked most for inspiration in the development of Starscape?
2: Would you recommend that mainstream developers go indie? How about small breakaway "splinter cells" such as yourselves?
3: How did you fund development in the initial stages? Was it tough?
4: Ico for PS2 or Zelda: Wind Waker for Gamecube?

[Goober]

These are just my opinions, the other two may disagree:

1. Poo Bear is the man to answer this, he's the games guy. For personal inspiration I looked towards all the indies that made good and where the owners are now driving Ferraris.
2. No, the pay sucks. Unless you're really into it it's not a good idea.
3. Yep, pretty tough. If money was water then my savings account would be the Sahara desert.
4. I prefer the look of Ico, very nice look and feel to the whole game (Zelda:WW looks pants, IMO), but the game annoyed me to the point where I rapidly accelerated my Dual Shock across the room. I've not played the latest Zelda, so I can't comment on the aerodynamics of the GC controller (or the game itself).

Glad you like the game

[jollyreaper]

http://games.slashdot.org/games/03/06/27/0056250.shtml?tid=127&tid=186&tid=207&tid=208

Slashdot had an article about the rise of casual gaming. The gist of it is that sure, there's a market for the $5 million state of the art games like Half-Life, Quake, GTA, and so forth, but there's a growing movement of people who are enjoying retro gaming. And seriously, when you think about the games that are played on PDA's, cell phones, and other hand-held mobile systems, they really have to go back to the well because they can't do 3D 32-bit anything.

A game doesn't have to be whiz-bang with bells and whistles to be fun. Slap some prettier graphics on an old idea (like Starscape) and you are talking serious fun.

I think that there will be a growing demand for these sorts of games. A friend of mine has recently landed a job doing wireless gaming development for cell phones. He got into the industry back in the 80's with a really crude self-published game (and what games weren't crude back then?) Anyway, he says it's really getting back to the roots for him.

One of the distinctions brought up in the slashdot discussion was just how much time people had to play a game. Something huge and mainstream could require a lot more time than a lot of professionals have to give to it. But a smaller game, the kind that you can pick up and leave in 5 minutes, that would fit perfectly into the spare moments of the day. Got five minutes? Play a round.

[Teeth]

Thanks for the answers. It's a shame you had to use your savings to fund the development. Think we might see quite a few indies springing up soon what with all the redundancies 'round these parts...