"Indie Game: The Movie"

Last
night I hosted a movie night at the Gaslight office to watch “Indie Game: The
Movie”. I broadcasted invites across Twitter, reddit,
and the user groups’ mailing list I’m on. We ended up with 13 attend, five of
whom were high school age or younger. I think there’s some potential to maybe
have a regular Cincy Indie Game Dev meetup night.

The movie itself was pretty good. I enjoyed the intimate, behind the scenes
look at the successful development of several games. We got to see early
prototypes of “Braid” and the experiences that led up to it’s development. We
got to see the iterative work on “Fez” and the cost of not shipping. We got to
see the thought process behind “Super Meat Boy”. I really enjoyed getting to
see how these guys worked. More than that though, the movie focuses on the
emotional and psychological experiences of these developers as they go through
multiple years of work on their projects.

I don’t actually know very much about indie game dev, so I don’t know if the
movie portrays a typical experience or not. The overall image it shows is the
sole developer working too many hours in somewhat poor conditions. All of the
developers highlighted struggled with depression of some kind induced by
burnout and exhaustion. The movie made a specific point that to do this you
had to make adverse trade-offs between your work and your life. As an
outsider, I want to believe you can participate in indie game dev and still
maintain work/life balance.

The coolest part of the evening was after the film. We had some great
discussion about the movie itself, indie game dev in general, and factors
affecting getting started. A couple of the teens demoed a game they had been
working on. Vincent was just beginning to use
impact.js. He had a ninja able to run and jump and
almost land on a moving platform. He’d also hooked up some audio as well. It
was a nice start with only a few hours of experimentation on his part.

A friend of Vincent’s (who’s name I sadly don’t remember), demoed a game he
wrote last summer using Unity. It was a complete
tutorial level for a fairly novel game concept. Being done in Unity, it was
3D, first person. The main hook was that you could rotate the world around you
in order to make your way through the level. He said it took him most of the
summer to build. The actual coding of the game wasn’t that much work. It was
mainly the work he did on the menu system and the artwork.

I think we could get a handful of regular attendees for a monthly game dev
group. It’d be good motivation to have something to demo and show. It’s also
be good to talk about our experiences developing, problems we’re having and
how to overcome them.

As a brief aside, I had downloaded the censored version of the movie from
their website. Unfortunately, I had not screened the movie. Even being
censored, there was still quite a bit of content I wish I hadn’t projected up
on the wall for my and other kids. I work in the indie software biz to some
extent and know the coarseness most of us have, so I’m not really surprised. I
think indie game dev is a great way to attract kids to programming. At least
one of the scenes would have been very uncomfortable to watch if there had
been any young women in the group. I wish the film had been more sensitive.