More Indie Opportunities
The big news for game developers (especially budget-conscious indies like me) is the release of the Quake III engine to the public via the GPL by John Carmack and crew. An interesting comment came from John Carmack: "Anyone working on the Q3 codebase today should just delete all the asm code and use the C implementations. Making a commercial game with fairly high end requirements go 10% faster is sometimes worth writing some asm code, but years later when the frame rate pressure is essentially gone, the asm code should just be dumped in the name of maintainability. All the comments in the world wouldn't change this decision a bit." Does that mean he's dumping ALL assembly language coding in the future? I doubt it. He's saying here that if you are working on a cutting-edge engine, then the speed improvements you gain from assembly language make sense. But it's been 5 years since the Quake 3 code was a "next-gen" engine - if you are really needing cutting-edge, you need to go with a different engine.

It'll be interesting to see what gets produced with this engine by the indie game dev community. I haven't really seen much of anything come out with the previous engines, but I've no doubt they've helped in the education of many game programmers.

My little time-waster these days is Kingdom of Loathing, a humorous web-based massively multiplayer RPG. Ya gotta admire this game - the developer obviously had some halfway decent web programming skills but probably little in the way of artistic skills - it's all stick-figure art. But he's got a wicked sense of humor and an eye for parodying everything from Massively Multiplayer RPGs to 80's pop culture. You get to battle White Chocolate Golems, Knobb Goblin Harem Girls, Undead Elbow Macaroni, and Knights in White Satin, build a meat-car (the currency of the game is Meat), watch a hippo ballet, and raise your three attributes: "Muscles", "Mysteriousness", and "Moxie." It's got an interesting crafting system, and an advantage of having stick-figure-and-text content is that the developer is cranking out TONS of content for the game on a regular basis. It's quite impressive. It's not going to stop me from playing City of Heroes (not that I have time to play THAT one much - some months it's just an expensive comic book subscription), but it's a fun little distraction. The game is free, but apparently he's taking in some money via donations and merchendise. I'm not sure how PROFITABLE a venture it is, but I applaud the effort.

Another web-based game that my daughter got hooked on was Adventure Quest - another little web-based indie RPG. My ten-year-old saved her allowance for WEEKS to become a premium "guardian" in that game, so it's bringing in some money. The game also has a little bit of a sense of humor (though it's not quite the parody of Kingdom of Loathing), and regular events taking place.

A "build-your-own MMORPG" project taking place that I am really excited about is Prairie Games' "Minions of Mirth." It's in an open alpha stage now - it uses the Torque engine and is quite playable in its current stage. There's lots of missing content and rough edges to be ironed out, but the game manages to capture a lot of the flavor of the original release of EverQuest in 1999 (albeit with somewhat better graphics!) This is one of the most ambitious independent game development projects I've come across. If Josh Ritter (the principle developer and head of Prairie Games) didn't have the combination of a solid track record and raw enthusiasm, I'd assume this would be just another one of those bazillions of indie projects that never get off the ground. I really hope this game succeeds on a tremendous level.

These games may never rake in the EverQuest / World of Warcraft dollars, but what impresses me is that they are succeeding on some level that many of the really BIG, high-budget MMORPGs that fail to achieve critical mass never do. That's saying something - there's definitely room to breath, survive, and hopefully thrive as a small indie game developer, even in the woefully overcrowded MMORPG arena.

Labels: Biz, Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:45 AM (Permalink)