I’ve been reading The Indie Game Development Survival Guide. It is quite good. If anyone is interested in this as a field, and are considering going out on their own and making their own game, I highly suggest it. It has given me a lot of great ideas on how I could get this thing done. And I really think I could…
First I need to see if I can get together with this IGDA guy over the next week or two and see if we can get some plans made to do this. I’m not sure how much a producer is really needed for an indie project, but if he can help bring in three or four quality guys in the area, and help with potential promotion and design then I’m more than willing to let him have some percentage points on the product. As long as he is willing to let the game itself, and a decent chunk of the profit go to the company idea. This seems to be the big thing though and hopefully we can get by it. It occurs to me that perhaps by trying to sell him on the bigger picture I might have lost him. Likely because he doesn’t think that it is possible to create a company from scratch in this day and age.
And maybe it isn’t anymore. But I keep looking at some of the best games in history coming in this way. Will Wright did it with SimCity. Sid Meier did it. And while these happened in a more innocent time in the industry I can’t help but think that perhaps one reason the industry has stagnated is because these startups aren’t around as much anymore. And heck, it does still happen to a small degree with the guys who did Viewtiful Joe, or the makers of Darwinia, even PopCap with all their puzzle games or the makers of Puzzle Pirates. These were all indie studios that produced highly innovative, NEW properties, and thank god for them because otherwise we would be stuck with Old Game Idea XII: The return of the Previous Idea.