Unity did it, and now Epic has done it too!

A little over a week ago, Unity decided to make their indie license for their 3D engine developer tool, Unity3D free. This was great news for us indie developers, and I have already decided to use Unity on our games instead of Torque!

But then! Epic announced a few days ago that their Unreal 3 engine Developer Kit can also be downloaded  for free!
Granted, they still require 25% royalties on all revenue over $5000, but the possibility that we indies now have to use the AAA U3 engine is bound to generate some great new games out there.

I like the development of the Gamedev business lately. What’s next? CryEngine for free?
This is kind of bad news for Torque though, since they recently decided to not make a separate indie license with their new Torque 3D engine, but instead offers it for $1000 for everyone. Which means they will most likely lose ALOT of indies to Unity or Epic.
Unless they use the opportunity and release a free indie license in the coming weeks, which might be a smart move as it looks now.

Also, Unity has just partnered up with  online video education site, Noesis to offer education on the use of Unity3.
Which is something I’ve always found lacking in the past, easy accessible education on the different 3D engines out there.
Hopefully this trend will continue too, so we get more education on the different engines online.

I am sad to say that I have been procrastinating even more lately, but that’s mostly because of lack of energy from fixing my back/neck, and a surgery I had to extend my Achilles tendon earlier this year.

Lately though, I have finally got back most of my energy and I am eager to start diving deep into TGE to see how to best make our planned game, but then my computer died…. Gah!!
Luckily it’s a known problem with HP lappies, so I’ll get it back in 2 weeks time or so… 2 weeks… yay!

Anyway, some updates.
As you might have guessed from what I wrote above, we have finally decided on a game engine; Torque Game Engine. With it’s nice low price for indie developers, I found it perfect for our studio, and the engine is way beyond my expectations too.
Our 3D-modeller, Ståle, have made a few models, and as soon as he makes some textures to put on them and I get some landscape going in TGE, we will see about making some early-stage screenshots to show off what we’re working with.
By that time we’ll announce what kind of project we’re working on too and post some more details about our ideas surrounding the concept.

So stay tuned for more information about our under-development game!

A few weeks ago, I promised to compile a list of articles about how to start a Game Studio. After some searching around, I have found a few very nice articles that are out there.
I will update this list as I stumble over more good articles, but keep in mind that I actually read them before posting them, so it might take some time

Anyway, let’s get on to the list!

Starting Your Own Game Company[^] – by Gregg Man. It’s aimed primarily against starting a professional Game Studio, and he has a lot of good advice. But it’s all applicable for an Indie Game Studio too.

How to start and run a computer games company[^] – by Matthew Stibbe. It’s quite old(written in 2001), but it still holds great advice for starting a Game Studio. He focuses mostly on publishing, marketing and finances and what to think about while starting up. A good read for a starting studio.

How To: Create your own game company, Part One[^] & Part Two[^] – by Victor Agreda, Jr. Part one deals mainly with some different resources you should consider when starting up. Lots of good suggestions there. Part two deals with the business part of starting up. Both parts are good articles and he lists tons of links to other related articles and the resources he mentions.

Five Realistic Steps To Starting A Game Development Company[^] – by Jeff Tunnell. A very good guide of how it is to start up as a Game Developer. He starts from the hobbyist stage and work his way up from there.
Be warned though, this article is just a teaser for his upcoming ebook, can’t wait till it’s finished!

The birth of a new game studio[^] – by Daniel Sánchez-Crespo Dalmau. Another 2001 article, but a very good read with loads of good advice. It’s more an account of how they started a game studio than a howto, but that doesn’t make it less valuable.

How to start your own games studio part One[^] & Part Two[^] – by Mark Morris. Part One deals mainly with the decision to start independently and the process of Idea generation, with lots of good advice around how to go about the process. Part Two extends the idea generation and talks about making the prototype of your game. I am looking forward to any future articles in this series from Mark.

An excerpt of what I myself have learned from reading all these articles.

• Use free software where possible, but if you can afford a game engine, it’s highly recommended to buy one. It will save you so much time, it’s without question worth it.
• Build a solid idea and then make a prototype of that idea. It’s while making the prototype you really will discover if this is something you want or are able to do.
• Learn team-building. There are tons of good articles and books about team-building out there, and if you want to start your own studio, you will need all the advice you can get.
• Get someone who knows his/her economics, or try to strike a good deal with an accountant.
• Marketing. You can do viral marketing while building your network, but again, this is usually not too easy without a prototype to show off. I would also recommend joining gamerelease.net[^], it’s cheap and it dumps you right into a already well-developed network of game contacts. And it gives you a way to publish press releases to blogs, RSS feeds etc.
• And last but not least, you need to dedicate your life to this. Game developing takes ALOT of time and resources. You can do it as a hobby, but if you want to make a living from your game studio, it will take most of your free-time. And as Jeff Tunnell put it; Don’t quit your day job!

Hope this list will help you as much as it did me. It’s quite the nice compilation of advice for starting up a game studio. So if you’re still set on starting up, good for you and best of luck to you! And welcome to the life of a game developer.

Gamecareerguide has posted a new Ask the Experts feature post: Ask the Experts: Console vs. PC Development[^] that I find very informative for anyone who wants to start developing indie games.

Consoles might be a nice platform to develop for, when it comes to possible profits, but as Jill Duffy points out, it’s usually alot more expensive to develop for them. In addition, you need to get access to the development ki, which means another money sink AND a meeting with the company making the console; Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft.

Our [Kybernesis] games will be made primarily on PC, and maybe ported to consoles when we can afford it. Cause I have the same philosophy as the panelists mentioned in the feature points out in the end. Keep costs to the minimum… At least in the start-up phase!

Gamasutra has also posted a Postmortem: How Puzzle Quest Saved Infinite Interactive[^] which gives some very good insights into developing Indie games, specifically a casual puzzle game. But their experiences could very well fit any kind of Indie developed game.

There’s an essay @ Gamasutra about gameplay patents[^] by Ernest Adams. Well worth the read!

I agree on the points he make, the US patent-system just don’t work as it is today.. It restricts freedom of creativity which in my opinion is synonymous with restricting creativity. Cause there can’t be any *real* creativity without freedom!

Imagine if everyone and their cat patented all the innovative parts of their game…. On one side, it would demand innovation in games, no matter what! On the other side, it would kill all indie-developers, since only the big companies would be able to afford the extra cost from using someone else’s patent.
Or it would kill all innovation whatsoever! Cause all the big companies would patent their innovations and stick to them, never straying from the patented path. It would be even worse than it is today…

I’m glad it isn’t like this though, and I sure hope they will remove the possibility to patent gameplay in the future.

Oh, and don’t forget programming code!! As Ernest points out, if the creators of all the sorting algorithms that we programmers use today, had patented them.. There would be no effective programming. I shudder at the mere thought…

Bit-tech.net has posted a really interesting article, Staying Independent[^], by Mark Morris of Introversion[^]. Where he shares his thoughts about why Introversion ended up going Indie and why they don’t plan to change that fact.

It’s a nice read and I recognize myself in a lot of the reasons why they decided to go Indie.

Okay. So I decided to start my own blog.

You see, I’ve been dabbling with starting up an Indie Gamedeveloper company for half a year now, with a concrete game idea and everything.. Actually, several game ideas! I even got 2 modelers and 2 artists on my team to get the graphics done. Though that leaves only me as the programmer, eeep!

But I persevere. I’m looking into DX Studio these days, to see if it fits with my gamedev-goals. and I really like what I have seen so far, but more delving into that later. This is just a hello world post, so I can see how this blog-thingie works

Anyways, if you’ve stumbled over this blog for some reason and are disappointed din the lack of content, don’t fret. I will get this up and going in no-time and then I will blog about all my experience in starting up an Indie Gamdev Company from scratch. And I will try out tools like DX Studio, Torque, Endorphin and more in the process.

Oh and all input is heartily welcome of course!