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The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Defy Gravity Extended
Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We at Joystiq believe no one deserves to starve, and many indie developers are entitled to a fridge full of tasty, fulfilling media coverage, right here. This week, Fish Factory Games' Paul Fisch describes the fun of designing with a gravity gun, in Defy Gravity Extended. Why develop independently, rather than work for an established company? There are a lot of reasons to work independently. You have much more freedom to create your own vision and take big risks developing an independent game. Defy Gravity Extended is a pretty unique game, and probably too radical of a design for a large established company to implement. I think that you should always try to bring your idea to life with the minimal amount of people necessary. Braid and Cave Story were made by basically one guy. World of Goo was made by two. The more people involved in a project, the less flexibility you have. I've talked to designers who've worked on games with $10 million budgets, and they complain about the fact that they're often locked into their designs once production starts. Once you start to actually play-test your work, you realize that there are a million things that you'd like to change, but by that point there are 40 coders working on implementation, the level designers are already half done, and the high-poly models have already been received from Singapore and paid for. So you can't just pull the breaks and do a redesign, and your game ends up being worse off for it. So I say, if you can create your dream game with one or two people working in their living rooms, then by all means do it.
