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The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Gratuitous Space Battles
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 believe they deserve a wider audience with the Joystiq Indie Pitch: This week, English developer Chris Harris talks about the good ol' days of being indie and the continued success of Gratuitous Space Battles. What's your game called and what's it about?Gratuitous Space Battles is a strategy/management game that plays in an unusual way. It's a "hands-off" battle simulator for giant space fleets, which puts the player in position of the designer of individual ships and entire fleets, and in control of the orders those ships will use during battle, but the actual battles themselves are out of your hands. You can watch your fleet fight, but cannot change anything mid-battle (although we have recently added direct control as an option).The game is all about ship and fleet design, rather than arcade action, and plays more like a puzzle game or tower defense game than a conventional RTS.Do you see yourself as part of a larger indie movement?Kind of, although I am not a typical part of it. The indie scene seems to be younger, cooler and much more American than me. I find it weird that indie games are suddenly hip and cool, and acceptable to buy, and make millions of dollars, because this is a very recent thing, and there is no guarantee it will last.When I started making indie games, there was no Steam, relatively few online stores and the majority of people were still buying CD-ROMs and downloading from sites like download.com. The scene has changed dramatically since then and I'm always slightly wary of the fact that it could change again. Some indie games now make tens of millions of dollars and that is definitely going to change things in the long term. How, I don't know.%Gallery-178806%
