cnn.com — The industry has been shrinking to a handful of big players that use large teams of in-house programmers.But Silva is a one-man game maker. He's among a growing number of independents working to distribute their games to Internet-connected consoles with the help of game box makers seeking to meet demand for titles beyond the us
Jun 23, 2008 View in Crawl 4
cloud7654Jun 24, 2008
Microsoft first? That's unpossible.
aussierobotJun 24, 2008
Personally I think indie game dev on consoles, i.e. xna, wiiware and psn are a load of crap.XNA/360: Best of the bunch. Good tools, but distribution only through Creators Club members. No commercialization permitted for 360 games. Quite difficult to get your game 'out there' unless you win some sort of competition. (Surprise!)PS3: vacant. empty. 'nuff saidWiiWare: I got very excited when they announced WiiWare. What no-one tells you (or bothers to check) is the fact that it is not targeted to indies, as in individuals and 'amateur' developers, but that you don't get jack unless you develop a full game design doc, show Nintendo that you are a capable developer with a full team and titles under your belt etc. There is no SDK or tools available etc.TBH: one of the best ways for indies (albeit on desktop, not console) is the Source SDK on Steam. Although I have a love/hate relationship with Valve (their SDK is the most advanced and supported, but they do tend to leave devs with hanging with huge problems for months and months) they have to be commended for the sheer amount of tools, technology and documentation they have and continue to release. The catch is that you of course cannot commercialize unless they really like you and either buy you out or come to a special arrangement. The other catch (and this applies to all the avenues mentioned so far) is that most big companies have learnt their lesson about indies (ie getting shown up by the few genius' amongst us producing better games than the expensive commercial titles) and have set the system up in such a way that if you come up with a great idea, they can pretty much just own it regardless of you.To free yourself of this you then end up with the mother of all gaming companies: iD. If you can accept the GPL, then you can take anything up to the Q3 engine (and yes you can extend it, just look at engines like tenebrae) and make a commercial game and sell it. It's an awesome deal although many of us are waiting for JC to release the idTech4 engine code so we can get some real physics and shaders etc....soon I hope.
blatantninjaJun 24, 2008
Spiderweb games makes some pretty cool titles. The graphics are pretty dated, but the gameplay is better than most of the junk the big studios put out.
lmn8rJun 24, 2008
Sorry for the double post.
zombirdJun 25, 2008
Dwarf Fortress has no graphics at all and is better than most EA games. It's all about gameplay.
williJun 25, 2008
depends on what kind of game.
joshmackDec 22, 2008
Love gaming its great, I love my PS3 more than anything in the world. <a class="user" href="http://www.monster-ps3.com">http://www.monster-ps3.com</a> is a great site for PS3 games