Indie Games

This semester I'm taking a seminar in video game design and programming. The seminar meets for 3 hours every week and we discuss everything to do with games: from its "fun" appeal (gets psychological sometimes) to game mechanics and dynamics. It's very interesting stuff.

Via this seminar I was introduced to the Indie Game scene. Indie games are the games that are independently developed without the financial support of a video game publisher. Our instructor is an indie gamer himself and was on the team that developed Osmos (link) which won an award at the Independent Games Festival (IGF 2009). Its a really interesting world where pure personal commitment, determination and innovation are displayed in the games. This is due to the fact that most of the developers are part-time and are not being supported financially.

As part of this seminar I'll be designing and creating video game prototypes every single week. I will be uploading them to a website and linking you to them. Please leave your comments.

I'll leave you with snapshots of my first two game prototypes. The first was a game built under the constraint of only using squares and circles. The second had no limitations besides the week to do it in. I even added music and sound effects to the second game. I used opengl and Glut to develop the first game and opengl and SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) for the second. Click on each of the snapshots below for an enlarged view.