2 responses to “Going Part Time Indie, Part 1”

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  Dan May 13th, 2016 at 00:24

  Enjoyed your show as usual but I have two things: “Interactive Media”. Interactive media is not games but I think games fall under the category of interactive media, as does Google Maps. Games are a sub-category of interactive media. But games are probably much more deep and complicated than most forms of interactive media.

  Also you keep saying how easy it is for anybody to make games with Unity. Maybe it is easy to make simple stupid games (the majority these days). But not everybody can even do that. I’ve been using using for 3 years now and it is still very difficult to make a complex game of substance. Yes, the low-level stuff is taken car of, but the meat of the game, the concept and gameplay is still just as hard as it’s ever been. Saying it is easy to make a game with Unity is like saying it is easy to build a car because the tires, wheels, and various parts have already been fabricated…just throw it all together and you have a car.

  Please stop harping on how easy it is to make games with Unity.

  Regards,
  Dan

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  Indiegamepod May 13th, 2016 at 19:11

  Yeah, that’s how I see interactive media…games are a subset…but it seems like the most “popular”/successful interactive media are a mix of utility, game-like elements, feedback, and other dimensions that are still not well understood.

  As for Unity, ok, yeah, it does have a steep learning curve…but there are amazing tutorials on YouTube to make a simple game in less than an hour. And it works for many different platforms. That is a lot better than 5 years ago. You are right, the deep gameplay and nuances of the game require a lot of time and polish…but at least…you can get a simple prototype out relatively quickly and maybe then even convince some people to fund the development of the game.

  To come up with innovative gameplay may require more effort or luck…but at least, with Unity, you are thinking at the gameplay level…instead of worrying about whether the engineering/programming underneath the game layer actually works.