Personal and Professional Practice 3: 'Research' Studio Brief - Edmund McMillan

For this module I wanted to look at a number of different games companies to see where I would fit into the industry. I wanted to look at a range of different people and companies that where large small, national and international to look at how they ran and how they produced there games. The first person that I wanted to look at was Edmund McMillan who is one of my favourite Indie Game developers.

The way in which he works for his project is that he produces all the art and designs everything about the game, he will then have someone do the programming for him or the publishing. He generally works in very small teams and this really works for him as a games designer. The first game that he worked on was Super Meat Boy with Tommy Refenes, who did all the programming for him. There is a really informative documentary about the progress of the game when it was in production and it shows just how difficult it was for them both to go it alone.

The next game that he worked on was The Binding of Isaac, in which again he created all of the artwork and designs for the game. He then worked with Florian Himsl who did all of the programming for him again. This again worked but there were again a few issues with timing and it was a struggle to produce on there own. The game was fantastic and he set about creating the DLC a year later. The game proved so popular that he wanted to create a sequel for it but due to the limitations of flash it had to be produced differently, meaning that he worked with different people again. For his most recent game The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth he now works with Nicalis, a small games developer and publisher headed by Tyrone Rodriguez.

Altogether I really like the way that Edmund goes it alone on most project bringing his older work on games like Gish and SMB to his newer ones to introduce them as enemies and bosses, it adds nostalgia to the game especially if you played his older stuff. But not only that the way he produces all of the art himself is impressive and then it means that your not replying on a lots of people, just yourself to get it done and then getting the help of say one person to do all of the programming. For me this is what Indie Developing is all about.