Indie Game: The Movie

For PPP2 I was really interested in looking into this movie as I feel that it offers a lot more insight to people in the Indie games industry and actually how difficult it is to get your game out there and please the audience at the same time. It seems like an immense amount of pressure to have to deal with and you can see the struggle that most of them had to go through.

Featuring:
Jonathon Blow
Tommy Refenes
Edmund McMillen
Phil Fish

Indie Game: The Movie
The generation that are making Indie game grew up with computer games so it has become a natural part of their life as games have always been there at their homes. They spent there lives playing through big titled games and they want to start to develop something new and during the rise of digital distribution is were Indie gamers made their move. Valve's Steam was the first place to start selling games through digital purchases and so henceforth came Indie games as they didn't then have to pay big companies to market there products, they could create small games from home in a team with just a few people and get their work out into public.


Fez (Phil)
Phil Fish has been in development for 3 years at this point and he gained a grant from the Canadian Government in order to begin developing Fez. They had a lot of complaints throughout the development that it was taking to long to produce, Phil remarks 'it took 5 years for 1000 people to make Red Dead Redemption, there are only 2 of us!'. It was an over-ambitious project for a first game but he had a lot of help from Renauld Bedard who was his programmer for Fez. Phil has produced games for other people before but never from A-Z on his own before. It is a scary process, especially as there is threat that the whole game could fall apart and there is nothing to back you up.

When he was growing up he got a Nintendo Entertainment System with Mario, Zelda and Tetris on it and this inspired him to be where he is today, even at the age of 4, to start creating video games. He would draw a lot of pictures when he was young and his dad would turn them into hiding games where he would find letters and this inspired him to create his own game which features patterns which would alternate in colour over a set time period very quickly and you would be able to see different things after staring at it for too long. Something which he was very proud of. 

He is very interested in level design and the aesthetics of a game level as it more the game more appealing. He uses Photoshop to make the stripes of textures that will wrap around the cubes in game and he can then cut bits out and rotate the individual cubes in order to change parts especially if he doesn't like how the section is looking. He obsesses over small details like his and wants to get it right as he has never touched pixel art before Fez and had to make the entire game 3 times before getting it to a standard that he liked using pixels, but when looking at the older style vs the newer one you can see the massive improvement.

The goal of Fez is quite simple, you are putting the universe back together. This is based off Phil's own worries and he feels that sometimes the world just falls apart on him and bad things begin to happen one after the other until they take over your life and if Fez had failed Phil stated he would never work in games again. Fez is his life now.

Phil wants people to be brutally honest about Fez as he has been working on it for the past 4 years and has a demo of it for a festival called PAX in Boston, so he needed all the feedback he could get. At this point he also had a lot of trouble with his business partner and this is another thing he has to try and get through.

It's the first day of PAX and PHil is still worried about everything that is happening, but he does get to show off Fez, only to discover that they are game-breaking bugs within the first few moments of playing due to changes they made the night before. But this doesn't put him down, he restarts the machine as often as he needs to and despite this setback, everybody loved it! Phil is very affected by the response he gets and needs to know how many hits its getting on the internet, while learning about what people have said about it at the same time. He cares a lot about people's opinions of his game even though Fez went onto being a very popular game and sold in vast quantities.

Braid (Jon)
Jon has been making games for 22 years now and it took him 3 years to make Braid. In Braid there is a very unique time travelling element to the game. This is inspired off the old Prince of Persia: Sand's of Time game but altered as in this you could only turn back time a certain amount before you would run out of sand, but in Braid you can turn back a whole level if you so wish. It started out with a prototype that is clearly recognisable in the final game, e.g. the layout of the game levels.

He has a lot of good advice when it comes to level design and you always need to plan where the character is going to be when they first get onto the level and you also need to know where the character is going to go when they begin to move. There will be a certain path to take which will be the definitive correct one but alternatives are also allowed.

It was a massive success when it was released and scored very highly and sold about 10 000 units on the first day of release. Jon took a lot of the feedback that he got very seriously and would reply on nearly every thread published about Braid until it became something of an obsession. He wanted to get a better connection with the audience to understand the true meaning behind the game as many just thought it was funny to play, but Jon actually had a deeper meaning behind it. But regardless of that the game still did fantastically and he is starting work on his next game.

Super Meat Boy (Tommy and Edmund)
Their goal was to make a game that their 13 year old selves would want to play. Super Meat Boy is their childhood put into a video game with a distinctive art style that plays on being a retro platformer. The game is about a boy with no skin, so he is essentially meat, as he tries to save his girlfriend, who is made out of bandages, from the clutches of evil Dr Fetus. It is a very difficult game that plays off old game and they used a lot of references from these at the same time. They live for good reviews and if they don't get the money that they need from the game they can't afford to make another one.

Edmund has worked on 22 flash games previously and the two partners have lots of weird ideas when it comes to there games and these are very present in Super Meat Boy. Edmund spent a lot of time, when he was growing up, drawing monsters and also spent a lot of time with his grandma, who believe that he could do everything and was particularly proud of what he did. Aether is one of his earlier games and it is based around his niece as she likes monsters, is particularly shy and likes to be on her own. The story follows a boy riding a monster who solves the worlds problems but never does it right and every time this happens the Earth gets smaller, until he goes to touch it and it breaks, leaving the character in isolation. This is based around Edmund's earlier feelings as a child when he always felt very alone and isolated from everyone.

In say, level 3, they introduced an element of the gameplay where you have to do a running jump and to influence this movement further they put it in another level slightly later on to show the audience that they still need to use this element and apply the same technique. This is the same principle that applies with wall jumping. They introduced the wall on its own to begin with so that players knew that there was only one way to finish the level and then it was brought back a few levels later but players knew that they could do this now, making it obvious what the solution was. New gameplay moves require introductions and this is what Edmund and Tommy are great at. The same goes for new mechanics. You introduce a static saw and players know they have to jump over it or they will be destroyed, so when you introduce a saw that moves up and down the walls player already know that saws are bad and will hurt you so they know to avoid them. When designing a game, ensure that your obstacles have multi-purposes and advance throughout the game. 

Tommy got very stressed throughout the last stages of the games creation as there was a lot of pressure from Microsoft to get it done within 2 months to ensure that they got a feature place on the front page of XBox market. They had little time to finished the game now to ensure that spot, otherwise it would have been months later and they just didn't have the money to wait. 

They had a lot of  good reviews about Super Meat Boy and Edmund was waiting for the worst review, but it never came. They had fantastic feedback but most of the time they were just feeling weird as people were writing about their game and saying good things about it. Tommy was still very worried about the game being accepted and Edmund felt that even though they got such high reviews they might still fail.

They have a lot of worries on their release day and try not to look at the market as they knew they would be sat their refreshing the page all day. They had a bit of trouble at first with it not featuring on the front page but later on that day, when it did, they sold around 10 000 units within the first 8 hours of launching.

Edmund loves watching people play his game and hearing their responses and watching their reactions, it makes him happy and shows that all of the effort he put into creating the game payed off completely. They beat braid with how many copies they sold and were nearing on getting 1 000 units sold every hour. They were so happy with everything that they had accomplished and where about to see all of their hard work please everybody who played it.

'Super Meat Boy was the 4th highest rated XBox game of 2010'

'The game has sold over 1 000 000 copies to date'