Re: Indie games?

>Actually, I think there is one genre where one person could do a
>great game: strategy games.

Absolutely, and there are indie developers that are doing pretty well 
in that area.  BattleFront, StarDock and Strategy First all come to 
mind.  However, titles of this type -- turn-based strategy, 4-X 
games, etc. -- do not tend to sell particularly well, but maybe 
enough to sustain a very small team of developers.  Maybe.

Even so, the cost to develop games of this type are far from trivial. 
 Even accepting that "design > tech/art", you still need a lot of 
content.

The one area where maybe you don't need nearly as much content is 
when you build "toys" instead of "games", i.e. think in terms of The 
Sims, RC Tycoon and what not.  Also, competitive on-line play lets 
players effectively provide their own content.  It takes much, much 
longer to develop a 20 hour single player game than it does to 
develop a decent competitive on-line game, at least in terms of 
content.

Hell, on-line games have a lot of things about them that make it even 
easier -- no need to support save games, pause or even AI (unless you 
support bot play or want NPCs thrown into the mix).

-Hook




-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by: Scholarships for Techies!
Can't afford IT training? All 2003 ictp students receive scholarships.
Get hands-on training in Microsoft, Cisco, Sun, Linux/UNIX, and more.
www.ictp.com/training/sourceforge.asp
_______________________________________________
Gamedevlists-design mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gamedevlists-design
Archives:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_idU6