The News Grandmaster 4000

the only changes anyone ever really talked about in indie games for the last decade was distribution/publishing and funding methods

1 Like

Well that, and the increasing ease & ubiquitiy of gamemaking tools

Selling Indie Game: the Movie on Steam was some bullshit.

2 Likes

eh?

okay but did they fix the dupe bug

Just galaxy braining.

ah.

I mean, you’re not wrong; and I say this as someone who attended the Toronto premiere of the film (and who owns the Steam version)

And by “galaxy braining” here I mean with all this talk of indie game strike-it-rich dreams, IGTM seemed to be specifically created as a kind of (unwitting?) propaganda for telling everyone with a computer and an idea for a puzzle platformer that if they believed in their dream (by highlighting the success stories of Braid, Super Meat Boy, and Fez at the same time Notch was swimming in Minecraft early access money) they would be handsomely rewarded. Releasing the movie on Steam (effectively the home of those three games) sits weird with me still, especially in light of this whole conversation.

But also I never actually watched IGTM and I’m not actually industry so I’m at least half talking out my ass and immediately regretted posting it.

3 Likes

i just remembered that back in 2014 i tried to solve the issue i’ve been talking about here. i don’t want to clog up the news thread with stuff that isn’t related and anecdotal, but the short version is: i didn’t succeed!

3 Likes

oh, I see

It’s hard to contextualize because we all knew where those folks stood when the movie released, but it was brutal enough within what they went through that it was honest on the success stories.

It was interesting to see the romance film adds atop the life I was living because I was newly dipped into the separation of grinding difficult creative work; the separation from my old friends and family that is hard to express through words which that creative work entails (relatedly, the recent First Man is superb at expressing this). So seeing the big picture version was a communicative tool I used a few times and it was honest within that scope

1 Like

Addendum: No indie scene I’ve ever been involved with sucked as much as TIGsource forums circa 2009-2012. Incestuous, forbidding, contemptible snobbery everywhere and they couldn’t stand the fact that the big fish (indie game authorities) in their small pool was evolving and the concept of what could be accomplished in indie games was growing.

2 Likes

I dig it. I think I also generally hate feel-good documentaries. I have problems.

oh no! That was always a space I thought about dipping into mostly because of a halo effect of Derek Yu

This conversation has brought back so many bad memories.

you’re not alone, feel-good media in general makes me ill, but moreso with documentaries.

all nature documentaries are tragedies where the ending is 100 years away

…maybe i have problems too

4 Likes

One more galaxy brain take while I’m feelin spicy:
One of the biggest problems with the indie game development scene is that 99%* of indies believe that the entities permitted to have find success in videogames should be:

A. Nintendo
B. Sony
C. A bunch of other triple-A developers and massive corporations
D. Them and only them specifically as an indie

People demand support for their own success without concern or interest in what other people are doing in the space.

*Number exaggerated for dramatic, galaxy-brain effect.

3 Likes

Derek Yu is a pretty great dude, I think. The tutorials he posted on TIGsource for GameMaker were invaluable for me. He seems like a nice, generous guy. There is a curmudgeonly cult of personality around him and other oldbies that “made it” that makes me ill.

Yu has been a huge inspiration to me going back to Eternal Daughter and definitely with Spelunky. Love him.

3 Likes

Yeah, that makes sense (and obviously we had to work out our own issues like that).

1 Like

I am also an absolute curmudgeon who’s grumpy about everything.

2 Likes