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Author Topic: Amateurish Indie Games  (Read 5043 times)

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kori

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Amateurish Indie Games
« on: July 13, 2005, 01:51:27 PM »

The post below is a modified post from another forum. The subject is, 'why do our indie games feel amateurish?' 
 
What causes any indie game to feel amateurish to the player? How can we as developers, stop this amateurish feeling in our games? 
 
 
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..great indie the atmosphere, the jokes... but unfortunately it does 'feel' rather 'amateurish'. This indie was poorly animated, the music was getting a little repetitive after a while, and there was no voice acting.
 
The backgrounds of this particular indie game are great, the music and voice acting are really good too, but the character animation shows, again, that this game is not made by a big team of paid professionals.
 
So it seems that there's always something 'wrong' with amateur games. At least, I personally haven't played one that feels exactly like a commercial game.
 
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Kori
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Nihil

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Re: Amateurish Indie Games
« Reply #1 on: July 13, 2005, 07:26:31 PM »

Ok, short answer: Amateur games are amteurish because they are done by amateurs. Suprising, eh? :-)

Longer answer: When one or two persons without the proper training and knowledge do a game in their spare time it's obvious that they will never ever reach the same qualitiy as a routined, skilled team that works fulltime for one, two or even more years on a game. How should they?

I for example work alone on my game, so I have to do everything myself. I'm a programmer, so that part is not so much a problem, but I have no education in graphics for example, and so the graphics I do with my little self-taught knowledge and my cheap software can never compare to the things that the real pros with the proper equipment do. Plus, I have perhaps 5 hours per week to work on my game, that's nothing compared to work fulltime on something.

Off course you can try to team up with others, but my experience shows that 9 out of 10 amateur teams never really work together and split up shortly after they announced their upcoming Half-Life 2-killer.

Quote
So it seems that there's always something 'wrong' with amateur games. At least, I personally haven't played one that feels exactly like a commercial game.

Funny, when I read game reviews for commercial games there is also always something wrong with commercial games, the graphics, the music, the voice overs, the character animations ... seems that there are no games out there that anyone really likes :-)

korii

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Re: Amateurish Indie Games
« Reply #2 on: July 13, 2005, 07:50:39 PM »

I don't think it's a case of 'what's wrong with a game', so much as something about the game that screams,'amateurish'. This is a difference. All games have something wrong, yet you can almost smell a amateurish game, even when everyting is perfect.

Kori
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Nihil

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Re: Amateurish Indie Games
« Reply #3 on: July 13, 2005, 08:07:17 PM »

Because everyone knows which games are amteur and which are commercial.

Korii

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Re: Amateurish Indie Games
« Reply #4 on: July 13, 2005, 09:04:55 PM »

Here is a good reply from a poster on another forum:

I think games feel amateurish when they are unpolished and without a sense of style. I have seen many professional games that feel amateur to me, but usually it is indie games that are really bad about it.

Here are some of the signs that I see as amateurish:

- Obvious typos and misspellings
- Inconsistent graphical style, such as photorealistic backgrounds and cartoon characters (though this style can work, most indies don't make it work)
- Unpolished UI, especially in the transitions from screen to screen
- Clunky controls with poor animation
- A poor 3D engine used when a great 2D engine would have been better
- Overuse of certain "humorous" elements : Pirates, Ninjas, Robots, Monkeys, etc... (though some games hit these dead-on... Earthworm Jim)
- Music that does not fit with the gameplay and presentation style
- Poorly chosen, improperly mixed sound effects
- Superfluous gameplay elements (such as a jump button that is useless throughout the game... Doom 3 anyone?)
- A system that was obviously scaled back, such as a hugely complex magic system but only seven spells.
- Misaligned textures in the levels
- Generic level designs, lack of scripts/triggers/events within the levels
- Trying to jimmy a generic backstory into a game that didn't need one (how does fighting the Robot of Doom equate with making a toothpick statue?)
- Focusing so much on a poorly written story that the rest of the game suffers (most indie RPGs fall into this category, written by people who want to write stories, but like to play games)

There are many more tell-tale signs, but basically the lack of polish and an obvious misunderstanding of what makes a game great are the signs that I see. Generally, I think the problem is that indies often want to compete with the big-guns of gaming. This means that they bite off more than they can chew and then don't have the time to give the game that extra polish.

Kori

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metamorphium

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Re: Amateurish Indie Games
« Reply #5 on: July 13, 2005, 11:15:49 PM »

Ok, I'll comment a bit on this.

First: amateur != bad. The word comes from french and means that people doing that project love doing it. I'll give you
an example: Phil Plait (you would know him probably from his badastronomy.com site) who worked on hubble space telescop
calls himself an amateur since he also takes his telescope and watches stars in his free time. So no. Amateur is a good approach.
Amateurs should make games since there will be more originality and less *proved principle* involved.

Now guess what? I am not buying this rant at all. There are hundreds of independent games with varying quality and I enjoy
playing them. Some excells some don't. Now look at AAA scene: some games are wonderful, some don't. See the similarity? If you
can't enjoy good independent game, you're not the target customer for indie market. I know I can enjoy it.
And I am buying these games regulary as well as I am buying so called AAA games. I can enjoy good game and don't have a needs
to bash game just because authors don't have fifty thousand euros for graphic creation. If anyone manage to create game which
is playable, he deserves some respect because he certainly did much more than *critic* sitting in front of computer and finding
*what's wrong with your game*. This is unfortunately even more typical in music where people who weren't able to do music
professionaly ends up as critics acting way too similar to game critics.

So my advice for such threads is: everyone is able to make a simple game. If everyone of indie bashers just sit down and write
some small game (tetris for example) from the title screen to end credits and score table, he would get way better attitude to
indie developers since they are usually proving themselves much more than just with such simple games.

Hope that makes sense.
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