The thought occurred to me today that adventure games are an ideal medium for indie developers. Feel free to quote the blog on that, I mean this is a legit internet source for referencing now. Just put one of those little numbers in the brackets next to the quote, or paraphrase, and then put our blog URL down for the link. Nobody can complain! We are literally living the dream now, we're educated and this is a serious academic blog about media production.
The development team is in a weird place right now, production cannot begin until the idea for our game has been fully thought-out. So I'm sitting here thinking about what our game would be like, if we were to actually make it. I'd say that there are only a few kinds of indie games.
Also Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw made more than a few adventure games. You can probably play a few of them on his website, here, or if you wanted to watch his reviews, you can do so here. Buy his first and second novels as well.
Source Engine Modifications/Mods in general
Firstly you have modifications of existing games/existing game engine software that evolve into something more through beta development and production. I'm really thinking here about source mods, modifications of the source engine. Some of these are bought out by Valve and are no longer indie games anymore, such as 'Counter-strike', 'Left 4 Dead' and 'Garry's Mod'. The source engine itself is just a super-heavily-modified Quake engine. Sometimes starting out from scratch just isn't feasible. Hell if I know how you'd even start to make game software from scratch, so it's not surprising that a lot of games use another game's materials to begin with.
By the way, there are plenty of source mods which haven't been made official Steam store products which are still top-notch, you should go play 'Black Mesa', 'Pirates, Vikings and Knights 2', 'Portal: Prelude', 'The Stanley Parable' and lots of other mods which I don't know of/can't recall right now. There are even plenty of source mods which were made into retail products which are very interesting and definitely worth your time, such as 'Zeno Clash', 'E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy', 'Dark Messiah: Might and Magic', 'Alien Swarm', 'Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines' (although it's difficult to play on a system with more than 2GB of RAM installed), and yet again, there are many more that I won't mention here.
With Steam's new 'Greenlight' system as well, more and more indie games and productions from smaller companies are being sold on Steam. Support for newcomers to the game development industry and game market from big corporations has never really been stronger.
Platformer games/Roguelike games
Ok, let's be honest here, I'm mainly thinking about the brilliant 'Super Meat Boy', and equally brilliant but much more creepy, 'The Binding of Isaac'. Those are ideal examples of indie development turning out a fine retail product with plenty of marketing support from Valve on Steam, as well as word-of-mouth recognition. Boom. You could totally paraphrase that if you were writing an essay on indie games or Team Meat.
Anyway, there are so many indie platformer games, it's such a common set of gameplay mechanics that any list of independently-developed patformer games would just be inaccurate and useless. Also insulting to the many multiple people who develop these games who didn't get mentioned. In platformer games, the player character jumps from one platform to another, the player varies as does the environment, platform, and generally the everything is determined by the context of the narrative. It's an old style of game-making, Mario Bros was initially a platformer and is still usually a platformer (there are seriously too many Super Mario Bros games to even link though, just know that those links aren't even a third of all the games), when they're not making a kart-game or sports game or some other nonsense that is. So that's something that anyone with a basic knowledge of games will recognise. Back to the point though, a lot of indie games are platformers or some similar style of game, there a few reasons for this I'm sure, the reason that first springs to mind however, is that indie developers played games that were the original progenitors of these genres, and wish to pay homage to the games that they spent their childhood playing. They may also want to imprint their artistic vision upon the genre, it's a kind of way of saying, "I grew up with these influences, now that I'm older, this is my attempt at a game of that style".
Technically speaking, I'd imagine that a game in this 'retro' style requires a much smaller team and far fewer resources than a game like anything in the previous paragraph. Still, creating a gameplay engine for this kind of game is beyond our development skills.
Adventure games 2: The Return of the Point of this Post
When I was much younger than I am today, one of my first encounters with the world of gaming was, like many other people I'm sure, with 'The Secret of Monkey Island'. When I wasn't too busy playing Robocod that is. Although my siblings and I were unable to progress past actually getting to Monkey Island, the game stuck with me forever. If you've ever played it, you'll know what I mean.
Now it's time for US to tell YOU the SECRET OF MONKEY ISLAND. Not really though, but we will be attempting (probably not though, although maybe) to make an adventure game, which is what 'The Secret of Monkey Island' was/is. It'll be like a badly made, far less funny variant of it. Maybe we'll put a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle in the game as a reference. Then we'll be super-successful and people will associate the rubber chicken with our game more than Monkey Island, then people will think we're trying to outdo Lucas Arts from the past, copying their ideas and stealing them for ourselves. If we tell them otherwise, they'll say we're hipsters for trying to be 'in to' something before it was popular, then a highly trained but morally and logically lacking team of ninjas will sneak into our rooms at night and poke out the lenses from our glasses so we're undeniably hipster. HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO SEE THEN? WE'RE NOT HIPSTERS, WE JUST HAVE BROKEN EYEBALLS.
Point is, adventure games are cool, and we can definitely incorporate features of an adventure game into a live action trailer. Also we may, might, likely probably make a tiny sequence of an adventure game, if software packs that enable us to do so are easily picked up and stuff.
Stay loyal.
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