Re:One thing that has changed in the professional game indus...
by Cthulhu_ on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @04:12AM
(#36968311)
> Today, the divide is so high that you can’t possibly make a AAA level game as an indie.
To latch onto this remark; indie games of today are bigger and better than the AAA games of 20, 30 years ago I think. Groundbreaking games like Commander Keen (side-scrolling on PC) were written by a late teen, early 20 year old John Carmack, who continued to basically invent 3D video games.
That said, reasons why indie games are better than old "pro" games are that they stand on the shoulders of giants; Carmack for example had to invent and apply a lot of theoretical knowledge into performant code, afterwards people could reuse his code and ideas. Programming languages and tooling have improved, so indie developers can focus more on building a game instead of solving lower-level problems.
But they still build their own engines, albeit usually not from scratch. I'm thinking games like Factorio, Cogmind, The Witness, Minecraft, Amnesia, Project Zomboid, etc (yeah I had to do a search to find and confirm these games).
That said, "high-end gaming" is a difficult term to use; with some of the most popular games, graphic fidelity and the like is secondary to gameplay. Minecraft, the best-selling game of all time, was made by one guy / a small team, Stardew Valley by just one guy, and Pokemon and Terraria were made by just small teams.
To latch onto this remark; indie games of today are bigger and better than the AAA games of 20, 30 years ago I think. Groundbreaking games like Commander Keen (side-scrolling on PC) were written by a late teen, early 20 year old John Carmack, who continued to basically invent 3D video games.
That said, reasons why indie games are better than old "pro" games are that they stand on the shoulders of giants; Carmack for example had to invent and apply a lot of theoretical knowledge into performant code, afterwards people could reuse his code and ideas. Programming languages and tooling have improved, so indie developers can focus more on building a game instead of solving lower-level problems.
But they still build their own engines, albeit usually not from scratch. I'm thinking games like Factorio, Cogmind, The Witness, Minecraft, Amnesia, Project Zomboid, etc (yeah I had to do a search to find and confirm these games).
That said, "high-end gaming" is a difficult term to use; with some of the most popular games, graphic fidelity and the like is secondary to gameplay. Minecraft, the best-selling game of all time, was made by one guy / a small team, Stardew Valley by just one guy, and Pokemon and Terraria were made by just small teams.