Contrary to popular belief, games don't always need huge budgets and teams of hundreds of worker drones toiling away under the watchful eye of whip-wielding overlords in order to be awesome. The thriving indie development scene continues to give birth to some of the weirdest, coolest, and most innovative games around. Indie Spotlight pulls back the curtain, taking a closer look at the world of independent game developers and the magic they make.
Strange and Compelling
Apparently, the view isn't always the best from the top of the mountain. While making it into a large game development studio and working on AAA titles is a dream for many budding game designers, the ideal gig doesn't always turn out to be the one they expected it to be. As a result, the indie game development scene isn't just a stomping ground for newcomers. Quite a few industry veterans who've spent years cranking out games in the big leagues are finding themselves drawn back to their roots. Nathan Fouts spent a decade working on high profile projects for studios like Running With Scissors and Insomniac Games, but it was his love of 2D games and the precision of old-school action titles that inevitably lured him to the indie side of the fence.
After working on the infamous hyper-violent shooter Postal 2 and even bigger games like Resistance: Fall of Man, Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, and Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, Fouts decided it was time for a change. He formed Mommy's Best Games with his wife Amy in 2007 in order to focus on crafting new 2D action games that revolved around wild ideas and art styles, releasing the bulk of their projects on the Xbox Live Indie Games channel. "I'd done 3D development for long enough, but grew up loving the perfection inherent to controlling 2D games with a 2D controller," Fouts explains. "There's a lot of processor power now, and plenty of room in the industry for all sorts of cool art styles in 2D."
Fouts' long-time fascination with sci-fi and nature manifests in the visual aesthetics and subject matter of his games. Most of his project feature stark and often edgy variations on strange alien encounters that mesh organic life with synthetic technology. In Weapon of Choice, an intense side-scrolling platform shooter, you play as uniquely armed operatives tasked with protecting Earth from foul, putrescence-emitting creature invaders. The company's second release, Shoot 1UP, is a bullet-hell-style space shooter that ramps up the strangeness factor. You pilot a fleet of ships (instantly spawning a new one every time you gain a 1UP) to blow away alien fighters and other atrocities across a landscape that gets weirder as you play. In a few stages, the scrolling backdrop features dead whales and half-naked women intertwined with wires and technology. Some of the odder boss battles include a uterus-like beast, and the upper half of a well-endowed female android with detachable rocket boobs and laser-blasting nipples. It's the kind of imaginative, off-the-wall stuff that would make the average person do a double take.
Beyond a strikingly warped aesthetic and unique-but-bizarre subject matter, Mommy's Best Games often hinge on boundary-pushing mechanics. Shoot 1UP's trick of making extra lives instantly appear as ships that can be manipulated in various flight formations for maximum bombardment impact really offers a fresh twist on the classic arcade shooter. Grapple Buggy, Fouts' next big Xbox Live project, focuses on exploration and combat in a lush alien world, where you pilot a tank-like vehicle equipped with hydraulic arms that allow for an incredible range of dynamic movement. Each new project incorporates more of Fouts' clever ideas. "I love finding my way to the new design of each game," he says. "It's like pushing through some jungle undergrowth, but with this bright glow in the distance. You can sense you're getting close to something cool, but you have to just keep working at it and then -- BAM! You find it the light!"
It might seem hard to stay afloat simply releasing games to XLIG, but Fouts has managed to pull it off thus far. He says the great thing about the platform is the way it affords access to console game development without requiring as much of a cash investment -- and it involves very little publisher meddling. "The freedom of what to develop, when to release, and what to price your games makes it very attractive," he adds. However, it has its own set of challenges, particularly in getting recognition and convincing players to even check out the games in the first place. Press coverage is hard to secure, since few outlets devote time to XLIG titles, says Fouts... and even sifting through all the less-than-stellar games that pop-up on the platform can be tough for players. Recent community-driven efforts, like the Indie Games Winter Uprising, are an attempt to boost the channel's visibility by highlighting a larger number of quality games on the platform.
Looking ahead, Mommy's Best Games is still chugging away on Grapple Buggy and working toward expanding to other platforms, including the PC, Xbox Live Arcade, and Windows Phone 7 -- both in terms of porting enhanced versions of existing games and creating new titles for those platforms.
Nathan Meunier is a freelance writer and indie gaming enthusiast who likes his pixels jaggy and his tunes blippy. He writes about videogames and geek/gaming culture for GameSpy, IGN, What They Play, Nintendo Power, GamePro, and many other fine publications. See what he's up to at NathanMeunier.com.