Indie Development Today
The game industry has changed so much since the 90's. And in revolutionary ways that are mind-boggling. Team size is one of these ways.
We just announced several new games in the past few weeks, like Dead Fury, Below the Stone, and most recently Elements and Turbo Overkill. All four of these games are being made by three developers or fewer. Back in the 90's, to accomplish what these ultra-small teams have already done would have taken 20-person teams.
How's this even possible? Let's count the ways...
Engines like Unity and Unreal have advanced and matured significantly, and are so feature-packed that they allow for nearly anything the imagination desires.
The marketplaces for these engines give developers access to code modules that can be dropped into a game to do any number of things, like NPC AI, weapons effects, physics, animations, and the list goes on and on.
The marketplace also has art and models that can be bought for cheap and used in an indie developer's game. In many cases, art/models bought on the marketplace can be fairly easily modified to make it unique and to better fit the game.
These are just some of the radical shortcuts that didn't really exist two plus decades ago, and much of it not even a decade ago. Indie developers have never had it so good, and this is one of the reason the indie scene is simply exploding. No longer does all of a game's code and art assets need to be built from scratch, saving tons of time and money.
Will this continue? For example, in a few decades will we be able to simply tell an engine the type of game we want to play and the engine creates it using sophisticated game creation AI?
I wouldn't bet against a future like this.
In closing, the entire Apogee crew attended the first major game industry event since COVID-19 hit us early last year: PAX West in Seattle. We had a 20' x 20' booth there and showcased all of our currently announced games, including Turbo Overkill, which we announced as a surprise at PAX. If you were in Seattle and attended PAX, you had a chance to check out our games, speak to the developers, and even got some hands-on play time with them! This is something we loved for our teams and for our fans, so you can expect us at more cons with even more announcements and hands-on demos in the future!
