GregK

Digital: A Love Story, based on recommendations I saw on this site. Interesting game (and free).

That's awesome, thanks!

In a single purchase it was the original Japanese PlayStation and games, an extra controller and a memory card. I think it was around $900. On the plus side I had a PlayStation, Ridge Racer, Cybersled, and Toshinden for about a year before practically anyone in the US did. I gave up my NeoGeo collection to afford it, which was sort of a terrible mistake, but the PlayStation really was a technical marvel for a while.

" @iWonder said:

" The main question that's been on my mind is well, who IS that narrator guy? Is Kassavin touting some fancy vocal FX or did you guys get an A-grade VA?  "

He's a friend of theirs iirc. "

@MarkWahlberg said:

  I don't think anyone's going to accuse you of shilling. The Bastion coverage here on GB has been pretty interesting so far, and given the way it's been going down, it makes sense for you to be on here.  "

Thanks, we'll see how the next episode goes tomorrow. We'll be showing the first version of the game's campaign and story, a build from almost exactly a year ago -- super rough and terrible but hopefully interesting. We need to keep the cameras rolling more often as we work on it because we've had some good drama go down on some of the late nights but it's not all on film. I figure as long as we're fighting about the right things, things that matter to the game and will ultimately make it better, then it's fine if we show that stuff -- let people see how the process can get ugly because frequently it does but you only really hear about it after the fact, in a postmortem or when there are mass layoffs somewhere or something. No one gets to see how games are made besides the people involved, all they usually get to see are these slickly produced "developer diaries" that have nothing to do with the real anxieties going through game developers' heads.

"Wasn't he working on the new Spec Ops game before he moved to Bastion? Whatever happened to that? It looked really cool, but I haven't seen anything about it in a long time...   Still, nice interview!  "

To the OP -- what you need to develop an indie game depends entirely on the style of game you're making and your own proficiencies as a developer. I was recently at GDC Online in Austin where I briefly met a guy named Thomas Brush, who made a game called Coma. It's a beautiful Flash game that's well worth checking out, and he made it all by himself -- everything from the art to the audio and music to the coding is all his work. That game Minecraft is basically a one-man show too. I'm amazed by people talented enough to make games entirely from scratch in this day and age, but then again, the tools available are better than ever before.

Free tools like XNA and Visual Studio open up a lot of doors for people, so if you're an engineer that's a great place to go and sounds like what you're thinking about doing anyway.
 
Beyond that it's just a question on the type of game. If you don't know which game you want to make yet, that's OK -- just pick a direction you like, something you're interested in or are comfortable with, and start doing it. Whatever that is can be a mechanic, a genre, or an aesthetic idea, but whatever it is you can start researching it and executing on it pretty much straightaway. The team I'm working with now, that's basically what they did. A year ago they had a crude-looking prototype with placeholder everything -- my colleague Amir would scan images from the D&D Monstrous Manual to stub in for the monsters in the game, and the gems you'd get from killing them are 8-bit sprites for Rupees from The Legend of Zelda, stuff like that. It was representational, but enough to sustain early prototypes and sharpen the focus for the gameplay. The game took shape from there, and a year later it was Bastion, which basically is a "real" game now with its own look and feel.

It can really help to know people in complementary disciplines, like graphic artists and so on. In our case, we had a support network of animators and 3D modelers from our days working at Electronic Arts, and the team would lean on them from time to time. Overall though independent game development is a pretty tight-knit community so you can meet those people if you don't know them already. I think the most important thing is to work within your means. If you have a great idea for a game that would take 20 people to make but you don't have 20 people to make it, the idea won't do you much good. You'll feel much more rewarded if you can execute on something you yourself feel capable of achieving. At any rate, good luck. It's a scary feeling to do this stuff but at the same time, it can be very rewarding on a personal level and there's never been a better time to do it given all the options for digital distribution out there.

Awesome or so awesome?

"He's ambitious, I'll give him that, but he's also a tool for cheating his way into two amateur game design contests run by a fellow GameSpot editor while he was still at GS.  He also won, no doubt due to his inside knowledge.  Once he revealed his identity to the world, it basically ruined all of the good will that I felt the contest had. "