During some sickness timeout, Alistair Doulin (Doolwind) has written a 2011 games industry retrospective, describing what has been working and what needs to be improved this year for his Brisbane based indie start-up, Bane Games. Alistair heaps praise on the new markets and the availablility of high quality game engine tools, from Unity to UDK and CryEngine for indpendent games developers. His studio has taken specific advantage of Unity for the application's ease in muti-platform publishing...
(Alistair Doulin) It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Unity and we’re currently using it to create our third game. Unlike our first two games, this time we’re planning to release on no less than 4 platforms simultaneously. Without the power of Unity this would simply not be feasible for a small indie company that’s still in startup mode.
Distributed Development, which describes how Alistair's team can communicate and work with each other online via various cloud and internet services such as Skype and Dropbox, gets a big thumbs up, and in the process also reduces the overheard of a studio where renting and running an office would mean a big financial burden for a new startup. The Skype and Dropbox combo has been touted before as important tools by fellow independent developers, Blue Macnhu.
What is still an issue for for Bane Games, however, is development time. While his studio is constantly refining their development process where they can, games still take too long to make and all of their titles so far have run a lot longer than scheduled. From Alistair's blog...
Every game I’ve ever worked on has run overtime, often by over 50% of their original estimate. After speaking to other developers, thankfully this is not just something I struggle with.
Alistair believes that tools are the biggest area where there is a potential to speed up development time, despite having initially been against the idea of investing the time in developing tools.
It's great that Alistair could share his thoughts on current development issues from the point of an emerging indie start-up, and I'm sure many other indie studios will be able to relate to the many areas he's outlined. Head on over to Alistair's blog entry and provide him some feedback at the following link!