Indie Game Research Articles

Channeling End-User Creativity: Leveraging Live Streaming for Distributed Collaboration in Indie Game Development

This paper explores the role of live streaming in distributed collaborative software development using indie game development, an end-user driven creative community, as an example. We conducted 27 in-depth interviews with indie game developers from various cultures and countries, who had engaged in live streaming for collaborative software development either as a streamer or a viewer. Our findings show how live streaming can be used by indie game developers to support their endeavors to innovate the traditional game development model, which goes beyond just learning and teaching technical skills. We also highlight the potential challenges indie developers face in this process. We thus make unique contributions to CSCW by bridging the previously often disconnected research agendas on collaborative software development and live streaming. We also provide potential directions for designing future live streaming platforms to better support distributed collaboration in emerging end-user driven creative activities.

Data-driven method development and evaluation for indie mobile game publishing

With the emergence of mobile distribution channels, the traditional game value chain has produced new changes, leading to the emergence of the mobile value chain. Independent (Indie) game developers can upload their games directly through third-party app stores and publish them themselves. However, many indie game developers have issues with game publishing, especially updating the new version, promoting the market, and forecasting revenue for their games. This paper aims to provide a method to guide indie mobile game developers with mobile publishing. This new method mainly focuses on addressing the main challenges from the indie game developer’s side. The method includes a new concept of mobile game publishing logic and an online analysis tool along with the guidelines. It shows how to collect and analyze data and guide new version updates, marketing promotion, and revenue forecasts. In practice, the method was provided to six indie game companies and guided their mobile game publishing, and related data were collected and analyzed for evaluation. Based on the survey and interview results, the usefulness, usability, and confidence in the method were positive, and the method improved the indie game developers’ mobile game publishing and benefited their game business.

Games as Heterotopias: Realist Games in China

Realism is essential to our understanding of the life and reality of a particular era. This article explores the meanings and feeling of life in contemporary China, through examining three indie games. Inspired by real issues, these games function as heterotopias that provide new perspectives for players to reflect on reality from alternative perspectives.

Towards Sinophone Game Studies

The editor’s introduction discusses progress so far and possible future directions in the emerging field of Sinophone game studies, taken to mean the study of games – in this case, specifically video, computer, digital, or electronic games – in a Sinophone context, including mainland China and the broader Chinese-speaking world. Recent industry figures and news stories related to video gaming in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) paint a picture of continued expansion and growing global ambitions, albeit tempered by the regular introduction of fresh government regulations surrounding game content, gaming permissions for under-18s, game streaming, and game license approval. The eleven contributions to this issue, however, reflect the diversity of possible approaches to the study of Sinophone gaming, focusing not just on the often-conflicting politics and economics of the PRC games industry, but also exploring Taiwan’s flourishing indie game scene, political uses of games in Hong Kong, game-based representations of online and offline realities, issues in the transnational adaptation and localisation of games, and more besides. Sinophone game studies is a highly fruitful area of academic research that is intrinsically inter- and cross-disciplinary in nature and well placed to respond to some of the most pressing issues of our time, whether they be international conflict, ecological crisis, identity politics, minority rights, or even the development of disparate virtual worlds into a cross-platform ‘metaverse’ in which many of us may one day live our lives.

Digging the Digital: Beat Modalities and the Representation of the Beats in Video Games

Ever since setting their foot on the social and cultural landscapes of the post-World War II realities, the Beats have been both the subject of and subject to pop-cultural representations and appropriations. While figurations of Beat sensibility in film, television, press and popular music have been well recognized and analyzed, an area which remains uninvestigated for Beat influences, perhaps due to its relatively short pop-cultural presence, is the one of video games. Recent years, which have marked the release of titles such as Fallout 4 (Bethesda Game Studios, 2015) and Life Is Strange (Square Enix, 2015), attest to a certain amount of interest invested in Beat mythos by both indie game developers and the biggest game studios in the world, thereby opening a new chapter in representing the Beats in visual media. By, on the one hand, mapping out the categories of Beat references in video game narratives and, on the other, setting them against the backdrop of existing models of (mis)appropriating the Beats in visual culture, I will seek to explore the ways in which video game designers venture into the Beat ethos and I wish to address the implications this bears for the lineage of Beat pop-cultural presence. The final part of the essay takes a closer look at Fallout 4, making references to such theoretical concepts as Derridean hauntology, Zygmunt Bauman’s retrotopia and Simon Reynolds’ retromania, to further demonstrate how complex and ambiguous Beat video-game figurations can be.

Scoring Eldest Souls (2021)

In this interview conducted by Hannah Capstick, composer and sound designer Sergio Ronchetti explores the process of creating music for the game Eldest Souls (Fallen Flag Studio, 2021), which was nominated for Best Audio for an Indie Game at the 20th Game Audio Network Guild (GANG) Awards. The interview covers topics including creating the game’s audio during the COVID-19 pandemic, the influence of metal on the score, first experiences of producing audio for a game, initial experiences in the industry, self-directed education, and Ronchetti’s design and career philosophies.

Żulionerzy and the Polish Independent Video Games of the Early 2000s

This article investigates the development of discourses related to a specific era of independent games and offers a close historical and cultural analysis of the freeware Polish game Żulionerzy (Ortalion Entertainment 2001). The game is positioned as a compelling cultural artefact from the often overlooked and underresearched period of the early 2000s, combining inspirations from the globally recognized TV franchise Who Wants to be a Millionaire and the emerging indie games scenes. The authors argue that Żulionerzy is a project that manages to capture young adults’ perspective on the economic and cultural zeitgeist of the era. Its potential as a counter-cultural and transgressive gaming intervention is further reinforced by intertextual references and a parodistic core gameplay loop. The assessment of Żulionerzy is concluded with a call to investigate similar productions which, while produced in a national language, shared their key features with the rising wave of grassroot browser-based games.

An Actually Existing Dystopia: Othering Eastern Europe and the Lived Experience of an Authoritarian Regime in Black: The Fall

Sand Sailor Studio, a small Romanian indie game developer company launched a Kickstarter project to fund the development of their game Black: The Fall in 2014. After having more than 1,600 people backing their pitch, they could finish their 2.5D puzzle-platformer set in a bleak dystopic past/future and published it in 2017, receiving mostly positive reviews. The paper argues that Black: The Fall inscribes a more general Orwellian dystopia into a dystopified version of Romania’s socialist past in order to present it as a commodity for Western audiences, leveraging on the perceived uniqueness of Romanian history and hence reinforcing the image of Eastern Europe as an ‘other at hand?’. While the visuals support what we can call a mediatised experience of the late Ceausescu-era, the game mechanic and affective qualities of playing may be capable of offering a more nuanced impression of the 1980s in Romania as a lived experience.

Charming work: An ethnography of an indie game studio

Based on data generated from an ethnography in a video game studio, this article contributes to research on gender and game work by presenting an analysis of the studio’s ethos and aesthetics. The studio’s employees described the company and the games it made in terms of their charm, and related this explicitly to its ‘diverse’ hiring practices and the company’s identity as ‘indie’. I explore how the notion of charm was applied to a game, a game company, and game developer or employee, by tracing continuities and discontinuities across three types of data: field memos written whilst visiting the studio; conversations with employees; and a game diary based on a play through of one of the studio’s games under development during fieldwork. Drawing on Sontag’s notes on camp, Ngai’s work on cute aesthetics and Born’s research on the institutionalization of aesthetic discourse, I analyse ‘charming’ as a distinct sensibility within contemporary game culture which is symptomatic of the breakdown of straightforward gender binaries and the commercialization of ‘amateur’ or independent game-making. The article builds on existing research about the social significance of aesthetic genres in game culture, notably retrogrames and the appeal of nostalgia in indie games. It also locates games within debates about contemporary aesthetic experiences shaped and sustained by global digital media and their associated production cultures.

The elusive “indieness"

This article aims to investigate what are the internal and external marking traits of indie games. Building up on previous efforts from other scholars, we developed a mix method research approach relying on interviews with indie game developers and a quantitative survey. Rather than trying to “re-invent the wheel” by proposing a new definition for the term, we attempt to map out what are the significant distinctive factors present in contemporary indie game from the perspective of developers and non-developers alike, while also discussing the changes of meaning it might have been subject to over time. We found that the determiningtraits of what allows one to perceive a game as indie change over time,andthat,despite thecorefact thatcreative independence remainsthe central feature of all indie games, the conditions for achieving this independence appear to be rather flexible, especially when it comes to issues of funding and publishing agreements. Additionally, our findings point to the term "indie" as being highly mutable and reliant on temporal and contextual aspects, with the qualities that divideindie fromnon-indie games being more akin to a continuum than something rigidly binary.

Data-driven method for mobile game publishing revenue forecast

Games as a service is similar to software as a service, which provides players with game content on a continuous monetization model. Game revenue forecast is vital to game developers to make the right business decisions, such as determining the marketing budget, controlling the development cost, and setting up benchmarks for evaluating game publishing performance. How to make the revenue forecast and integrate it with the game publishing process is hard for small and medium-sized independent (indie) game developers. This includes all steps of the process, from forecasting to decision-making based on the results. This paper provides a data-driven method that uses the mobile game revenue forecast based on different time-series prediction models to drive the game publishing. We demonstrate how to use the data-driven method to guide an indie game studio to forecast revenue and then set the revenue forecast as the internal benchmark to drive game publishing. In practice, we involve a real game project from an indie game studio and provide guidance for one of their casual game projects. Then, based on the revenue forecast, we discuss how to set the revenue forecast as an internal benchmark and drive the actions for mobile game publishing. Finally, we make a conclusion on how our data-driven method can be used to drive mobile game publishing and also discuss future research work.

MODELING AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTERACTIVE GAME

The purpose of the article is development of the issue of increasing the interest in the issue of the interactive entertainment industry, in particular in such areas as the development of electronic games, as well as coverage of the issue of independent product development and content of the compound. During the research, such a program product was developed, with usage of author’s content, to avoid the similarities with the other products. Today, the information technology sphere remains one of the leading sectors of the economy. The field of computer games, in turn, is one of the most popular areas of information technology development. Over the past 50 years, this segment has only strengthened its position in the global entertainment market and continues to grow. Profits from the sale of games are growing, as is the demand for them, because nowadays more people play electronic games than ever before. Due to the inconvenience of the financial plan on the part of publishers involved in the distribution of computer games, the phenomenon of indie games has emerged - projects that are independent from a financial and creative point of view. This article is devoted to the issue of modeling and development of computer indie games. The above-mentioned computer game being developed is a representative of the "visual novel" genre. The main purpose of any game is to meet the needs of end users - players - in the organization of their own leisure, as well as making a profit from the game. The software product under development is an electronic (computer) game called "PRIESTESS", developed using the tools of the engine "Ren'Py" and high-level programming language "Python", the graphical shell of the project is created using the graphical editor "Photoshop CS5". All the necessary models, schemes, diagrams and algorithms were made before the development, and built by means of the Internet resource "draw.io".

Types of Gameplay in Newsgames. Case of Persuasive Messages about COVID-19

Currently, independent video games have been presented as an alternative to approach the development of a ludic typology called newsgames in which, distancing themselves from the interests of the entertainment industry, a series of games related to the pandemic are presented. From here, we seek to examine the gameplay elements and persuasive messages of 17 “indie games” in the context of COVID-19, categorizing them according to types of newsgames and determining any patterns present among them. The results manifest a tendency towards tabloid newsgames, which are characterized by dealing with sensational, direct, and immediate information using humor and exaggeration to convey messages, which, in this case, focuses on biosafety measures such as hand washing, the use of alcohol for sanitation, and social distancing. On the part of the gameplay elements, a linear narrative is maintained, but it is mainly a sum of achievements to reach the game’s objectives. In short, independent newsgames are formalized as an instrument of diversification in media realities that allow for the presenting of information in an alternative way without depending on editorial lines within a crisis context, as has been the case during the pandemic.

There Is No Immersion: Critical Intervention through Hypermediacy in Metagames

In 2020, Draw Me a Pixel released There Is No Game, a game that playfully engages with the concept of the metagame and its varied meanings to examine the relationship between developers, games, and their audiences. The game has much in common with other metagames released during the boom and bust cycle of the indie game market in terms of its themes and playful attitude toward its players. Like many of these games, it features an antagonistic narrator, who, upon launching the game, announces that there is no game. The concept of a game resistant to play has become a recurring theme in many metagames that critique industry pressures, trends, and players’ playful resistance to designed experiences. This article examines There Is No Game’s use of hypermediacy (as a feature of both its narrative and design) to deliver its critique of the industry, while offering insight into its own development. More than simply breaking the fourth-wall, hypermediacy becomes the instigator for critical reflection and is used to highlight the challenges faced by indie developers and the material conditions in which games are made. Yet, unlike its predecessors that share this critique, There Is No Game offers an optimistic perspective on the future of the industry.

Arrested (game) development: labour and lifestyles of independent video game creators in Cape Town

ABSTRACT The global video games industry is one of the largest entertainment sectors. Independent, or “indie” video game producers make games using small production budgets, outside of larger corporate game companies. In South Africa, video game production is a new industry. Because of the absence of large game companies, formalised production and distribution infrastructure, all producers are independent. This essay is primarily an ethnographic account of the work and lifestyles of a community of video game creators in Cape Town. I approach the category of “youth” to address the sociological facts of those who work in independent game development and as a metaphor for the emerging game development industry in Cape Town. I show how indie game developers attempt to “evangelise” their craft, hoping to grow the industry by attracting more creators and consumers. They negotiate the tensions of the haphazard work rhythms and uncertainty of financial security and their desire to express themselves by making a career out of creating meaningful cultural artefacts, eschewing mainstream expectations and definitions of success. The essay concludes with a discussion on how the industry could grow in the future, and the possible impact of this growth on the current culture of work and community.

Etkileşim alanları olarak bağımsız oyun yerelleştirme toplulukları

An Indie game may be described as a game developed by a single person or by a rather smaller community often with a minimal budget. An indie games requires localization to be more visible on the market and to access a wider audience, however, they generally allocate minimal budgets (if available) for the localization practices, thus, the developers tend to depend on fan - volunteer localization practices or low-budget localization by freelancers. Online communities of indie game localization bring developers who tend to make use of “free” or “cheaper” labour and translators of fan or volunteer localization communities who wish to attend a career in localization industry, freelancers, smaller localization or translation agencies together and serve as a medium of interaction. The analysis of interaction and exchange, the nature of the communities would provide insight into the aboıvementioned field of exchange. This paper aims to trace the footprints of “agents” through their profiles, posts, discussions and and produced content on the web with a specific focus on Indie Game Localization Facebook Page and based on the data gathered, to define the limits of online community, to describe nature of the agents and to draw the borders of the “online” mutual relationship among translators, translator candidates, localization agencies and gama developers.

Streaming ambivalence: Livestreaming and indie game development.

Commercial game makers at all scales of production have increasingly come to incorporate livestreaming into every stage of the game development cycle. Mainstream hits like Fortnite and League of Legends owe their ongoing success in no small part to their massive uptake by streamers, and triple-A releases from major publishers can reliably expect significant attention on streaming platforms. But what about smaller, lower budget games? For independent game developers, the costs and benefits of streaming are less clear. Based on interviews with small commercial indie developers in Toronto and Montréal, this article critically examines different discourses around streaming and commercial indie games, focusing on developer perceptions of the benefits and risks of streaming and its impacts on indie game-making practices, including production, promotion, and community-building. Contrary to persistent popular myths about streaming as the key to ‘discoverability’, commercial indie game development remains a precarious form of cultural work, and indie games collectively attract only a tiny fraction of the overall audience on streaming platforms. There is a high level of uncertainty about the factors that led to a given game’s success, leaving many indie developers ambivalent about leveraging influencer attention and even as they commit significant time and energy trying to doing so.

A Sandbox for Modeling Social AI

We present a system for quickly prototyping AI code for modeling social interaction among the simulated residents of a skyscraper. The system is built on top of a commercially released indie game but replaces its character AI with a general-purpose logic programming language. These two features together simplify the more tedious parts of creating prototype AI code from scratch, enabling more effort to be focused on the meatier parts of research.

Positioning game review as a crucial element of game user feedback in the ongoing development of independent video games

The research is designed to determine the extent to which game reviews on the Steam platform can be used as a means of discerning the common needs of players and any flaws in existing games. In this study, the independent game No Man’s Sky is adopted as the subject of the research. Results indicated that the majority of reviews reflect shortcomings of No Man’s Sky and that the developer has acknowledged these shortcomings. Statistical research and the analytic hierarchy process supported that variables on the Steam platform reflect players’ common needs and constitute a model by means of which developers can assess constructive data. Based on these results, the researcher argues that it provides clarification for indie game developers who rely on online reviews on Steam for ideas which can assist them in effecting improvements in-game quality on a constant basis.

An Operational Study of Video Games’ Genres

This paper presents a study of the most successful games during the last 34 last years (1986 – 2019). We observed that the 100 most ranked games are represented by 16 genres (adventure, role-playing, shooter, platform, puzzle, strategy, hack and slash/beat 'em up, real time strategy, turn-based strategy, point-and-click, indie, racing, sport, fighting, arcade and simulator). These genres are then compares to show which genres are more attractive for players. As a result, we observed that 6 genres among the 16 represent the most ranked games (adventure, RPG, shooter, platform, puzzle, and strategy). They represent 0.83 of the successful games. This allowed us to recommend to combining the others genres with the 6 selected genres. Also, we analyzed the evolution of the 16 games genres during the last 34 years. We observed that some genres have a great success until the past decades, but they haven’t a success in this decade. Game designers and researchers in the field of games may rethink about how to add attractive elements in the genres non-successful in this decade. Also, we observed that some genres like the indie games haven’t a great success in the past decades, but they have an important increased success in this decade. This may encourage the decision makers and the game designer to invest on these genres.