They usually cost twelve euros, you immerse yourself in a new world for a few hours and at the end you have a richer experience. Indie games are being hyped like never before - often rightly so. But what are they? Pure marketing label, the desire for ideas or an underrated art form?
On the one hand, on the scale of game developers, there are studios that make almost two billion euros in sales per quarter, set up life-size figures in electronics stores and whose stories are played by millions of people worldwide. At the other end, not alone but most visible, is the American game designer Anna Antrophy. In her book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, she wants personal works from authentic minds instead of impersonal creations from a faceless mass of programmers and graphic artists. You know what she means when you experience the hormone therapy of a transgender in her game dys4ia.
Okay, but who occupies the large gray area on the scale between these extremes? Especially in Germany, with the comparatively few large studios? You quickly come across the so-called indie games. So are these the games that not only meet a developer's need to communicate, but are also intended to reach a larger audience and yet are not as predictable as the Playstation One's loading screen? Who decides what ends up on our hard drives? The money, the idea, the marketing, the desire to create?
The vision: horror in the subway
As Malte Boettcher stands in the subway station at the Brandenburg Gate on a spring day, the trains commute to the main station at one end of the tracks, and the connection to Alexanderplatz is being built at the other. If he has his way, there will soon be panic and horror here – at least virtually. Because here, Malte and his team want to bring to life the unknown horror that lives in the tunnels of Berlin-Mitte with the game “U55: End of the Line”. His idea: A game that brings the horror of HP Lovecraft's stories into 21st century Berlin. The graphics are realistic; the soundtrack is atmospherically dense; the protagonist is an American student; The only weapon is a smartphone with an almost empty battery. Malte received training for his idea; he is a graduate of the Games Academy, a university for those who are drawn to the games industry. As part of a student project, he wanted to turn his idea into a game, but he wasn't allowed to - his group was too big. The lecturers only allowed ten fellow students, 23 wanted to take part. Only with his own degree in his pocket and a good network in the gaming industry did Malte want to crowdfund U55 as a Kickstarter project. Interested donors came forward, his development team grew, and he was also able to win over Lovecraft fans. In the end, however, there was a setback: of the targeted 115,000 euros, only 70,000 euros were raised - considerable, but anyone who doesn't reach their self-imposed goal with crowdfunding doesn't get a cent. For Malte and his team, the goal of their own game initially seemed a long way off.
A studio full of self-taught artists
Not every game project starts with a concrete idea. This was also the case in Kassel in 2009. Metaphorically speaking, the work of the Black Pants Studio began not as a castle in the air, but in the engine room. Computer science students from the University of Kassel had programmed their own engine, other creative people, graphic designers and filmmakers joined them and began making a game. And quite successfully: their first demo was downloaded over ten thousand times in the first week.
Sebastian Stamm is responsible for the artwork at Black Pants Studio and begins the story of the development of their game Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftover with the self-taught confession: "None of us learned how to make games." Things, The team first had to work for things that you take for granted as a player. It was only after the demo was released that they realized that every game needs something that serves as a goal for the hero and motivates him. Computer games that have become classic today still often fall back on the cliché of the princess. Over a round of beers, Sebastian and his team chose Grandpa's last heirloom from the protagonist Tiny: a pair of underpants. This is how it came about that in Tiny and Big you chase the villain Big, who wears these underpants on his head.
State aid for your own game
As I said, the demo was a complete success, but now it was about getting money for our own rent during the hot development phase. No crowdfunding, no big investor, no, the financial injection came from a federal ministry via the EXIST start-up grant. American colleagues still ask Sebastian in disbelief: What, did you get money from the state? This was followed by invitations to trade fairs, then indie awards, and most recently the German Computer Games Prize. A new office was founded in Berlin due to its proximity to the developer scene; growth is now not the top priority. The company is organized as a cooperative, the spirit of the middle class blows through the volatile games industry.
These general conditions also affect our gaming experience. For Sebastian, indie primarily stands for one's own independence: no requirements from a publisher, in case of doubt the last word in one's own area. This is the side of the game developers who want to see their visions fulfilled so that in the end games are created according to their ideas. The players' side is initially different: Indie then has less to do with the specific production conditions of a game, but is a label for the unusual, surprising, and innovative. We don't know what indie is until it's already here; The developers have to predict it. And of course one leads to the other: The fact that Tiny and Big plays so indie and different is partly due to the studio's financial independence, but also to the lack of know-how at the beginning. Or as Sebastian says: »We could never stick to the mainstream. We didn’t even know him.”
The core behind the indie hype
The term indie is rightly constantly problematic: not every indie game is convincing and some studios describe their games as post-indie. Indie means identify. The step of not leaving our gaze on the surface of a game, but rather of gaining new access to the medium, the formative experiences of which usually come from our childhood. This happens when players don't let themselves be fooled by the same plots or their own collecting instincts. This is what happens when developers see their work as a self-chosen and continually challenging way of making a living.
For Malte from U55, it was this desire that was convincing: After the failed Kickstarter campaign, other investors became aware of the project, and with the lessons learned from the last campaign, the U55 team is now working on a new collection campaign on the Swedish side FundedBy-Me. At the end of 2014, Malte and his team hope to be able to publish the first episode of the Berlin game with around three hours of playing time. More are already being planned.
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They usually cost twelve euros, you immerse yourself in a new world for a few hours and at the end you have a richer experience. Indie games are being hyped like never before - often rightly so. But what are they? Pure marketing label, the desire for ideas or an underrated art form? Standing on the scale of game developers
