Indie attitude

I love indie games. I try to play as many as possible. From brain-benders like Braid, to light flash games like Home Sheep Home, The Atomic Puzzle, Boomshine or Obechi (If you can't tell, Kongregate is one of my favorite time waster sites)

Anyway a relatively new one is on my radar (and thanks to the weekend Steam sale, in my possession), Gratuitus Space Battles. It's a game that boils the RTS game down to the battles, supposedly eliminating the resource gathering/unit building that can be the down side of most RTS games.

Anyway Cliff Harris was recently at the Develop Conference in England, participating in a panel of indie developers discussing "microdevelopers". Cliff was talking about the advantage of being a one man studio with the ability to support users on a one on one basis. As he discusses here, Marc Rein from Epic games loudly snorted derisively at this concept. Showing how larger companies really feel about their individual gamers. Not that Epic is really that epic in my mind, The Gears of War series is a piece of crap shooter that they keep re-releasing over and over.

Cliff sums it all up in his blog with a direct, "[Big] studio bosses trying to lecture me on how to communicate better with gamers? Fuck off.". Awesome, if I hadn't already bought his game I would anyway.