85
Oh those guys? Yeah those are just the dozens of professional voice actors we could afford to hire with our tiny baby game studio budget! And those guys? Yeah that's just our 7-person "engineering" team. What do you mean your entire studio is 4 people?
suck off me
(for the record I'm not dunking on Hades or Hades 2 as a game this is just something that pisses me (and I assume only me) off)
reminds me of when people called expedition 33 an indie game made by 30 people when they had a parent company give them millions of dollars and publish their game, and they hired a Korean ~~studio~~ team of freelance animators to do their combat animations (which is like half of the game itself right there)
the word indie has been overused to pointlessness, it means about as much as the word "roguelike" does now lmao
Glitch apparently spends upwards of $500k-$1M per episode of their shows. I'd still consider them mostly independent. Turns out that creative products that take years to make can be expensive.
never said anything about games being cheap to make lmao, just that when you have a publisher funding and publishing your game for you like with E33, you're literally not an indie creation
It's definitely a fuzzy divide. Kepler seems to have a cooperative ownership model and leaves the studio with a lot of creative freedom.
I feel like securing funding will always be necessary, but if you can maintain creative control over the project after getting the bag you could still be considered independent.
A larger corporate production company would absolutely be constantly making changes from the C-Suite
if it's a fuzzy divide for whether a game is independent when it's by a developer that didn't publish their own game, got millions of dollars of outside funding, and hired another ~~studio~~ team to help them make the game, I feel like the word indie has completely become meaningless. where is the independence here?
I think it's just a question of what they're independent from. Independent can mean solo/on your own or free from something else.
Like I can independently do something, or I can gain independence from my parents which are both describing separate actions.
I've always read "Independent X" as the latter, but I could be wrong
is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 an indie game?
It's a game made by an independent studio with a small team compared to most games that it's competing with. "Indie Game" is a more specific term than "Independent Studio/Developer" I think. Mainly because of that movie that focused primarily on solo dev projects.
I'm just happy when studios can get no strings funding and are allowed to make what they want really. I think most solo projects should also qualify for grant funding too.
This whole argument happens in music too, I try to stay consistent and just allow the independent moniker for any artist that manages to either secure funding outside official industry channels, or fully self fund.
Sidenote: This is one of the most reasonable struggle sessions I've ever seen on this site lol. I'm also definitely off the opinion that we don't really have good terminology for this stuff yet since it's all pretty new.
i preciate you not answering whether you consider Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 an indie game or not, but on top of that no lmao, if a musician gets multiple millions of dollars of outside funding and has their music published by a third party you're not gonna catch me calling their work indie music
the usual official industry channels thing doesn't work for E33 either because it was funded by both microsoft and netease
They didn't hire an Korean studio, they hired a team of 8 freelance Korean animators. The lead animator having never been credited in a professional video game before. The lead animator also said in an interview that he was working part time on E33 remotely while still full time at his day job in SK. It's not like they found an established animation studio who was OK with redacting their studio's name in the game's credits.
I think the confusion came from an article earlier this year where a website reported that the combat animations were done by an "eight-person Korean 'gameplay animation' team" which people have taken to mean like a Korean Pixar or something bigger than what it was.
I mean it's still not "smol bean indie devs" like some people believe but they also didn't have the budget to get an actual studio with history and priors
my bad, i thought it was an eight-person studio instead of an eight-person team they hired, i've edited the comment
Yeah, I saw in an interview. The game director found the lead animator while scrolling YouTube reels where he found videos of this Korean guy showing off some of his 3D rendering work he made in his spare time, and he asked him to work on E33. The animator said he had a full time job and couldn't move to France, they went on with him just working part time around his day job. As the project grew larger in scope and acquired more funding, then hired a few other Korean animators, friends and hobbyists, none of them worked on the project full time either, they all worked on it as a side gig (although some of them do work for legitimate studios)
It just so happens this probably saved the studio like a half a million Euros compared to an 8 person, full time, established animation studio with all the additional expenses that requires. It's kind of amazing how well done the animations are for something led by a guy who fucks around in Blender in his off time and posts it to his YouTube channel.
I'd say it's indie. The vibes of how it came to be are extremely indie. High budget indie, sure, but Ubisoft or Blizzard aren't outsourcing to hobbyists they found on Youtube, they outsource to proper studios or have an in house team. Plus their publisher is a co-op, so while there was a lot of funding from outside sources (moreso than basically every other indie game in existence) it's kind of a weird place. There should be a new term for it. High budget indie? What Star Citizen wishes it was.
their publisher is not a co-op, and first and foremost they have a publisher that gave them millions of dollars
we already have a term for it, it's called an AA game
AA is such a broad stroke in that it's began as a definition for "not AAA nor Indie". It's as well defined as AAAA (like that terrible Ubisoft pirate game). It doesn't address the differences in development cycle, production value and most of all: quality. Kepler is not a co-op in our sense (it's not worker owned), but it's definitely comprised of actual indie developers. If the money you're getting is funded by a dozen indie publishers pooling their money together, does that disqualify you from being "indie"? I'd say sort of, not really, but kind of. Furthermore, flagship games from big companies have their low effort titles also described as AA. "Final Fantasy XXIX: Final-er", "Kingdom Hearts IV: Revenge of the Goof", "Hearthstone II: Moneysink". But those would be completely different. It's not a meaningful category, outside of pricing tiers at checkout.
Like, yeah, they had funding from a publisher, which I get makes it not a true "indie" game in the spiritual sense, but it's far from "Call of Duty XXII: Current Year Warfare" or "Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour: The Game" or whatever they're coming up with next.
If your funding comes from a syndicate of indie studios pooling their resources together, I don't think it's the same as having your funding come from Microsoft or Sony shareholders even if the $ amount works out to be the same, because the strings attached aren't the same. Which is why I think there should be a separate term. Larian developed and self published Baldur's Gate III, and it feels weird to call that an indie game.
Something like Vampyr or Disco Elysium or E33 also don't feel like an indie game, nor really have the vibes of AA. Which is why I'm saying there should be a different term for it. Am I making sense? Or did I categorize things differently based purely off vibes?
lmaooo no, Kepler is mostly funded by NetEase, they laundered 120 mil for venture capital and is 99% of the reason they were even able to give millions to Sandfall. Real collection of "indie developers" when fellow shareholder NetEase is sitting at the table with you
E33 was funded by Microsoft, that's what the game pass deal was
Baldur's Gate III is an AAA indie game, simple as
When anyone describes a game to me as being a "roguelike" I immediately understand what the game is like less. I also constantly wonder if they mean "rogue-lite" since they sound 99% the same.
And this is after watching like 3 youtube videos on why the term exists; I really don't know how that term caught-on like it did.
They really just mean entirely different things to different people. In fact, when you imply that "rogue-lite" would clarify things here, that confuses me, because "rogue-lite" also means different things to different people.
There's the traditional roguelike purist view that goes something like this:
Roguelike: ASCII or tile based graphics. Turn based. Dungeon Crawler. Procedural generation. Permadeath.
Roguelite: Some of those qualities but not all, permadeath is mandatory.
That's the version on wikipedia. Based on that dichotomy, roguelikes include Rogue, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Cogmind. A game like Spelunky, FTL, or Hades is a Roguelite.
But then there's a newer dichotomy that's based on the way perma death works, so it's a bit like:
Roguelike: Procedural generation. Dungeon Crawler. Permadeath with no meta-progression
Roguelite: Same but with meta progression
(there might be some disagreement on what constitutes meta-progression, I'll just say it means progress between runs excluding unlocks, so upgrading your stats or adding more stuff to your run, but not unlocking new spells or heroes to do the runs with)
Based on that dichotomy, games like Enter the Gungeon, Spelunky, Noita, and even Slay the Spire (if you can consider it a procedurally generated dungeon crawler) enter the category of roguelike, while games like Hades or Rogue Legacy are roguelite. Games like Balatro, Vampire Survivors, or Monster Train (unless you consider a couple of random shops and an event between combats a procedural dungeon crawl) aren't really either, unless you loosen it up to no longer require the dungeon crawler aspect. The reason I still included that one, though, is that the dungeon crawler aspect is what really distinguished roguelikes originally.
I think the most general sort of vibe of what a roguelike or roguelite is, is simply a game where you start and end a run within a play session, each run has significantly different stuff you find because there's random terrain/enemy/loot/etc generation, and you generally aren't expected to be able to beat the game on your first try (nor are you expected to stop after your first win)