Macguffin Games

Screw Art (Or, Passion & Indie Game Dev)

The past couple years has given us a growing chorus of people cajoling game makers to take it up a level, imploring us to make Great Art – and a growing number of indies are doing it.  Games like Passage and Flower, amongst many others, are making us think.  This is A Good Thing.

Paying attention to this zeitgeist as an indie dev, though, can screw you over hard.  Here’s why.

Explanation by way of a short digression.  My job before starting Macguffin Games was at Blue Fang Games, a company right here outside of Boston.  I was on the Production team there, and worked on several expansions to the Zoo Tycoon franchise; I’m pretty well acquainted with reaching out to the non-traditional market for games.  It can be an incredibly rewarding thing to delight non-gamers and introduce them to this crazy world I live in.

In the end, though, I was really just not enthused about Zoo Tycoon as a game.  It didn’t appeal to me personally  – and I know that towards the end my job performance suffered because of that fact.  I take it as a personal flaw that I’ve always had a hard time busting ass on things I’m not passionate about, and in this particular spot it definitely clobbered me.

When you’re working at a company for someone else, sometimes this kind of flaw is workable.  You can find other things to care about and enjoy in your work – what the company accomplishes, the people you work with, the minutia of your job itself.  But when you’re starting your own company?  You need to be ultra-motivated.

Which brings me back to the idea of why “making great art” can be a bad thing to chase as an indie.  It’s fine, as long as that’s your passion.  With indie development it’s all up to you – no framework of deadlines, no boss to bother you – so you need to make the game you’re passionate about.  If you don’t, your odds of completing it go down greatly.  And I think the odds that you will make something memorable go down even more.

I got caught in that trap earlier on as I kept looking for ways to go out-of-the-box with the game design, simply for its own sake.  In retrospect, they were mostly bad ideas or involved large increases to the scope of the game.  Eventually I realized I was losing sight of my goals – what was I trying to do here?

Over the following week, I looked pretty hard at the reasons I was making this particular game.  It was a potpourri of stuff: proving I can do it, money, art, learning new things, love of games in general, love of certain games in specific… the list goes on.

In the end I realized I’m in this to make an RPG that I want to play myself – one that leads to some real role-playing and doesn’t have you collecting ten orc livers for the Livermonger.  Realizing this led to some very specific decisions that both focused the gameplay and cut the game’s scope.  My goal, the one I’m passionate about, is clear to me now.  Because of that, I think my odds of finishing a memorable game went up .

So – make games you are passionate about.  You have enough things stacked against you with this already, don’t add “Not Intrigued By My Subject Matter,” to the list.

And make sure you’ve sorted through all those varied (and maybe conflicting reasons) you’re doing this.   If your real goal was to make something bizarre?  Drop your uninspired platformer and work on perfecting that hentai / match-3 / rythm game design, and don’t worry about how well it might sell.  You want to prove you can make it and don’t care if anyone buys it?  Then stop writing your business plan and just get coding.

Here’s the second part – make sure you know what that passion is, and why.  If you’re like me, you’ve got a lot of different motivations for making a game with little or no team behind you.  Figure out which one really matters the most, then make the game that satisfies that.

Art is all well and good, and people need to make more games that illuminate that discussion.  But if you’re alone and on a shoestring, make the game in your heart – whatever it ends up being.

Tags: art, indie, Macguffin Games