My friend and adamant indie dev meetups organizer Tomasz Kaczmarek - who some of you may have personally met (or even listened to his talk) at the recent AdventureX - needs survey data for research papers. Big thanks to anyone that participates!
Why: Research materials and variety of perspectives for mine final essay “How does ‘Indie Game: The Movie' represent games and game culture†on Theory at Brunel University West London - Digital Games Theory and Design MA.
How: Survey monkey with 9 comment questions and 1 graded.
How long: Till Mid April
Rewards: My gratitude, putting your nicknames/names in my Final Work, interest in collaboration on some game projects
Who: Tomasz “Fanotherpg†Kaczmarek, indie trying to find himself in academia world. Organizing indie and gamedev related talks and events in Poland.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DTD8J9X
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=32062.0
So what is indie game: the movie?
I bought the film on steam ages ago but still haven't got around to watching it. This might be a good excuse to finally watch it. :D
@Radiant http://www.indiegamethemovie.com/about/
It's a great documentary, but you have to put with Phil Fish at some bits. I recommend watching it, specially if you have played Braid, Super Meat Boy (or anything from Edmund McMillen) or Fez.
So... Anyone here did this? Anyone still needs a pirate copy of the movie or some other form of encouragement?
I got it a few months ago via HumbleBundle.
For me it was a very intense experience, especially the little tragedies that can befall an indie project.
I just did the survey. Hope it helps.
Quote from: Mati256 on Sat 30/03/2013 17:16:40
It's a great documentary, but you have to put with Phil Fish at some bits. I recommend watching it, specially if you have played Braid, Super Meat Boy (or anything from Edmund McMillen) or Fez.
Yah Phil Fish is an arsehat.
Thanks Cerno!
Filled it out just now, too. Would've done it sooner, but I was superbusy with updating Gray. Anyway, good survey. The one question I felt was missing from it is the question of bending the reality a little by omitting facts -- whether to steer the viewers' sympathy in one direction or the other, or to add some thrill to the story -- which is a very common practice in maaaany documentaries. Case in point: "Catfish" and "Sugarman".
Great doccie! Pity about the Fish character.
Just out of curiosity: Why the hate for Phil Fish? Was it his endless droning on about his former partner or just his personality?
For me, he was very self-obsessed and sulky.
Yeah, he is a loudmouth, has an ego, is erratic at times, and he talks before he thinks -- but he made Fez, so somewhere deep inside there has to be some good in him, right? And despite what he said about PC's only being good for spreadsheets, I knew he'd come around. And it happened -- mostly because he got screwed over by M$ (which was painfully predictable), but still - and Fez is now heading for Steam. So yeah, he might be the Axl Rose/Fred Durst of indie games industry -- but he cared about the game, you could see how obsessed with the tiniest details he was. You gotta give him credit for that.
I mostly don't like him because of the drama he put on concerning the production of Fez. Including claims he'll kill himself if he doesn't get to finish the game. And the terrible TRAGEDY of having the game overhyped. So much that he felt he deserved a 2nd go in the IGF.
Also, for telling with a straight face that being good friends with the organizer of IGF and a good number of the judges doesn't give him any advantages in the competition.
Okay, thanks for the insight.
Some of the things you mentioned were not in the documentary (e.g. the IGF stuff), and others I can relate to after having seen the movie.
Although I can understand the pressure one must be under when your game hangs by a thread, I guess he was overreacting at times.
One thing I found fishy (hur hur) was when he went to PAX with only one bleeding edge, untested version of the game without a backup and was surprised when it contained a game breaking bug. Ah, the folly of youth ;)
I don't care about his personality at all, I don't like him because he released FEZ with lots of game breaking bugs and refuses to update it because Microsoft has an update fee that he didn't want to pay, it's a very small fee so I didn't see the problem.
Quote from: Cerno on Sun 07/04/2013 17:15:05
Just out of curiosity: Why the hate for Phil Fish? Was it his endless droning on about his former partner or just his personality?
He's also come under some fire for some comments he made about Japanese games "just sucking" and being "joyless husks".
Took the survey. I saw the doco a couple of months ago (it's on netflix now too btw) and it's a really well done movie.
I think it's a great movie. I recently helped with the Danish subtitles for the May 1st release, so might be slightly biased ;)
Took the survey as well and would be very interested in reading the final essay.
There's also a documentary about Newgrounds in production (think it has been for some years) which I'm looking forward to: http://www.everything-by-everyone.com/
fred, this looks really interesting, but I just realized the Kickstarter ended in September 2010.
So, are they still in production or is the project dead? At least IMDB mentions a 2013 release (as of 2012).
Cerno, last time I heard from the producer, back in May 2012, he said the project was still alive. Although one can speculate how dead the project would have to be for him not to accept my 20 dollar preorder :)
Quote from: Armageddon on Tue 09/04/2013 06:33:59
I don't care about his personality at all, I don't like him because he released FEZ with lots of game breaking bugs and refuses to update it because Microsoft has an update fee that he didn't want to pay, it's a very small fee so I didn't see the problem.
Wasn't it like 50k or something after one update?
Quote from: Frito Master on Fri 26/04/2013 06:55:38
Quote from: Armageddon on Tue 09/04/2013 06:33:59
I don't care about his personality at all, I don't like him because he released FEZ with lots of game breaking bugs and refuses to update it because Microsoft has an update fee that he didn't want to pay, it's a very small fee so I didn't see the problem.
Wasn't it like 50k or something after one update?
Just 2k, which is stupid yes but I'm sure he had plenty enough from how well it sold. He vowed to never come to PC and it's coming to Steam in a week...
QuoteMicrosoft's XBLA policy only allows for one free patch, with subsequent patches requiring the game to go through a recertification process at a cost of $40,000.
Is see a ton of stuff about it costing 40k for a recert process on the interwebs was it not true? It seems he wasn't the only one who said that it to costy.
QuoteHe vowed to never come to PC and it's coming to Steam in a week...
Until he thought about the profits :P It could fund another game.
I don't like him but he could/did make something interesting.
I did the survey!...but am I too late? It's really late in mid-April.
About the documentary, it was really well done. It had good production value. I was also a bit disenchanting; there was negativity abound. In the beginning, I was gleefully curious about what I could learn about the indie scene. By the end of it, Fish had worn me down and it was a bit depressing.
On the plus side, I have a new-found respect and appreciation for all things indie.
I found a kind of "follow up" interview about XBLA and Microsoft with some commentary from some of the Indie Game teams as well as other and the problem isn't necessarily the issues with being an indie game studio, but Microsoft itself.
From what I read they like to find a game coming out with a lot of appeal, and they press hard for exclusivity deals. I don't remember which game it was but one of the bigger indie Steam/PS3 games approached MS and were told "no" because they couldn't give them Xbox360 exclusivity since their game was already on two other platforms. There's also apparently a shit-ton of contract stuff wherein you can't release your games to other platforms for a set number of years.
I'm not trying to MS bash because I personally LOVE my 360 but they do pull the leash quite a bit tighter than their competitors which drives a lot of people away.
Also they require a lot of stupid crap. The meat boy team was saying that MS wouldn't finish checking out their game during one of the last rounds of dev until they delivered the avatar marketplace apparel for the little 360 avatars first which the meat boy team felt was a HUGE waste of time especially since they didn't get much in the way of profits from those sales.
I'd love to see a follow up to Indie Game focusing on the Steam/PS3 marketplaces.
PS3 support for indie titles specially the vita is really crap imo.
Specially the SDK thing for vita... Shame on them it woulda been a cool feature if they supported it more.
One thing I will say about Indie Game: The Movie.
Taking a break from crunching on a game project to watch a movie about people crunching on their game projects... extremely bad idea.