What are indie games and why should you give them a try?

If you are a gamer who is not missing any new title on the market, in all likelihood, you might not even be aware of the existence and value of indie games. Yet, this does not mean they are not worth your attention. The world of indie games is rich and diverse due to the fact its developers are restricted only by the limits of their own creativity and designing knowledge.

If you are already tired by the bestselling games everyone is playing and you would like to try something truly unique and not commercial, you should certainly check the offer of the market of indie games.

What are indie games?

First of all, let’s decide what indie games are.

To put it in a nutshell, indie games are the projects of individual developers. these can be small groups of designers or even a single person working without help of anyone else. What is sure is the fact they are not cooperating with the giants of the gaming industry such as for instance EA, Activision or Ubisoft.

Since today you will not have problems with finding courses on game development whereas there are more and more tools for creating games which are becoming highly user-friendly, many people can start creating their own projects with any professional help. Thus, the number of indie-studios is constantly growing, however, because of the specificity of the market, it is not thus simple for these small groups of developers to generate profit for their work.

On the one hand, it make many indie developers work almost for free. On the other hand, the lack of financial support make such developers even more creative.

Advantages of indie games

As you can imagine, the game created by small groups of developers and especially the one developed by a single person simply cannot be thus massive as the ones who have been developed by hundreds of people working for a large company. For that reason, such games can usually be finished pretty quickly and they are typically featured by one major characteristic which makes them notable whereas others are not thus well-developed.

These unique features might be the graphics of the game itself, its mechanics or unique characters. Great illustrations of this are such games as Octodad and GRIS. If you play the first one, you will be entertained by the behaviour of the major character whereas the second one will amuse you with its fantastic style of graphics design.

As you have already understood, untypical ideas is a crucial part of indie games. It is obvious that the developers working for the giants of the market will be very careful about their ideas since they can cost them a lot of money. Indie developers do not have such problems. They can create whatever they want which will give you absolutely amazing options for playing.

One of the best illustrations of this approach is the Getting Over It game. First of all, the game itself has a particularly strange idea as the protagonist is a half-naked man with a hummer. If you are trying to guess what this man can be doing with such equipment, you will really have a hard time. His task is toc limb a huge pile of garbage. Although it sounds so simple, the developers have made it a real challenge. The way you can control the character is rather complicated itself whereas the physics in the game world is downright annoying as you can easily lose your progress. Yet, this was exactly the idea of the developers who wanted to show players that losing is an intricate part of playing any game.

Needless to say such a project will hardly be completed by any large game developing company.

Finally, the system of reacting to feedback in the case of indie studios is a way better than in the case of large companies. There is nothing strange about it since the creation of such games is a very personalised process and developers are genuinely interested in learning the reaction of the fans of their games. They are eagerly collecting reviews considering it and use for future improvements which are taking place really quickly.

Disadvantages of indie games

Even though the market of indie games is really large and constantly growing, it is still not easy to find a project which is really worth playing.

Certainly, one of the major problems in the case of such games is the fact their designers lack experience and knowledge. At the same time, the roles of developers are not divided in the way it is done in the large companies where each member of a team has one’s own task. Here, the same people usually have to code, create graphics and music. It is absolutely natural that at some point even the most talented of them will make some mistakes. At the same time there is usually no expert nearby who can give good recommendations.

For that reason players of indie games can easily face serious problems which are making the entire gaming process impossible.