Written by: Luke Fimio

Indie games?  Social?  Those words don’t go together:

Picture this: A single individual, eyes transfixed on the monitor, huddled over a full pot of coffee, hammering away endlessly at his or her keyboard just for a chance to bring a few strokes of creativity to an often uninspired gaming world. This was once the world for an indie video game developer.

But guess what?  There’s been a revolution.

The programmers have found each other, banded together and what’s more, they’ve invited artists, musicians and anyone with creativity and a passion for video games to the party. And together they are building the Hand Eye Society.

Canzine Artcade 2009: The hand is quicker, because the eye is gawking at the games.

At the Gladstone Hotel, in downtown Toronto, ON, comic book artists, poets, and writers alike form a hipster-bazaar, offering their wares to the strolling patrons. The creative, eccentric and nerdy elite have all amassed within this one building. And deep within the buzzing crowds, an entire room has been dedicated to independent video game development. To say the least, I’m impressed.

I watched as hundreds of different people strolled through the room, amazed at the fully-interactive displays and workshops that the Hand Eye Society has provided.  One display allowed people to use the Gary’s Mod engine (the famed mod of the Half Life 2 engine) to create interactive levels and props in 3d space. Another allowed people to play with a program called Scratch, in which they could quickly and easily build levels using simple buttons (no coding involved, for us lay-people). A rather ingenious workshop, and one that I think showed people just how creative they could be, allowed people to draw a character (as simple or as complex as they wanted)in 4 frames of a walk cycle. Then via web cam, each frame was taken into a program that created a fully interactive, video game sprite right before their eyes. For me, watching my own little creation walk back and forth across the screen was a thing of beauty. If I had named it I would have wanted to keep it.

The crown jewel of the show however had to be the extremely impressive Torontron. Yes it sounds like a beast, and yes it could take over Tokyo.

This ain't your daddy's Tron. User beware!

However it was only beastly in terms of its gaming presence. For all of us retro-gaming nerds the Torontron’s story is a slice of gaming heaven. The original arcade cabinet was home to a 1981 Italian arcade game called Magic Worm which was actually just a clone of the classic game we all know and love Centipede. The game no longer played so Hand Eye Society member Jph Wacheski gutted the entire cabinet and re-worked and re-fitted the controls to play six different games all created by different indie game developers from around Toronto, ON. If the machine itself wasn’t amazing enough, the 6 games that it contained were equally stunning. The games it ran were:

• Night of the Cephalopods by Miguel Sternberg
• lockOn 2 by Jph Wacheski
• Albacross by Rosemary Mosco
• Mondrian Provoked by Jim McGinley
• Monster Puncher by BananasInPajammers
• Heavy Weather by Team Entelechynt

Each game worked off of simple but engrossing game play mechanics, and contained a unique art style that you could only find in the culture of indie games. The show was capped off by an interesting and informative slide show in which Jph Wacheski demonstrated step by step how Torontron was created.

Jim Munroe, one of the Hand Eye Society’s founding members told me that he considers the society to be an indie game advocacy group, and that’s exactly what I found them to be. The show seemed to provide many video game lovers with a breath of fresh air, showing them how easy it can be to bring your talents to life. And to those whose only interactions in the video game world consist of Rockband and possibly Wii Fit, it provided a simple spark of imagination and a look into the culture where video games all started.

Gamers, new and old gather around Torontron.

Visit the Hand Eye Society at their website!  http://handeyesociety.com

I have been having fun playing with the free XNA Game Studio 3.1.  Although I have a moderate ability with programming C#, there are excellent tutorial videos available at the XNA Game Studio site that walk you through every line of code you need to program a basic game.

One of the best ways to learn coding is to be fearless and hack away / reverse engineer code and see what the results are.  So long as you understand how and why you break the code and get bugs, you are learning how to do it yourself.

I find there is a serious lack of RPG content on Xbox 360 Indie Game marketplace so I did a search and lo and behold there is a recently uploaded starter kit for an RPG!

Once you have installed the free Microsoft’s Visual Studio C# Express Starter Edition and XNA Game Studio 3.1 (also free), you need simply download and install the RPG Game Starter Kit and can open it as a template from the software.

There are some basic XML based tutorials for how to create your own quests, and if you are feeling brave you can start the time-consuming process of creating your own custom Sprites and background textures to make the game feel more like your own. If you want to make this a lot easier, consider using a free program like GraphicsGale to build, develop, animate and save your game sprites.

Because great RPGs are more about excellent storytelling and world-building than anything else, I encourage you to go and try this out.  I do caution that you may lose night after night of sleep as you descend into the limitless word of game building, but you will at least know that in the end you can submit your project for peer review and maybe ultimately turn a buck by selling your wares on Xbox Live.

Note: in order to test your game directly on your Xbox 360, get reviewed or put it up for sale, you will have to purchase a premium membership – $99.95 annually. However, you can still program games for Windows PCs that you can distribute to your friends – free.

By Sarper Soher

No offense, I know a lot of people who start out a MMORPG with a month of experience! We even see those “Gimma da linkz for doom3 making program!!11″ type people everyday on forums!

So, first you need to make sure you have piled up enough experience. If not, you should finish some tiny projects like a Pong, Galaxian, then small projects like Tetris then medium ones like mario only after these processes, come here and try to make a commercial project.

Above may sound discouraging but if you jump to a commercial game right away it will both spend your time and your money. Also it will effect your game career as it will be a huge letdown and lose of self confidence.

Only experience itself won’t take you so far. To be successful you need the tools of the trade, money, time, determination and dedication. And most important of all, you have to love what you do. If you really blend your passion into your game the gamers will love it too.

So let’s get into details a bit:

A) Right Tools:

You may already know, tools are the applications you will develop your game in. I will break them to branches per purpose.

1. Producer tools

2. Programmer tools

3. Artist tools

4. Music / Sound tools

Read the rest of this entry »