History 4 A - Independence Day

(This is the start of my rewritten fourth task. I never had any clue I was to make 3 different posts about this! But I'm glad for the chance to re-write it, personally.)

Indie games are awesome. That isn't just a personal opinion. Indie games are absolutely massive in  todays gaming climate. The beautiful thing about Indie games is how well they can fill niche areas and gaps in the market which no  AAA developer would dare tread near.

 With the ease of Steam and Xbox Live Arcade indie games have never been easier to make and sell. Especially now with Kickstarter, Developers now can easily see if a game will be well recieved and get funding based off it. Just see Star Citizen for an example, Kickstarting  up $2,134,374!

 But it was not always this way. In the early days of gaming in the era of the Atari 2600 many games were made by one or two people. All you needed was the know-how, and you could easily create a video game and sell it. These independent developers are similar to the ones we have now in a way.

 This is part of the reason for all the extremely weird games of the 2600. Take for example Custers Revenge...  There was such an oversaturation of games because of this.

 That and people being able to release games so easily was part of the blame for the great video game crash of 1983. So when Nintendo rose from the ashes like a phoenix they stopped these shenanigans. Nintendo would only let games be published with their seal of approval by using the10NES chip installed inside their Nintendo Entertainment System.

 But this didn't stop unlicensed publishers from trying. These to me are similar to indie games in a way, being separate from the mainstream. They're also really dang weird. These include beauties such as Wisdom Tree's series of Bible related games. 

 Now we move onto the PC, where indie games truly thrive. In the Late 80s games such as Doom and Wolfienstien were released as Shareware. These games were made by tiny groups and gave out the first levels of the game for free requiring payment for the later levels.

 Indie gaming didn't become truly huge start to become as grand as it is today till 2004 with the release of Cave Story. I love the Cave Story story, where the game designer Pixel created this entire game from scratch including the graphics and music. Cave story became a massive hit in Japan, and a massive hit globally once it was translated by fans. It perfectly combined simple gameplay with excellent story, something that will be a recurring theme in the world of Indie gaming.

 Making this game was a great step in Pixel's career, as he has now worked on remakes for various consoles and with many upgrades to his game with large teams. He really showed the world how making games independently could be truly viable again. And In my opinion this sparked the resurgence of indie gaming culture that we now experience today. 

I thought this would be a good time to finally update my blog again. We had just finished a two week set of workshops, one in 2D and one in 3D. While in 3D we made a simple street scene, which is not all too interesting. But what is interesting is the 2D project where we got to design a vehicle. 

I really enjoyed this project, although it was kind of hard. This is my final piece, and as you can see i've made a submarine robot squid. Thing. I'm really happy with it, especially with this new technique on photoshop. This project was crazy hard, but I think i've done rather well.

 During the project I had that realisation. I'm here to do this course, I want to do all of this. So I've been putting in a tonne of extra work. Every day I'm trying to do some quick sketches. Ideally these would be photoshop practice but my personal graphics tablet has currently died. RIP in peace you glorious device. Till then I've been trying anatomy practice, mostly to see if I can make realistic anatomy WITHOUT reference.

I need alot of work, but I'll get better. That's what this practice is all for.