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How do you keep up with smaller indie game news?
How do people here keep up with upcoming niche games? Most of the blogs I've followed for this have been abandoned over time and I'm looking for new one(s). Ideally, I'm looking for something that:
- Supports RSS
- Highlights trailers or other creator-made pages showing off lesser-known games
- Focuses on the "hobby itch.io experiment" to "Annapurna / Devolver-published" segment of the Lo-Fi to AAA spectrum (nothing more AAA than that)
- Posts occasional reviews/interviews with games/creators (optionally)
- Has no/little focus on industry-insider news
I'm obviously biased towards "small-web" blogs or forums, but I'd love to hear about however you stay up to date with cool things creators are making!
Not a blog but you may be interested in the Indiepocalypse "zine", a monthly bundle of indie games with a focus on "hobby" / "experimental" stuff.
https://itch.io/c/689872/indiepocalypse
Full disclosure, I'm an indie gamedev and my game was included in one of their past issues. Devs are paid an up-front fee to have the game included in an issue, plus royalties on that issue's sales :)
Cool, this is definitely the kind of thing I'm looking for. Navigating itch is intimidating, and having a human driven (as opposed to algorithmic) way to highlight things there is a great idea!
Okay so I'm at a point where I'm fed up with enterprise IT as a career and I'm looking into indie game development. Obviously not dropping my job to do this, but how do you even get started in this area if you have absolutely no experience? It's been my dream to just make games even if they're indie games, and I have no idea where to start.
Depends on what you want to do. Art, animation, audio? Grab a tool, such as blender, krita, cascadeur, or ardour and start creating assets. Code, gameplay? Grab an engine like godot or unreal and start experimenting. When you a hit a problem, your IT-learned googling skills should help you locate the right resources to skip past it.
I really want to do it all, I'm a very creative individual and want to really understand how to build something from start to finish. Music is my main creative outlet and I'm familiar with ardour already. I actually donate to them regularly since their stuff is always really well made and free to compile.
I had the same question as you about a year ago! I'm approaching my first anniversary of starting out in gamedev. I think I literally just typed something like "how to make a game for beginners step by step" in youtube search and got started from there š I somehow learned about game engines, picked Godot coz it's free, open-source, and lightweight, and followed a "how to make a 2D farming game in Godot" youtube step-by-step tutorial. I seriously was just pausing the video and copying the steps without understanding much initially. (I like learning by doing / making small projects so this learning approach works for me.) Got familiar with the basics of using Godot after a week of this, and joined a game jam on itch.io a week after that. :)
It helps that I'm coming from a professional art background with some experience in multimedia so I make my own assets. But if you don't want to, you can get free assets from kenney.nl for example, just to get started learning. Feel free to ask me if you want more resources!
Oh wow thanks that's awesome! I'll be sure to reach out if I need any help. Thank you for your insight, this really helps me. I get demotivated super easily and with ADHD it's hard to focus on one thing at a time. If you wouldn't mind me asking do you have any games published anywhere either on steam or even itch.io?
Welcome! Hope you have fun! Yup I've only published my games on itch :) http://mellowminx.itch.io/
Awesome, thank you! If you don't mind me asking, what were some pitfalls and challenges you had to face when starting out? Also, when making pixel art, is that something you already did or did you have to learn that as well?
I'll send you a PM here on Tildes since I think we have been going off topic on this thread! :D
Yeah that's fair, sounds good! I look forward to hearing from you.
I don't do it too well, in all honesty. And probably one of the biggest losses to cutting off reddit since I ceased using r/indiegames to find less hyped up but interesting stuff, or simply see what others are doing in development.
I personally use Itch.io and it's forums to check aroind for various indie works. And then F95 is a forum dedicated almost exclusively for NSFW games, especially useful for games exclusively hosted on sites like Patreon. But for other options:
These don't really fit your requirements , unfortunately. But I don't know any dedicated "professional" site focusing strongly on the indie market. Gamasutra and RockPaperScissors used to be good resources, but RPS died out, and Gamasutra (now called GameDeveloper.com) shifted more and more to AAA stuff. I'm sure others exists so Id love to know about it myself. Worst case, there definitely are some indie game focused YouTubers that at least showcases such games.
Yeah, I've tried various methods Steam provides and a lot of them are pretty hit or miss. That hidden gems link is a cool concept though, thanks for that! I fell off Twitter (and reddit, sounds similar to you), but even if I still used it I was looking for something with just a tiny bit more curation than the firehose they provide. Steam and Itch both also have that firehose-like "infinite recommendation lists" and while those sometimes result in cool stuff, the signal to noise ratio is not quite there.
I did follow those sites (RPS, Gamasutra) and their disappearance (or changes of focus) is what spurred this post. I guess I was just hoping something else stepped in - but I think there's just not enough money in it (understandably). Grass roots seems to be the way to go now, but I just don't have the time to keep my finger on that many pulses.
As a 20 year Steam user with 1400 titles on my account all my gaming happens there, but I definitely lean indie when choosing games. As such this might not be that helpful to you but I'll explain it anyway in case someone finds some value in it.
I find new games mostly thru 3 different means:
I regularly check the New and Trending or New Releases lists on Steam store page. It lists all new games released on Steam and is a good way to see titles that would normally completely miss my radar, like the new Alex Jones game that just released and actually looks so ridiculous it could be good but I won't be supporting it out of principle.
I watch gaming YouTube channels like Skillup Splattercat and Northernlion. They regularly play and discuss indie games and have informed my purchasing decisions more than I might like to admit.
I subscribe to humble bundle choice, a low-cost monthly subscription of random games, often smaller or "indie". You get Steam keys so the games are yours to keep. My taste in games is broad and eclectic so I rarely feel like I didn't get incredible value from the collection.
I think it is important to note that no one should EVER support alex jones in any way shape or form. Dude is a straight up conman, white nationalist, paedophile supporter (he's good friends with ted nugent who, ho boy, thats a big problem. Read up on his discography and pele massa to know why) which also makes him a horrendous hypocrite.
I thought it was just some weird parody political game that gets made every other week (I mean, one of the screenshots shows Donald Trump dressed as Superman but with a "T" on the chest instead), but it's very odd knowing this is officially ordained Alex Jones content. Poe's law truly has died.
Also, funny thing I found from PC Gamer:
With the next section titled:
The woes of game journalism.
Yes thanks, I meant it to read more clear, just assumed much of the user base here would understand my inference without having to state it explicitly. I probably shouldn't have linked to his store page directly. Edit: fixed.
That is precisely why I enjoy browsing those Steam store sections, usually daily, as it provides a relatively uncurrated and unfiltered window into what kind of content is being added to Steam on a regular basis. I find a lot of gems in there. It also lets me pre-screen my store suggestions by clicking Ignore on the less interesting adult, free-to-play, and low quality games I know I have no interest in. I currently have 700 titles ignored in the store which prevents them from returning in searches or discovery queues in the future.
It's definitely a great suggestion. And ignoring games is a really good call, i hadnt considered that possibility, ive seen the checkbox 1000 times but its never clicked haha.
Not a news site, but for reviews, John Walker's Buried Treasure is worth checking out. It also has an RSS feed.
If the name doesn't ring a bell, Walker has had a long history in games journalism and was one of the original founders of Rock Paper Shotgun. He only posts when he has come across something interesting, so there is very little noise. While he and I have very different tastes, I tend to find his observations and recommendations interesting, even when I don't necessarily agree with them.
I just occasionally look for them.
I have opted out of hype culture. I donāt think itās healthy; it feels kind of like an addiction at times and it can easily be an unnecessary drain on the pocketbook. I do occasionally check on what people are talking about but itās generally when people are bringing it outside of the realm of āgamer cultureā. Iād include Tildes on the outside group.
One really great thing about it is being choosy and finding some really great and very niche titles that really speak to you. It feels like I canāt really explain how good it feels; itās like going to a tiny out of the way bookstore and finding a book about how someone who lived a life almost exactly like you did.
The downside is that you donāt really have anyone to talk to about it and itās really hard to get others to give them a chance. I have been simping on Iconoclasts and Echo for years, but have I convinced any of you to play them? There are fan communities to join but they are going to be filled with people who think everything in the game is perfect and I donāt find that terribly satisfying.
I agree about hype culture - and I fully admit I'm looking for a "junk-food" fix here. I definitely acknowledge it and treat it as such though, so I think it's fine in controlled moderation. Sometimes I just want to spend 30 minutes keeping my eye out for innovative game mechanics, and watching a small hand-curated list of trailers did that for me. If I weren't doing that, I'd probably be doing something similarly unproductive with the time anyway (and at least my search for innovative mechanics can inspire me in my own creations).
I think your observation about media that speaks to us is insightful - it's an amazing feeling to find something that feels handcrafted to you (a few albums from artists who seem to have shared my exact childhood pop into mind), but it can create an odd sort of loneliness when you realize that the hyper-specificity limits you from sharing it (except, like you said, with others who are 100% into it, and that's not really interesting either). Maybe the joy of sharing media is the off-chance that you rope someone in who was already on its periphery?
I like the Best Indie Games channel on YouTube well enough, even though the channel name is pretty generic :) They mainly do rapid-fire trailer compilations for indie games. All YouTube channels have an RSS feed, here's the one for Best Indie Games for example. There's also a weekly newsletter.
Nice! I never would have found something like this since I don't browse YouTube itself (too many social-media type problems with automatically recommended content).
Thanks! I'll check it out.
One of my favourites is https://warpdoor.com who have RSS and are also on socials.
Wow, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for. A small, curated, well updated feed of interesting games! Thanks!
My pleasure, have fun!