15
votes
Jaeho Hwang (“Dave the Diver” game director) on what exactly is an indie game
Link information
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- Title
- 'Is Dave The Diver an indie game? I would say no,' says game director
- Authors
- Christopher Livingston
- Published
- Mar 22 2024
Original title: ‘Is Dave The Diver an indie game? I would say no,' says game director.
Changed the title because it felt clickbaity but feel free to change back.
Funnily, your headline feels more clickbaity to me because I'm aware of the controversy over Dave the Diver's indie status. I was expecting them to defend their indie nomination from Game Awards.
But thanks for sharing the article!
😂 can’t win em all I suppose
Many of my favourites games are smaller titles or from more independent studios like Warioware games, Hades, and Transistor. I'm not sure exactly what you'd call them, but there's clearly a huge market for them nowadays. Square Enix figured this out and started putting out a ton of smaller projects (too many in fact).
I really appreciate the shift towards smaller projects since it gives games a lot more opportunity to get experimental and creators are closer to their work. I think indie is sometimes used as short hand for a game having a soul; a certain je ne sais quoi.
Transistor and Hades are both from Supergiant Games. If you haven't already, check their breakout success Bastion. In my opinion it's even better than Transistor.
But yeah, Supergiant is just an indie game developer. The scope of their games is tight and you can see it reflected through quality. They rarely overstay their welcome.
There's plenty of indie games with broad scopes that aren't as successful at maintaining quality.
But to answer your question, they have no set genre. The length and scope is usually because of their independent status and the need to keep it affordable.
Controversially, I just couldn't get into Bastion. After playing Transistor, it actually felt a bit clunky to me! In general, I like slightly more strategic games so Transistor's unique combat appealed to me.
My favorite indie studio is actually Image & Form. I love the SteamWorld series. SteamWorld Heist in particular is one of my favorite games of all time due to its soundtrack and extremely tight gameplay.