Monthly Archives: August 2010

Last month at Boston Post Mortem, Eitan grilled the founders of Moonshot Games, Macguffin Games, and Dejobaan Games on the topics of game development and being indie. Attempts to define “indie” and questions about whether something or someone is “indie” strike a chord with a lot of folks, so Scott Macmillan (of Macguffin) followed up the talk by posting an interesting manifesto on his studio’s blog and Gamasutra. Check it out, it’s good stuff.

Bottom line:
1- Don’t ask if something is indie, it’s a waste of energy
2- “Indie is the aspiration to create something new, interesting, or different. Something you as an artist find worthwhile.”

Update

Eitan: Man, Scott is such a little bitch. Waaaaaaa, I don’t wanna define what indie is! Waaaaaa!

Vincent Diamante and Steve Johnson are two of my favorite people. They are the two sound geeks behind the music in Flower, and they are VERY good at what they do. Here is a talk they recently gave on using sound and music to create narrative in that game, and it’s a really cool listen! They discuss influences, how they went about creating music on a shifting project with an abstract goal, and what interesting things they did to make the game sound awesome. And considering that Flower is (in my opinion) one of the best sounding new games out there I’d say they did a great job?

Yes, this is only the first 8 minutes of an hour long talk. Wanna watch the whole thing? You can catch it the full talk (chopped up into 8 sections) here.

SEMI-RELATED TANGENT TIME!

1. As long as we’re talking about video game music, does anyone else think that the Bionic Commando Rearmed soundtrack was extra awesome?

2. I’d like to point out that in addition to being a composer nerd Vincent is also has a kick ass blog on photography, food, and anything else interesting that comes to mind. Definitely a fun read.