Indie Development: Not Just Fun And Games

Others, talking in the pub afterwards, dissent. Part of the reason for going indie is to avoid the strictures of the workplace, some say. Clocking in at regular times just isn't conducive to creativity. But it is, perhaps, conducive to graft - and that, Harris maintains, is what the majority of the game development process involves. Harris' advice is practical; it could apply to any freelancer in any profession - but, given his references to the laissez-faire approach of his past employer Lionhead, it clearly also has implications for larger development studios.

Grown from an entertainment industry aimed at adolescent men, it's little surprise that many development studios feel more like adult crèches than places of work. Harris says this poor work ethic will simply be steamrollered by the professionalism of competitors in China and India. If the UK is to have an indie development scene, or a development scene at all, it will simply need to buckle down.

A poor work ethic will simply be steamrollered by the professionalism of competitors in China and India. If the UK is to have an indie development scene, it will simply need to buckle down.

Though this sort of tough love was far from the primary currency of A Bit of Alright, there were a few other talks which focused on the practicalities of creation. Kicking off the day, James Wallis of game consultancy Spaaace expounded on the merits of paper prototyping. Once described, it's a sort of smack-your-forehead kind of revelation: pool together the boards, pieces, cards and dice from all your defunct board games, and you have the tools for a level of rapid iteration that is simply impossible in the digital world. While it's not a perfect match for every genre, most games have individual mechanics that can be represented in paper and pen, allowing developers to get a feel for the flow of play, eradicating cumbersome pauses, unnecessary complications and inconsistencies without fiddling with a single line of code.

Other instructive talks included a QA session with lawyer Alex Tutty from event sponsors Sheridans, and Claire "Minkette" Bateman's overview of the mechanisms by which games addict players, for good and (more commonly) ill. But despite the dearth of sessions looking at development from this practical stance, the talks which dealt in the more nebulous field of themes and inspirations were no less stimulating for being more plentiful.

Kerry Turner and Simon Parkin from LittleLoud were on hand to discuss the function of emotion in games. As with many of the other talks, this was built upon an entertaining, if familiar, analysis of the usual suspects - ICO, Final Fantasy VII, Shadow of the Colossus - but then went further, unpicking the workings of Littleloud's own superb game, Sweatshop. It has a tough juggling act - on the one hand it has an educational remit regarding the tough conditions and moral compromises involved in running a factory in the developing world. But it must do so while being neither too grim nor too flippant and all the while an engaging game - quite a feat.

Also on display was event sponsor Introversion's forthcoming Prison Architect and a meditative big-screen play-through of Ed Key's Proteus - a game of dreamlike exploration with no explicit goals, and a gorgeous dynamic sound track by David Kanaga. Certainly, these last two projects represent a healthy swathe of the indie spectrum: Proteus is the sort of ethereal development that emerges from a casual collaborative jam, and for all its zen qualities is unlikely a mass-market blockbuster, while Prison Architect is an intricate and overtly structured game, with clearer commercial appeal.

Neither of these games would be possible to develop anywhere but the indie scene, and should remind us of the boons that a freeform development process can bring. But it's worth remembering that Prison Architect is nearing release after a number of close calls: developer Introversion has narrowly survived ruination on more than one occasion, and scrapped several years of hard work on a previous project, Subversion, which failed to attain coherence. The indie scene does not lack for creativity and genius, that much is clear from A Bit of Alright, but perhaps a bit of rigour wouldn't go amiss, either.