My Insight into Indie Game: The Movie

As I said on the first day of class, video games never really had a huge impact on my daily life growing up, outside of Pokemon on my Gameboy color.  Through what I've read and seen so far though, my interest and knowledge has grown, and I'm continually intrigued by the vast knowledge and information that remains out there for me to learn, read, and discuss.

Our first in-class screening was on Indie Game:  The Movie and I was pleasantly entertained with what I watched and grasped from the movie.  Going "behind the scenes", and following these select video game coders and designers really demonstrated how much work, time, and effort is put into such a feat.  Literally months upon months of no sleep and constant computer interaction (both coding and designing) is put into creating this virtual world and space where these individuals (Edmund and Tommy) found it perfect to express themselves.  I loved being able to hear the first stories of how Super Meat Boy originated, from the days of the programmers childhood, and it was great seeing how both of them worked constantly to put their visions and dreams into developing a video game to entertain masses.

On the other hand, it was also interesting to follow the stressful business aspects and design of Fez by Phil Fish.  He experienced such distress while developing, engineering, and coding his virtual reality that in the end, I even felt saddened when his game kept crashing at the conference that he had been planning for.  Although he took a leap of faith and brought Fez to the convention with numerous bugs being spotted by even the very first players, it was reassuring to hear the news that his former partner would sign the necessary papers to let Phil continue in designing his dream.

Although the movie really didn't follow Jonathan Blow's Braid as intensely, it was interesting seeing his insight into how he reacted to the press and media.  The logistics of his game were exactly how he envisioned them, and his extreme and excessive work towards his goal was evident in his on-screen interviews and by providing the viewer with the knowledge that he would be working on a second game, The Witness.

All in all, I throughly enjoyed this weeks screening and it greatly added to my knowledge base for this class.  I found it so interesting to be able to see the "behind the scenes" development, through all of its stages, and then the release of a product that these individuals have worked so hard on.  Although the success wasn't exactly transparent for all of the developers featured, the movie did a great job of following their journey (including their various obstacles) in a gamble to bring their ideas mainstream.  "The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand." -Vince Lombardi