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[lonestarr]

Hello,

I'm brainstorming about what could be my 1st indie game. I've seen that most indie games are solo games, so my question is roughly: why indie game developers all follow this path?

OK, this is not obvious to develop, but with a few google search here and there, you can find some cool libs to do the job. There is even a comprehensive FAQ on gamedev.net.
On the freeware side, there are a few games, but I'm not sure if their community is very active (see teeworld for example).
With the recent release of Plain Sight from Beatnik Games, things may change and we maybe are at the dawn of a new "multiplayer indie games" period. A few recent post on developer blogs tend to confirm this trend (or at least the fact that this question is in the air): see this post and this other one.

I'd love to have the input of the TIGSource community on this. This is one of the main subject of my blog, and I'm going to prepare several tutorials about multiplayer game development, and before going on I need to know if anyone is interested... if there is a trend, or if I'm just dreaming

Thanks!

-lonestarr

[increpare]

I've seen that most indie games are solo games, so my question is roughly: why indie game developers all follow this path?

Most multiplayer games are networed, and network games require a lot of commitment - you pretty much have to keep a dedicated server up and running to support them, otherwise they die.  P2P networking is very awkward to do nowadays.  There are ostensibly free solutions that rely on other people's hardware, but they can't really be relied upon. Also network coding does introduce a little bit of overhead, however smooth your server setup is.  That's my take, anyway.

Though it should be said that there're plenty of multpolayer indie games out there, if you look around. (Look at many of the gamma 4 entries, say).

[Kekskiller]

Some kind of P2P is actually possible when exploiting already existing servers. Abusing IRC channels for listing available clients/ongoing games etc.

[xerios]

Well I have this project running called Rage Effect ( http://ragefx.com/ ), I haven't been
working on it that much lately. And it's more or less abandoned ( still played by few French
people) and reason why it is so, is mostly because my game is in flash and flash with it's
stratus thing is one hell of a bitch, almost 70% of my users experience problems with it and
it's just IMPOSSIBLE to fix, the other problem is providing content from time to time which
gets really boring.


But now I no longer have any intentions on making another MP game since it gets boring after
a while, which is why I started making single player games. All that just because I want to
tell a story and not entertain my players.

That's the main reason why indies make singleplayer games instead of multiplayer ones, they
want to tell their own story, show off their world they wanted to create ( or created ) and all.

[LemonScented]

The reason I started working on my current (single-player) game was because my previous game design (which I'd still like to go back to in the future) was too big and complex to handle. That game had a single player component, but multiplayer was also a huge part of the design.

MULTIPLAYER IS GOOD BECAUSE
* Having a significant online component provides nice ways to do verification checks to try to combat some of the spread of piracy without being unreasonably DRM-y. You want to play the game singleplayer? Fine. But if you want to play multiplayer, you'll be connecting to a server that can check if your game is valid.

* Playing with other people is fun. Personally, I'm much more a fan of playing with friends in the same room than with strangers on the internet, but whatever floats your boat - a lot of people like it.

MULTIPLAYER IS PROBLEMATIC BECAUSE
* There's a technical hurdle to cross when adding networking to a game. For me, this is a big part of what put that game on hold for me - there was a lot of stuff to implement already, and networking that and keeping it all deterministic was one headache too many.

* You've got to have a server. Servers ain't cheap. How are you going to pay for that?

* Cheating becomes a significant problem, which you need to spend time and money on to develop technical counter-measures. There's also a pretty good chance that you might need to have actual people working as community managers if the game takes off, so you've got to pay for people as well as for servers and bandwidth.

Ultimately, at some point I'd love to have a stab at overcoming the obstacles and doing something multiplayer myself (not something MMO, but maybe something where people can hook up for a "deathmatch" type thing), but right now it's just important for me to get a game finished, and that's hard enough as it is without the additional problems that multiplayer brings.

[fraxcell]

There are actually quite a few multiplayer flash games at places like Newgrounds. I'd say the main difficulty, in addition to the commitment a developer needs to maintain an online game, is that it's hard to get people constantly playing your game. It's rare to see a multiplayer community for an indie game last more than a month after release, unless it's an MMO.

[Core Xii]

The same reason 3D is rarer than 2D. It's just harder to pull off.

[bateleur]

stratus ... is one hell of a bitch, almost 70% of my users experience problems with it

Really? I'd like to hear more about that seeing as I was just about to start a project using Stratus!

Do these same users have problems using Skype?

Do you have error data? What goes wrong? Latency? Failure to connect?

[nikki]

because it costs investments ?

[Dataflashsabot]

Because they're ridiculously fucking hard to make.

[xerios]

stratus ... is one hell of a bitch, almost 70% of my users experience problems with it

Really? I'd like to hear more about that seeing as I was just about to start a project using Stratus!

Do these same users have problems using Skype?

Do you have error data? What goes wrong? Latency? Failure to connect?

You know how they were all like "RTMFP handshake is handled automatically, no problems and all"

Well apparently it's not true, stratus is the main reason why my game lost many players. People weren't able to join certain servers and other weird stuff happened, like UK people could only join servers hosted in their area, if it was someone outside UK like USA it didn't work. Same with France / rest of the world, 20% of my users had that, luckily after long time of searching for a solution, I found that forwarding a huge range of ports ( stratus uses a random UDP port ) helped to resolve the problem for some of my users but either way that's just plain stupid cause not everyone knows how to forward their ports and all.

As for the rest, everything works once connected.

Well , stratus is good for small apps targeting people who live in a certain area. If you're planning on making a worldwide accessible multiplayer game then prepare to endure the whining of users who cant connect or have some shitty latency
And since you won't be able to fix those problems, people will ultimately stop playing and leave

Almost forgot about another thing, stratus can crash browsers occasionally.

Because they're ridiculously fucking hard to make.

Not at all, with a little bit of networking knowledge and a good library, it's easy as 1,2,3 

[Tuba]

The biggest issue here IMO is the cost of a server.
Also testing and debugging a networked game is a pain in the ass :/

[moi]

1-is programming hard

2-Multiplayer games need an established community to be worth the effort (and for testing purposes). Most indies are alone in their corner.
If you can't gather more than a dozen comitted people around your game in devellopment, then forget it.

3-high maintenance cost (server maintenance and debugging)

[gimymblert]

1-is programming hard

2-Multiplayer games need an established community to be worth the effort (and for testing purposes). Most indies are alone in their corner.
If you can't gather more than a dozen comitted people around your game in devellopment, then forget it.

3-high maintenance cost (server maintenance, balancing and debugging)

Fixed

[ink.inc]

1-programming is hard

2-Multiplayer games need an established community to be worth the effort (and for testing purposes). Most indies are alone in their corner.
If you can't gather more than a dozen committed people around your game in development, then forget it.

3-high maintenance cost (server maintenance, balancing and debugging)

double fixed

[migrafael]

 I'm not sure i'm adding anything new to the topic. I think everything has been covered - expensive servers, comunity managment, etc... An online multiplayer game is never quite finished, there's always some work to be done.  No wonder independent developers stay away from it. 

 

[synapse]

I'm not sure i'm adding anything new to the topic. I think everything has been covered - expensive servers, comunity managment, etc... An online multiplayer game is never quite finished, there's always some work to be done.  No wonder independent developers stay away from it. 

Actually, indie developers don't stay away from it.

You can start a webgame using PHP/MySQL and make $5k/mo on your own pretty easily, if you're smart about it.  Webgames have extremely low dev cycles, FAR lower than 90% of the projects you see on tigsource - around 2 weeks.  They are also able to make a lot more money than most games on here, and reach a wider audience.  You just have to get out of the mindset that "2d scroller adventure game with cool physics and hip storyline" is the only genre of game out there.

You can make $5k/mo off of about 2000 daily users, and that will cost you only a few hundred bucks.  Most server prices also scale with load, so if you don't get a userbase, you won't be paying much.

Online games are actually a no-brainer.

[True Valhalla]

Webgames do seem more "indie-friendly", and are definitely cheaper to host.

MMO projects, however, require:
- Initial learning and understanding of networking.
- Massive development time (biggest contributor, IMO).
- Lots of testing, balancing, and fixing exploits.
- A lot of pre-planning and initial commitment.
- Exceptional engine infrastructure.
- Community management ( )
- Potentially expensive server.

Personally, I've got them all covered to the level I work at, except for time. To make a decent MMORPG (even a smaller scale one like I'm working on) simply requires such a huge investment of time that it makes development hell. Sometimes it is tedious, so you must also stay dedicated to the project. Your engine (particularly for the server) needs to be very steady. Sometimes it can take many iterations before you have a base good enough to be worth building on.

If you manage to get an online game off the ground, you then need a server (not always easy to get; I'm lucky), but hosting yourself should be fine in the game's initial steps. You then have to make sure hackers/spammers/etc., won't ruin your game, and you also have to deal with bad users and community relations.

It's difficult to balance, but if you stick at it you'll have a project steady enough to build on for years to come. If you want that.

[Skofo]

I'm not sure i'm adding anything new to the topic. I think everything has been covered - expensive servers, comunity managment, etc... An online multiplayer game is never quite finished, there's always some work to be done.  No wonder independent developers stay away from it. 

Actually, indie developers don't stay away from it.

You can start a webgame using PHP/MySQL and make $5k/mo on your own pretty easily, if you're smart about it.  Webgames have extremely low dev cycles, FAR lower than 90% of the projects you see on tigsource - around 2 weeks.  They are also able to make a lot more money than most games on here, and reach a wider audience.  You just have to get out of the mindset that "2d scroller adventure game with cool physics and hip storyline" is the only genre of game out there.

You can make $5k/mo off of about 2000 daily users, and that will cost you only a few hundred bucks.  Most server prices also scale with load, so if you don't get a userbase, you won't be paying much.

Online games are actually a no-brainer.

Is this the case with War Metal?

[migrafael]

@synapse

Wow, I completely forgot about browser based games like that, and I even have a couple of work collegues making  one. Truth be said, I really don't feel any conection with that sort of interactivity, hence me forgetting it

I stand corrected