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[Jacob]

Indie games minumum and maximum system requirements, commonly agreed upon.

As my laptop is dying, i find myself window- and jpeg-shopping for new laptops and what's running through my mind not "but can it play half-life 2 episode 3?" but "Can it play indie games?"

See the common problem and benefit with this media is the constantly expanding power our systems.

The mainstream media has hooked on to this and is constantly making more demanding games. This has resulted in them becoming more expensive for everybody and fewer risks are taken.

Another less obvious problem is that instead of using the means at our disposal, we keep inventing new ones while leaving behind major amounts if untapped potential. Who ever heard about an HD, surround sound, home theater experience in a book?

The mainstream companies can't compete here. If they don't appeal to the keg-&-guns audience they lose money.

Yet still I find my current laptop is in pain over Aquaria on the highest settings, grumbles about Braid and for some reason gets mental issues from Blueberry Garden. Yet it has fun displayig a medium demanding game like Half-Life 2.

What strikes me as one of the pressing issues of games is that we have to make so many choices: wii, x360, ps3, Windows (xp, Vista or 7), mac, linux, GPU and laptop or stationary?

When we read books we don't keep in mind whether we can read Scholastics or Ballantines. Sure, language is an issue, but that's it.

The same situation concerning video games is a Utopia.

But we can eliminate SOME of these choices.

I most certainly agree that some interactive and aestethic experiences can't be replicated replicated without certain amounts horse power. But seriously, Crysis is uncessesary and wasted.

And we can't deny that an engine like Unity truly enables access to perhaps some earlier rather hard to reach echelons of 3D game making?

So what I want to suggest is we, as an indie game community with many relations to the broad indie game making community, together, agree upon certain minimum demands for laptops and such, so that we can create a medium of easier accecebility so that more people can enjoy these treasures.

No demands, just requests. And reasonable ones, as in:

• All OS's are okay •

 No one should be forced to convert and sometimes you must let go of a game, just like some books are never translated.

• All currently in-development and already released indie games, who choose to be part of this union should be allowed to raise the minimum requirements •

We don't need to dictate anybody. This is part of the fairness. If a game like Zeno Clash wants to be part of the union then their slightly  higher system requirements should be acceptable aswell.

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When we set a price bar for how much a gamer should have to pay at most to be able to play indie games, this price bar is necessarily going to be a little high, considering that Blueberry Gardens, Zeno Clash and Braid for example, are demanding games. But that the most demanding indie game currently released or in active development, should set the standard, and from there on, developers should strive make there games playable on the minimum requirements.

The minimum requirements should be set for perhaps the length of an entire console generation.

Many advantages are to be gained from this:

- Computers will be cheaper for indie gamers

- Weak laptops are okay, there by saving the environment unnecessary issues.

- Developers and gamers gain more power over the big companies, because so there are so many laptop manufactures, that they HAVE to please the consumers, compared to the console world where the big three have become (always were?) faceless greedy corporations, cloaking themselves in PR officials and press releases.

- Indie game developers won't suddenly feel forced to develop bigger and more demanding games.



So I would very much like to start a serious debate about this. I think this suggestion is in EVERYONES best interests, but there might be something that I've overlooked? Remember, I'm not suggesting an EU like system, where developers who wants to join in are forced to comply with these standards. Simply suggestive guidelines with no consequences (except somebody annoyed that she can't run the game on her new, but weak, laptop).

[nihilocrat]

It's nice if you post in the introduction thread.

In many games, notably Blueberry Garden, there are lots of non-visual things happening in the background that may not be obvious. For the trees and bushes and stuff to grow while you are not around them, they still need to be simulated. Games like Half-Life 2 don't generally need to worry about this, as the only real things of interest are fairly close to the player. Also, the choice of language, framework/libraries, and such influence the performance of the game.

Games like Half-Life 2 also have humongous teams of veteran programmers. I'm not saying indie devs are all amateurs or inexperienced, but they definitely have less time to put in optimizations that Valve and others can dedicate hundreds or thousands of man-hours to. These optimizations can be difficult and non-obvious to implement, and indie devs generally don't have a ton of time to spend on things that don't directly influence the gameplay.

A lot of this stuff is not obvious if you are just a player and have not tried to program games yourself. Computers are pretty complicated things and the performance of a game is more often dependent upon the programmer and the sacrifices they are willing to make (Wolfenstein 3D and DooM both make assumptions about the game world to make it possible to render on 386/486 hardware; they are not TRULY 3D games) than on the perceived complexity of the visuals or the number of dimensions involved.


I think what you are saying boils down to "I wish computers were more like consoles, in that developers had a non-moving development target to write software for, instead of having to make games for several platforms at once while making sure it runs on computers that are somewhat old". This is a completely valid complaint, and it's ultimately a side-effect of how the computer market works. If the chip manufacturers, OEMs like Dell and Apple, and other such important companies agreed to make just one kind of computer every 5 years, we would probably see a market that operates like the console market.

Consoles are becoming more like computers, which I applaud, but I am saddened that the manufacturers are being particularly clever / selfish about it (take your pick) and tightly controlling the console owner's experience, as well as that of the developer, rather than providing an extremely flexible hardware platform like PCs and Macs.

[medieval]

[Montoli]

Your creepy, clapping man fills me with an indescribable sense of dread.

[Black18rose]

If we ask for what strikes me as one of the acute issues of amateur is that we accept to accomplish so abounding choices: wii, x360, ps3, Windows (xp, Vista or 7), mac, linux, GPU and laptop or stationary?


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[Hayden Scott-Baron]

I would never join any such union, but I can see where you're coming from.

When windows Vista was announced, it was announced that computers would have a simple grouped performance benchmark number. You could then use that number to tell consumers whether their system is up to scratch. This didn't work out at all, but there was some potential there.

In general this is a pipe-dream. CPU speeds are a mess, many consumers have no idea what GPU they have, and many other qualities.

That's okay though, because users can download the demo which also serves as a benchmark test. Most indies require customers to do this, and the performance of a demo has swung a purchase for me many times.

You can also get a general idea of what is bottom of the line each calendar year, especially if you target laptops specifically. I think it's fair to say "if you bought your computer in 2003 or later it should run this software fine".

[Guillaume]

90% of the indie games should be playable on low end machines, ie. netbooks or 500$ laptops, with extra tweaks for rich geeks.

Then we'd all be happy.

[Aquin]

I'd be honestly surprised to expect indie games to play on a lesser computer than the one I have now.  It's a single core CPU with specs lower than that of many new laptops.

Having said that, I was forced to skip Trine and Blueberry Garden because I just don't have the hardware.  A lot of Flash games have tremendous overhead as well.

I guess I better upgrade.   

[weasello]

There's a lot of projects I'd love to do, or features I'd love to have in my games, but simply can't for performance reasons. It seems a lot of my indie projects are crippled in some way, because of the slow performance of computers (I'm not even talking optimizable stuff - think complex AIs as just one example).

So I would say the max system requirement for my dream indie games would be.... the fastest processor on the market.

But I'm a complex code 2D-loving guy.

I'm sure there's someone out there who likes real simple games but with photo-realistic graphics, if only systems could handle it. So lets say he picks the best graphics card on the market...

I like your idea, and it's a nice dream to aspire to (as a gamer), but I think it will significantly limit many indie devs and you'll have trouble gaining support!

[Eclipse]

indie games are usually poor optimized compared to mainstream games, that's a fact, i don't know if it's only because the coders doesn't care or they do messy code hard to optimize.
One for all, The Path runs worse than Crysis, and it surely doesn't uses the same technologies or a similar polycount, yet it really runs sloppier.

On another note: Aquaria and Blueberry Garden are not demanding at all, it's your pc that sucks