Adam Creighton, Computer and Video Gaming: AGDC: The Bit.Trip Series: Holistic Indie Console Game Design

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Adam Creighton, Computer and Video Gaming (Subscribe)

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

AGDC: The Bit.Trip Series: Holistic Indie Console Game Design

After a brief intro of the whys and wherefores of the Independent Game Festival and related Independent Games Summit, the summit kicked off with Gaijin Games Mike Roush's session, "AGDC: The BitTrip Series: Holistic Indie Console Game Design":

"Having created the Bit.Trip series for WiiWare to significant acclaim, Gaijin
Games has melded retro game design aesthetics with a unified, holistic-feeling
style to create games with a special feel. In this design talk, Gaijin Games'
Art Director Mike Roush discusses how they created the retro-infused series,
giving tips on standing out on WiiWare and how to intelligently mine classic
gaming for a unique look."

I use "kicked off", but it more like shuffled along.

I like Gaijin Games and those folks (and what they've accomplished), but Roush is pretty relaxed, which isn't the best for an early morning game development talk (hey, it was also his first presentation of the type, so he gets a lot of slack).

The talk boiled down to leveraging all parts of a team (art, design, programming) as joint stakeholders in pre- and production to make a high-caliber indie game in 3 months (impressive).

The talk was too light on actionable details, but Q&A opened things up a bit -- like a little more process detail as to how the team resolves collaborative deadlock (domain experts can trump in their areas). Etc.

Labels: AGDC, AGDC09, events