Something I Don't Get About Indie Creators

[skykiii]

Recently I was re-watching Hbomberguy's video about RWBY, and it made me think of something.

Okay, so you're an indie creator, you could make literally anything you want.... and you decide to make something that is basically just yet another "girls in impractical outfits doing acrobatics while fighting monsters" type story that is barely different from the slop Japan has put out for yonks now.

And okay, maybe RWBY isn't really "indie" but it's more than just that. Look at vidya for example, so many indie creators just do rehashes of games that already exist.

What really bothers me--and I've said this before--is that the stories in every medium have not really gotten any better or more diverse. If anything they feel like they've shrunk. It always amazes me that there seems to be more variance of output in, say, pulp sci-fi and weird tales type fiction than we get in the modern day.

But I mean, come on. If you handed me $500,000 on the premise of "I have three years to make a horror type game," my overriding ambition would be to make something that nobody else is doing--at least in terms of story. So I really don't get it when indie creators decide "we just want to make Silent Hill 2 again."

Am I making sense?

 

[Old King Koaleamos]

I mean, maybe they just wanted to do something they thought was cool. Not everyone has a desire to go way off the beaten path.

Mind you, I do think we could use more variety.

 

[Whatevermancer]

What, you've never completed a game and thought:

This was so fun, I want more of this, but I would change this thing and that thing and also that thing...

 

[chalkyresidue]

It’s probably nothing new, but in the best of historical circumstances there were better editors, A&R guys, studio heads etc who could pick and choose new material that clicked with the public. We’ve been in a rut for decades where entertainment moguls ran their industries with an attitude of, “the public will take whatever slop we give them and like it.”
People looked to platforms on the internet for more interesting stuff, but there are problems with that. For one, with no guarantee of cash for your hard work, only self motivated people are making things… and that means dweebs and fetishists take up a lot of oxygen in these spaces. Moreover, you realize who’s willing to wade through tons of that shit to get to something good? An audience of other dorks and fetishists.
That’s how you wind up with things like Hazbin Hotel and Lackadaisy winding up as the success stories in independent animation. The fujoshis and furries powered them up to a level where they could attract wider attention. Ironically those same qualities will severely limit their appeal to general audiences once they get on that stage. It’s sucks; it’s totally broken. I’m sure someone who’s watching music and prose fiction more closely than I do could offer you similar examples.

Having said all this, if you have a good idea and the time and resources to pursue it, I don’t think things are totally hopeless.

 

[MrTroll]

But I mean, come on. If you handed me $500,000 on the premise of "I have three years to make a horror type game," my overriding ambition would be to make something that nobody else is doing--at least in terms of story. So I really don't get it when indie creators decide "we just want to make Silent Hill 2 again."

If you handed me $500,000 to make a horror game I'd steal the money and and make nothing.

 

[Hypercop]

my overriding ambition would be to make something that nobody else is doing--at least in terms of story. So I really don't get it when indie creators decide "we just want to make Silent Hill 2 again."

Indie devs often start with an incredibly unique idea and think, "Okay it's time to design the rest of this game!", only to realize most of it doesn't actually work, and as they tweak the idea into something salvageable & fun, it starts to look more & more like another popular game. 95% of highly creative ideas just won't work.

But it's actually really healthy for the games (and movie) industry to pursue these ideas. The two most influential games of the 21st century (Minecraft and Dark Souls) both took many years and iterations to figure out. I mean fuck, you can feel traces of Dark Souls in Evergrace, and FromSoft released that game in 2000. It would take 9 years for them to have a succesful game in that style, and it didn't really pop off until Dark Souls, and then Elden Ring took over the world. Yakuza had a similar path, a lot of the early games are mediocre.

 

[Gan Ying]

You don't want to bite off more than you can chew, especially if you're an inexperienced, untrained guy going his own way. On top of that, a crazy original idea will only get you so far if the execution isn't there or it ends up shallow as a puddle because you only thought about being original, not interesting.

You're better off trying to make Quake 2 rather than Daikatana, especially when you're just starting out.

 

[skykiii]

I wanna add on to my rant a bit.

So, there's some things I do understand.

First, influences will always be a thing. But you can be influenced without just imitating. You can tell Tolkien got a lot of his Silmarillion ideas from Greek and Norse Mythology but he still created something wholly his own.

I also understand wanting to homage things from the past. Again though, you can do that without descending into just imitation. I do this all the time--recently I was streaming the King's Field games for a group of friends and I made a few statements of "feel my Press Square to Smash skills," itself an homage to Markiplier (admittedly my inspiration came because the area I was in reminded me of Dungeon Nightmares, the game Mark was playing at the time).

And one last thing I do understand, is when you want to avoid tired ground but for some reason can't.

This last one is something I myself ran into. In one of my own writing attempts, I had a girl who becomes part of an adventuring party and had already had these big revelations planned about her. The problem was when the story starts, all the reader knows is A) she lived most of her life away from civilization and thus never had any proper education and B) this is a society where everyone has a job or task of some kind. I realized this meant the only thing she was qualified for was "stable girl," which I hated because in fantasy novels there's a cliche of stable kid or kitchen urchin who turns out to be something special. And yet it was the only thing that made logical sense.

But see, here's the thing:

In my case I was forced into an old trend because I saw the logic of it. And anyway its just one part of a larger story.

When Monty Oum decided he was going to rip-off Cowboy Bebop for an action sequence, he did it entirely because he thought the sequence was cool and didn't care if it made sense or if the different context caused conflicts, and it goes on to set expectations for the rest of the series.

But like, ultimately my big issue is I don't want my own work to be something that you could easily get from someone else, or which indeed you might have gotten. I could write a Giant Robot epic about the emotional cost of war, but why would I want to when Yoshiyuki Tomino already beat that horse into the ground?

The other thing I understand is at least wanting to do something less common. Like Lunacid being a King's Field clone--there ain't many of those.

 

[Old King Koaleamos]

I wanna add on to my rant a bit.

So, there's some things I do understand.

First, influences will always be a thing. But you can be influenced without just imitating. You can tell Tolkien got a lot of his Silmarillion ideas from Greek and Norse Mythology but he still created something wholly his own.

I also understand wanting to homage things from the past. Again though, you can do that without descending into just imitation. I do this all the time--recently I was streaming the King's Field games for a group of friends and I made a few statements of "feel my Press Square to Smash skills," itself an homage to Markiplier (admittedly my inspiration came because the area I was in reminded me of Dungeon Nightmares, the game Mark was playing at the time).

And one last thing I do understand, is when you want to avoid tired ground but for some reason can't.

This last one is something I myself ran into. In one of my own writing attempts, I had a girl who becomes part of an adventuring party and had already had these big revelations planned about her. The problem was when the story starts, all the reader knows is A) she lived most of her life away from civilization and thus never had any proper education and B) this is a society where everyone has a job or task of some kind. I realized this meant the only thing she was qualified for was "stable girl," which I hated because in fantasy novels there's a cliche of stable kid or kitchen urchin who turns out to be something special. And yet it was the only thing that made logical sense.

But see, here's the thing:

In my case I was forced into an old trend because I saw the logic of it. And anyway its just one part of a larger story.

When Monty Oum decided he was going to rip-off Cowboy Bebop for an action sequence, he did it entirely because he thought the sequence was cool and didn't care if it made sense or if the different context caused conflicts, and it goes on to set expectations for the rest of the series.

But like, ultimately my big issue is I don't want my own work to be something that you could easily get from someone else, or which indeed you might have gotten. I could write a Giant Robot epic about the emotional cost of war, but why would I want to when Yoshiyuki Tomino already beat that horse into the ground?

The other thing I understand is at least wanting to do something less common. Like Lunacid being a King's Field clone--there ain't many of those.

Sometimes you don't need to really go overboard in reinventing the wheel. Sure, you could use these sensible tropes, but make them an aspect of the background. We can address how [Sci-Fi/Magic Superweapon] is in a story about the cost of war, but also have the story focus on other things. I mean, it all depends on execution.

 

[Idiotron]

If you handed me $500,000 on the premise of "I have three years to make a horror type game," my overriding ambition would be to make something that nobody else is doing--at least in terms of story. So I really don't get it when indie creators decide "we just want to make Silent Hill 2 again."

And then your game sells 2000 copies and you have to go work at Mcdonalds.

Being innovative n shiet is cool but bills need to be paid.
The people who make games don't want this to be a hobby they do for free after 8 hours per day of a shitty job.

 

[Lemmingwiser]

What really bothers me--and I've said this before--is that the stories in every medium have not really gotten any better or more diverse

It's more a decline of culture, that all stories that are made are worse than those of yesteryear. Us old men haven't been yelling at the clouds enough, and as a result the muses have fallen asleep.

Also stories aren't replayable. Roguelikes and roguelites are. The latter are popular to make because the time to make vs time to play ratio is far better for the developer.

Finally if you ask me, the outfits are too practical still.

 

[Squawking Macaw]

And okay, maybe RWBY isn't really "indie" but it's more than just that. Look at vidya for example, so many indie creators just do rehashes of games that already exist.

I follow the Youtube devlog scene and this is pet peeve of mine. You see several devs openly talking about how much they loved [game], how they want to develop something that reminds them of [game] and end up creating a shitty ripoff of [game] as a result. They even copy [game]'s aesthetics because they're nostalgic for [game] as a whole, not just its gameplay.

Not that I can criticize them too much because I'd probably do the same thing. Sticking with what you know you'll like is easier even if it's less creative.

 

[Oliver Onions]

A lot of it is follow the leader, the same way the AAA industry works. You see the massive success something like Undertale has and decide if you make your own le quirky subversive RPG you'll similarly find fame and fortune. Or if you want to be even more base than that, it's really easy to cash in on something like the Slenderman game format because there's barely any components to those games and they are perfect fodder for livestreamers.

A less cynical answer could be that sometimes you really enjoy a type of game but never find the one that fits exactly what you want, so you set out to make it yourself. Like I think Hollow Knight is one of the greatest metroidvanias ever, and metroidvanias are my favourite genre, but I would prefer if that game had a proper parry mechanic that was a core of the combat instead of something you can do if you want to show off. This is also why Sekiro is my favourite Soulslike game (which is good because there's no way I could make something that complex).

 

[Kari Kamiya]

If you handed me $500,000 on the premise of "I have three years to make a horror type game,"

Why would you need $500K for an indie horror game to begin with? Just boot up RPG Maker lmao.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

The simple answer is that it's rare for the people who truly want to do something different to reach the position they want and stick to it. Anything above RPGMaker means having a team, so they need the ability to lead. They need budget, so it means putting a lot of your own money into it/finding an investor, both not really something a normal person would have an easy time doing. And even if they reach the goalposts, chances are the work would never surface and get recognition, since people want shit they already know.

So a normal person with a new idea is extremely rare to reach anywhere, but there are tons of ripoffs of known works.

 

[skykiii]

It's just sad because, I mean, you think about the Lovecraft circle. They could have just ripped off Lovecraft, and certainly they did borrow some ideas ("Oh, instead of the Necronomicon, I'll make up my own evil book called Nameless Cults!") but then still expanded the mythos. So the main man was giving us octopus-head aliens, while one of his friends was coming up with dogs that live in angles and chase time travellers or something.

Then I think about modern mythologies and instead of growing, they tend to shrink. Slenderman for example very quickly became "defined" in ways that made him rather boring while also kinda eviscerating him (so he "takes" people and turns them into "proxies" so he can..... ummm... I dunno).

And of course, if you go in a different direction or do anything really new, that's likely to just make people bitch and moan.

 

[TopTierHealer]

If you handed me $500,000 to make a horror game I'd steal the money and and make nothing.

And even that has become a cliché.

 

[Tasty Tatty]

Okay, so you're an indie creator, you could make literally anything you want.... and you decide to make something that is basically just yet another "girls in impractical outfits doing acrobatics while fighting monsters" type story that is barely different from the slop Japan has put out for yonks now.

The root of these problem is that most new current creators are just fanfic'ers. They aren't really "creating", they're just putting characters someone else already created that they like in an scenario they would have wanted them to be in first place, but with a different name due to copyright issues.

Biggest example of this is 50 Shades, which is basically "what if Twilight was sexually explicit".

So, the "new" female character doing what you mention is pretty much just Sailor Moon or Sakura, but in a "what if" of their creation.

 

[chalkyresidue]

Why would you need $500K for an indie horror game to begin with? Just boot up RPG Maker lmao.

Pays a half dozen people (who are competent enough to have better options) to quit their day jobs for a year

If you aren’t empowered with that kind of cash it’s better to do it yourself in your spare time

 

[skykiii]

Why would you need $500K for an indie horror game to begin with? Just boot up RPG Maker lmao.

Or if there's a good point n' click adventure game engine.

The one horror story idea I actually had tho, I thought of doing as a comic first just to get the story down, then maybe adapting into a game later.

And yeah to my memory the RPG Maker scene actually was a lot more creative than anything you had to pay money for.