Indy and UX - Game Developers Network

League of Geeks: "It's a very serious time for a studio of our size"

GamesIndustry.biz

NOVEMBER 14, 2023

A pioneer of the indie scene with Armello back in the early 2010s, the Melbourne-based studio has followed a successful path for over a decade, always lending a helping hand to other Australian indies along the way. League of Geeks has a special place in the Australian games industry. Read more

Studios

Studios UX Indy Localization

Rival guilds and a dragon landlord all contribute to the rowdy charm of Dungeon Inn

PreMortem.Games

DECEMBER 6, 2024

South Korean indie studio Cat Society is a small team with big ambitions. Lee focuses on art direction, UI/UX design and related programming tasks, while Kim takes charge of illustrations, adventurer designs and animations. Since there are only a few of us, each person is taking on multiple roles, Ko explains.

Balance

Balance UX Studios Art

A friend of mine wants to become a game designer without learning any other disciplines in game dev, he seems very sure this is possible but his confidence comes off as “idea guy” to me. I like thinking about design as well and how it could all fit together cohesively but I’m worried he’s setting himself up for failure by not learning another discipline to go along with it. Am I correct in this thought or am I being an jerk?

Ask a Game Dev

AUGUST 3, 2023

That might mean working on combat, quests, cinematics, narrative, itemization, UX, enemies, levels/environments, or any of a number of other specialties. If he wants to go into the indie space and work with an extremely small team, he's going to need to wear a lot of hats.

Cinematics

Cinematics Game Design Game Designer Dev

“Put that planet to the left!”

Played with Fire

DECEMBER 4, 2021

So today we’re going to talk about UX (user experience) in virtual reality games and tell you about the most interesting solutions we used in our game Stargaze! Good UX practices for VR. That’s why we gathered all the best UX practices we know, all based on the example of Stargaze. Stargaze – cosmic VR game.

UX

UX Puzzle Animation Animation

Games Industry Events in the UK and Europe 2023

OPM Jobs

APRIL 13, 2023

Pocket Gamer Connects London 23rd – 24th | London, UK Pocket Gamer Connects provides value for every level of the mobile and portable device gaming industry from global corporations through to indie developers, whether you’re looking to develop strategies or make new connections. Find out more. Find out more. Find out more.

Games

Games Mobile Gaming Dev Mobile

The Forgotten City (2021) revisited

Radiator Blog

NOVEMBER 3, 2021

Interesting approachability / accessibility UX here. Still, overall this was a very impressive achievement for just 3 indie developers. Before you begin the zombie-filled Palace quest, the game UI helpfully advises, "if you're not a fan of action or horror gameplay, feel free to decline this quest."

NPC

NPC Fighting Art Dev

Flavored by Authenticity: How Personal Experiences Amplify Narrative

Game Design Aspect

FEBRUARY 1, 2022

Juliana Loh Juliana Loh is an independent Producer/Artist whose background includes branded entertainment, UX and art direction. His latest book is Gaming SEL: Games as Transformational to Social and Emotional Learning (bit.ly/GamingSEL). GamingSEL). For more, please visit MatthewFarber.com.

Writing

Writing Educational Education UX

Upcoming CIMFest Keynote: Flavored by Authenticity

Game Design Aspect

JUNE 9, 2021

Juliana Loh Juliana Loh is an independent Producer/Artist whose background includes branded entertainment, UX and art direction. His latest book is Gaming SEL: Games as Transformational to Social and Emotional Learning (bit.ly/GamingSEL). GamingSEL). For more, please visit MatthewFarber.com.

Writing

Writing Educational Education Game Design

Open world RPG design notes from Enderal, a big long Skyrim mod

Radiator Blog

MAY 5, 2021

It's probably not worth the hassle for a solo indie. The Enderal builders don't want the player to ruin their carefully arranged clutter, so we get absurd things like "empty" sausages or un-lootable plates of food, breaking Skyrim's UX patterns for pickups. Sit and listen. Lots of height variation and clutter = broken pathfinding.

Open World

Open World NPC Cutscenes Terrain

Happy 5th Steam Release Anniversary

Greenheart Games

AUGUST 30, 2018

It was an intensely stressful and uncertain time full of the highs and lows of indie development. – Most recently, a major content and quality-of-life update introducing new topics, everyone’s favorite new console, a brand new game mode and several important UX improvements went live for free.

Simulation

Simulation Dev Prototyping Technology

My friend is making an arcade racer and I’ve been playtesting his builds for him. He didn’t go into it thinking it’d be easy but there’s a ton of things he didn’t at all realize would be a headache going into it. Obviously all games are hard to make but some are more apparent about their daunting nature. Which genres are deceptively difficult even if reasonably possible by a small indie team? What surprised you when you hit the big leagues?

Ask a Game Dev

JANUARY 23, 2024

Whenever I do solo dev work, the feature that always takes the longest and tends to require the most work to get something playable by actual players is the UI. Building out the gameplay features is always a lot of fun, but you can only go so far by fiddling with variables and restarting.

Dev

Dev Build Content Feature

2020 Predictions #2: What Happens When the Hypercasual Party Ends?

Deconstructor of Fun

JANUARY 17, 2020

Notable new releases include Outfit7's new Talking Tom runner , indie favorite Sky: Children of the Light and ONESOFT’s awkwardly familiar jumping brothers Bob and Bino. * Success of new entrants in the genre was quite limited. Ad revenues not included. Includes both soft-launch and global launch titles.

Mechanics

Mechanics Platformer Studios Data

The Economy of the Metaverse | Interview with Epic CEO Tim Sweeney

Deconstructor of Fun

JULY 30, 2020

Whereas on Android, you have to go through this incredibly complicated series of screens, some Epic explaining what to do on the next screen and then some designed by… Google has awesome UX designers. Tim, thank you again for your time and thank you for being so ambitious with Epic and for supporting small indie developers.

Platformer

Platformer Data Point and Click Build

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