I left the commercial games industry in February 2009 after, in all honesty, probably the most miserable period of my life. I didn’t leave voluntarily because, in all honesty, even getting paid for something you’ve grown to despise trumps not getting paid at all so I had no intentions of jumping ship. I wasn’t exactly pushed per se, but the fact that I wasn’t kept on to be part of the company that sprang up immediately after the company I worked for exploded, meant that I had effectively been fired. But fired in a manner which meant I got to claim statutory redundancy.

So that was nice. Not terribly surprising, though – I was hardly a model employee during those last few months of my stay. There’s a certain trouble you see, a rather delicate dance you have to perform if you want to be successful at the sort of place that, while it doesn’t make anything particularly amazing, is chock full of people who would be perfectly capable of amazingness given the right circumstance but constrained by a small number of utterly useless, yet bafflingly well-regarded people.

The trick is, to be vocal and passionate… but only a bit. Definitely not too much, and especially not if your passion is focussed on what isn’t working, because no-one that matters will care about the why unless the why is to do with somebody disposable. They might enquire earnestly the first time but the second time, after they’ve failed to address it, they’ll care less. And certainly five years later when the same problems are popping up they’ll really not want to hear them and will probably tell you to change the record or just yawn off your arguments as “that thing you do”.

So despite the fact that in between these moments of heated outrage you are, you know, actually rather good at what you do and (if you’ll forgive the blowing of one’s own trumpet) certainly beneficial to the project, when the opportunity arises you’ll be quietly let go. A bit like that bit in Titanic – morning dawns and there’s an empty space where Leonard Di Cappuccino used to be. Except in this circumstance, nobody is crying in the audience.

So, that was that. Forced into the indie business way sooner than I had intended. Fortunately for me, Lemmy had found himself in a similar position – indie games were always something we intended to do at some point, so it was either now or try and get a job somewhere else.

Had we had gone for the second option, perhaps I would have found myself at a great developer, one which would have immediately quashed all my frustrations. There are plenty of commercial games I love, and plenty of industry figureheads I hugely respect. Maybe working for them would be different. I have to rather hold on to that hope or it would utterly crush whatever remains of my love of the industry.

But in the indie scene I find myself and now I’m here, I discover that the gulf between ‘commercial’ and ‘indie’ is not as wide as I had expected. There are indie games out-selling commercial games, and suddenly you realise that gamers aren’t just some hypothetical statistic but actual real people who don’t really give a damn who made a game, providing that the game is completely brilliant. It sounds daft to say that, but in the commercial industry as an artist or programmer (even if you’re senior or a lead), you really are massively divorced from the people who actually play the thing you make. At least in my experience, anyway.

And so you find yourself able to actually have a dialogue with the people that may buy, or have bought, your game without having to send off your responses for approval or find someone else responding on your behalf with a slightly warped version of what it was you said. And then you start to wonder why in the commercial industry there tends to be so little communication with gamers because, you know, they’ve got quite a lot of stuff to say.

For example, there is a thread on our forums concerning the way our game was going to handle the player’s mental health. Me, Lemmy, and Nick have our own ideas about this, of course, but as it transpired some of our posters were qualified in this very area. Who better to discuss this with, if not 1) people who know one hell of a lot more about the intricacies than you possibly could with just your own game-based ideas and access to Google and 2) people who like the sound of your game?

When I remember games that I used to play on my C64, I typically remember them with fabulous graphics. It’s usually a massive disappointment to see them later and discover all that atmosphere was just a smudgy blob scrolling around making unconvincingly loud footsteps sounds. But your mind filled in the gaps. There’s something to be said for really simplistic graphics – the more you leave up to the player, the richer their experience. Games like Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft demonstrate that unequivocally. So really, what do you gain from having Hollywood stars doing your voices, or actors mo-capping animations? You get wonderful-looking visuals and exciting cutscenes, of course, but we’re not in the business of making films, we’re making games – an industry born as much (or more) from table-top adventurers than table-tennis players. The cross-over between games and films is not a new phenomenon but rather than being an inevitable evolution feels more like species divergence. In the future there’ll be a term for each (and not a rubbish term, like ‘interactive movie’).

When that happens, one of those types will be a game and one will be something else. Something probably cool and exciting, but not a game. When it comes down to it, a game is just a set of rules and a playfield. You can dress it up with swanky graphics, but the more you force the direction, the more complicated the rules or constrained the playfield, the less gamey it becomes. And eventually, no matter how exciting you make your presentation, everyone will just want to play Pacman.