Every gamer out there has an idea how games should be made. Some of them actually dream of quitting their day job to become a full-time developer and some are thinking of applying colleges’ newly irrupting game design departments. Like any other industry, game design industry is embrangled and like any giant and altered-everyday industry, a formal yet related education never guarantees immediate results. Therefore, most aspiring -wanna-be game developers go the indie route. After hiring their sister to do both the p.r and voice over work, leasing their mum’s basement for office, they embark on a unforgiving journey of finding the right “indie” engine. Talent? Of course, they have it by default. They have already the “new” mmorpg or counter-strike clone idea and you’ll swear you’ve read something truly original after reading their design document, if they ever have one.

Here we’ll try to share our own and some colleagues’ experiences with the ever growing of magnitude of indie game engines. Just check devmaster.net   You’ll see new listings every week. You’ll be shocked at the prices to licensee them. Some goes as low as 100$, some are even free.  And if you spend some time twiddling with them you’ll see why we have a bittersense attitude in this very article.

First, why “indie” game engines? Why not make a mod? Because, nobody at the video games publishing industry cares about your mod. You might have some loyal fan base on your forums but guess why they are there, the answer is simple. Because your mod is free, and once again, nobody cares for your mod. Even if you manage to win a big mod-making contest, it will only look good on your resume. And “real” engines do cost money, real money. Unfortunately these games are available to only established studios.

So you go check those 100$ engines, surprisingly some of them display “nice” screenshots on their gallery pages. You say to yourself, “who cares about ultra-parallax-mapping, my gameplay idea will be my main hook and this 100$ engine looks “nice”.

And you pay…then nightmare begins…

Without further ado, here is a list of why so many “coding” talent is wasted already and what can be done to improve those little game engines to turn them into attention-grabbing prototypes.

1)Designers need to have a simple demo, not a full game. Or more precisely they need to show publishers a working prototype. If you don’t have one, you can’t get away by showcasing “sorry, programmer art here” excuses to deliver images about your engine’s capabilities. Have a working example prototype and please, oh, please, we should be able to download it from your website without any hassle. Don’t worry, If we knew how to steal your uber-per-pixel rendering code, we wouldn’t be on your site.

2) Support, support and then some more support. Are you a student studying software development? Is this your commercial engine or master thesis? If the later, please tell us, we’d be happy to give you feedback but draw away your eyes from our 100$. We know you’ll get a nice landing job at so-so development house and we’ll get 404 error codes while trying to access support forums in 1 year.

3) Times are changing. Long gone the days of quake2 and unreal1. No more bsp, please. You already know this, but please have a working plug-in for all the major 3d softwares out there, especially the free ones like blender.

4) We are wanna-be designers, not coders. We just want to import a texture and see how it looks like without typing anything in a note pad. It doesn’t require to be genius to figure out why everyone out there license unreal engine but not the notorious doom engine.

5) Stay away from anyone registering on your forum “kool looking engine, how about mmorpg support?” . Just ignore them and don’t waste your lovely nerve cells to think about changing your network code. They won’t make the next wow, neither you.

6) In the same sense, stay away from over-complicated rpg ideas for your prototype that will showcase your engine. Make a simple car racing demo or alien-shooter and make it look “good”. As simple as sounding that, we heard myriad promises which never happened on like how you’ll implement soft shadows on your next update.

7) Now here’s the tricky part, where most wanna-be designers gave up while working on indie game engines.. Assuming you have this car-racing/simple shooter demo, we have to be able to get our content into your engine easily. So give us access to your art/animation content also and tell us how we can replace it easily to see our ai models. Your cousin might be too protective over his valuable art assets but guess what? Internet is full of free models and mocap libraries. Mostly people import a textured mesh and terrain into these indie engines and that’s it. I shouldn’t be begging all the way to India to find a coder so that I can import some ak-47 which has been imported to all kinds of game engines 9476537453 times before since the birth of videogames. Simple put, without the need of extra coding we should be able to import one ai, one weapon and make one playable level.

Simply put, make a working engine, we’re not expecting next-gen looks or network code to handle hundreds of players. We just have to see our art assets inside the engine so that some publishers may notice us.