Contrary to popular belief, games don't always need huge budgets and teams of hundreds of worker drones toiling away under the watchful eye of whip-wielding overlords in order to be awesome. The thriving indie development scene continues to give birth to some of the weirdest, coolest, and most innovative games around. Indie Spotlight pulls back the curtain, taking a closer look at the world of independent game developers and the magic they make.
Venturing Into Hellish Depths
One of the best things about the indie game development scene is its frequent willingness to explore beyond the confines of traditional game concepts, and push things further than studios that toil on projects under the watchful eye of major publishers. Steering your own ship means more freedom to take risks, right? British indie developer Dan Marshall created the London-based Zombie Cow Studios on a foundation of quirky, off-the-cuff humor, and when he was commissioned to craft an educational game geared towards teaching young males about the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases, it only seemed natural that he'd inject a certain measure of playful wackiness into the mix. The result -- a game about tiny condom-adorned soldiers nuking assorted contractible nastiness inside a massive vagina, among other things -- easily ranks high among the most outlandish and risque games in the indie world.
Best known for its charming and hilarious downloadable adventure titles Been There, Dan That and Time Gentleman, Please!, Zombie Cow decided to branch out into the realm of bizarre, somewhat-disturbing action shooters with its latest project, Privates. Commissioned by Channel 4 in the UK as an educational project to teach kids about safe sex, the game puts you in command of a squad of soldiers wearing condom hats as they venture deep into some pretty gnarly and taboo terrain to battle the evil forces of Herpes, Chlamydia, and many other undesirable sexually transmitted conditions. "I've got no idea where the idea itself came from, but I remember I was at work, and the core idea of tiny soldiers blasting spunk inside people struck me," says Marshall. "I started writing a loose design doc, and it all sort of came together. Then there was lots of research to make sure what we were doing was factually accurate and made sense."
The game is more than just running around and shooting the hell out of folks' diseased naughty bits. As the small band of intrepid inner-space warriors encounter new and increasingly grisly foes, these adversaries must be scanned and identified before you can determine which medically oriented weapon treatment will neutralize them. The game features candid and amusing descriptions of each disease, radioed in by HQ with each scan. Thankfully, Privates strikes a good balance between education, interesting gameplay, and off-the-wall humor. Response to the game has been overwhelmingly positive, says Marshall -- though some people didn't get the idea behind it at first, and others pegged it as perverted.
"There were times during development -- the anus level in particular -- where I was very nervous about how people would take this sort of thing," he recalls. "I grew up with a lot of abstract, oddball, alternative comedy, and stuff like this doesn't really shock me. It suddenly dawned on me as I was laying these brown-smeared tiles that some people might not 'get' this. And that's fine. People having different senses of humor is an amazing and beautiful thing. But I'd be lying if I didn't have a few sleepless nights about the direction some of it was going in."
In addition to the PC version, Marshall had plans for an Xbox Live Indie channel release for Privates, but that was shot down pretty heartily when folks at Microsoft advised him the game likely wouldn't pass peer review. Instead of being sore about it, he's simply pushing onward with plans to crank out free downloadable content for the PC version that continues pushing boundaries and buttons -- this time, inside gentlemanly bits.
For Marshall, independent development is about more than mere creative freedom. Making games used to be just a hobby he obsessed over in-between the grueling hours of a "real" job. That is, until making games became his real job. "The best thing about being indie is not having to slug my way into an office, through the rain and sleet and near 'other people' who are often rude and smelly. I'm grateful for that every day, and it's partly why I work so hard: I don't ever want to have to go back to that," he says. "It's challenging, obviously. Scary. Expensive. You have to make sacrifices... but in the long run, I'm a billion times happier now than when I was working my arse off doing something I didn't really enjoy for someone else."
Nathan Meunier is a freelance writer and indie gaming enthusiast who likes his pixels jaggy and his tunes blippy. He writes about videogames and geek/gaming culture for GameSpy, IGN, What They Play, Nintendo Power, GamePro, and many other fine publications. See what he's up to at NathanMeunier.com.
