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7:56pm on Tuesday, 28th May, 2019:

Very Casual

Anecdote

I was in London today at the Casual Connect conference (at which I'm speaking tomorrow).

They had a large section of indie games on display, something like 20 or 30 of them. I couldn't help feeling, as I walked around, that they all looked like student projects. This may be because I've seen a lot of very good student projects, but I suspect it's more to do with the homogenising effect caused by the use by pretty well all of them of either Unity or Unreal.

We saw this in the old text MUD days. When people wrote their games from scratch, the variety was much wider than when they started using engines. Engines make some things hard to say and some thing easy to say; worse, they make it look as if there's nothing to say that they can't say. The result is that we get a lot of games that look the same and have the same gameplay, even though they were developed independently.

OK, so casual is casual, they're not AAA, and I'm sure these indie titles have more content than most student games. Nevertheless, if they all blur into one...




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Copyright © 2019 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).