Indies have to stand out or else, says Arkedo's Guermonprez

"We are a small studio; we are making a very specific kind of game for a very specific kind of gamers. Let's call it the 'bright yellow' crowd," says Camille Guermonprez, co-founder of Paris based indie studio Arkedo. The company is currently developing 2D action game Hell Yeah! for Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network and PC download. He believes that standing out in the crowd is the key to indie success. The problem, he says, is that publishers can sometimes get in the way of the creative process. "The problem we have when we have to meet a publisher when the game is not done, is they give their opinion. Some of them are good. But my issue is that, as many people as you put around the table giving their color, in the end you've got brown. I can't be small and brown; it's not possible," he says. That's why he's also happy that he was able to initially fund Arkedo "in order to make the company as much close to 100 percent production as possible, and not business development and back-and-forth with many people having many ideas." The best games, says Guermonprez, come from tight creative control, not compromise. "It's a complete dictatorship; there's one boss of the game. In this case, it's Aurelien Regard. He's my partner. He had the general idea of the game, he wrote the whole game design, and he drew every single pixel you see in the game." That's why he's happy he went with Sega, he says. "They accepted not to call us for eight months so that we could completely be doing our game, and afterwards we could try to make it compatible with the market and listen to them -- but first let us do our thing." The full interview, in which Guermonprez explains how his indie team's agility outstrips the power of the big developers, is live now on Gamasutra.