5 tips for no-bull indie game design

Like many of you reading this, I’ve been making games for a long time. For much of that time, it was within a professional studio environment, working on products and adhering to design philosophies that weren’t always of my own making.

And sure, I’ve worked on some projects that I’m really proud of, but there’s nothing quite like striking out alone and creating something that’s fully your own. That’s why so many of us still romanticize the indie life, despite it being so grueling.

Though even without corporate oversight, it’s easy to slip into patterns of thinking that come straight from the industry establishment. It’s easy to look around at the games that are successful in the market and, whether consciously or unconsciously, take your cues from them.

But, are we not indies because, for one reason or another, the mainstream isn’t delivering what we want? Personally, having worked at Lucasfilm for a long time, I’d been in a very graphics and narrative-focused environment that, to my mind, was making gameplay a tertiary consideration. I constantly see modern games that are visually stunning but mechanically vapid due to gameplay being put on the backburner.

Vendetta Forever is my own antithetical backlash to this. It is one of my goals to prove that if you make something with all the narrative and graphical bloat taken out, you can still be successful.

Will it work? I don’t know yet. But what I do know is that my game is damn fun. Here are some of the things I learned while making it.

1. Follow the Fun

Your philosophy on games doesn’t need to be the same as mine, but it’s important to have one as a starting point.

What do you want in a game? For me, games should foremost have fun and enjoyable mechanics. What’s one game that exemplifies your gaming philosophy? For me, a big one is DOOM (2016).

Study what you specifically like about that game. What makes it special for you? In the case of DOOM, its story is completely incidental. Graphically, it's great. But the part I loved the most is the Glory Kills.  Now that is a great mechanic!  Zoom to an enemy, tear his arm off and shove it down his throat, get healed, then zoom to the next guy. What’s not to like?

The result is essentially a movement mechanic that takes the player from kill, to kill, to kill, all while supporting the interplay of ammo and health.

The realization of how amazingly satisfying this was directly inspired Lo-Kill-Motion: the mechanic that would go on to form the basis of Vendetta Forever.

When you’re following what you find fun, things move quickly. Lo-Kill-Motion in a nutshell: you kill a guy, they drop their weapon, you catch it and teleport to where they were. Once I developed that concept, I had it prototyped in VR within a day.

Immediately, I knew it felt cool. Even with five enemies spawning infinitely in a test chamber, I was zooming around for probably 30 minutes straight, just having a great time. In terms of core mechanics, the game really hasn’t changed all that much since this version. At its core, it is still that prototype I built in one day.

All this came from a desire to explore and build upon a mechanic I found insanely fun, and everything layered on since has been all about making that strong base even more fun. It may sound ridiculously simple, but there’s no better way to identify the ideas you really want to run with and keep yourself motivated to finish them.

2. Explore and Experiment

VR games have challenges with locomotion. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of any of the established solutions that exist. Laser pointer teleport is the absolute worst. Smooth locomotion is becoming the standard, but it still doesn’t always feel good.

I’m proud to have hit upon a good alternative in Lo-Kill-Motion that works effortlessly and allows the player to focus on the action. But my solution to the problem didn’t come by banging my head against it or by sitting down and deeply thinking about how to come up with a new approach to VR locomotion.

Instead, I just made something that I thought would be really fun to play, and it had the unintended benefit of also addressing many of the issues that I and many other players have experienced with movement in VR. A true happy accident!

The lesson? Your biggest challenges might be solved in ways you don’t expect, and are way more likely to be addressed meaningfully from a place of inspiration, i.e. fun, than by a dry, analytical approach to the problem.

3. Make What You Love

If you’re an indie developer, and particularly if you’re a solo dev like me, your games will inevitably be something of a reflection of you.

As you now know, I think fun is the single most important thing to pursue in game development. I have a great love for VR, and have worked with the tech for years – pretty much ever since it became available to regular people, from the first Oculus Rift onwards.

I am also (and I state this proudly) a former Quintuple Platinum member of Blockbuster. I watched so many action movies growing up, being a child of that late 80s / early 90s golden era, and even today I almost always have a movie playing on the side while I am working.

Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Bruce Willis, Uma – I just eat all that stuff up, and always have. If you ever had a Blockbuster card, you'll probably find something to identify with in my game.

All of these elements combined to form the DNA of Vendetta Forever. My non-negotiables were:

Everything stemmed so naturally from these pieces, making the entire development much smoother; If you build an experience around things you deeply enjoy, that passion will resonate and help carry you through the process.

4. Inspiration Is Everywhere

A key distinction I made early in the development of Vendetta Forever was that I didn’t want to make a game that is an action movie. I wanted to make a game that is a bunch of action scenes.

This means a series of vignettes in various different settings and scenarios, all quickfire like the scenes in classic action films, and immediately that opened the door for level inspiration from absolutely anywhere and everywhere.

I love how action movies will take everyday scenarios and make super cool moments out of them. For instance, you're in a kitchen and there's kitchen stuff around – cleavers, scissors, bottles, cans... how could you make a compelling combat scene here?

Where are the enemies coming from? Is the counter in the way? Can you jump over the counter, or do you go around it? Do you grab a knife off the wall and throw it at someone? It’s taking that environmental utility of a Jackie Chan fight scene, which can make even the most innocuous of spaces feel perfect for killing a bunch of dudes in unexpected ways.

Clearly, I don’t live inside an action movie any more than I live inside a high-fantasy realm or a futuristic megacity, but looking around my natural environment and thinking ‘how would you stage a fight scene in this space?’ was so unbelievably inspiring to me.

It could be my living room, down an alley, in an arcade or a pizza place; with a few tweaks, I knew that I could make any of these insane and super fun. With this mindset, it was a joy to come up with ideas for new levels.

The best level you ever design could come from a path you walk every day.

5. Break the Rules

We’re coming full circle with this last one, and I’ll ask you to remember why you became an indie developer in the first place.

Big-budget AAA games, by and large, have a pretty rigid scope from the start that the people in charge are very hesitant to change. I know first-hand that if you go to your bosses in that environment and suggest a wild gameplay variation that you know would only impact a small portion of the game’s overall runtime, that’s not something they’re going to be very receptive to. For obvious reasons!

But as indies, we have the ability to make these decisions, for no reason other than thinking it will be cool.

This is something I really wanted to embrace in Vendetta Forever. My philosophy was, if you think of something cool, fucking get it in the game and we’ll figure out how to clean up the mess later!

Not only does this help satisfy my ADHD, I genuinely think games are inferior when no room is made for these random explosions of creativity. Scope creep is a real thing, sure, but it’s not always a dirty word.

Some of my favourite bits of the game came from me completely breaking and rebuilding it, in service of a cool feature that might only appear in a single level.

I recommend not always letting logic win, and at least sometimes listening to that voice in your head saying “wouldn’t it be cool if…”

Vendetta Forever is out today on Meta Quest and PS VR2. A free demo is available right now on Meta Quest.