Interview with Chris McGarry of Ominous Development

Do you have any tips for aspiring indie developers?

Learn your trade and learn it well, and try not to get wrapped up the stuff that you don’t like doing as far as games go. If you need both art assets and music assets, you do one really well and the other really shitty, focus on what you do well and surround yourself with other people who are passionate about the project who do that other thing well. Games are the sum of their parts; don’t waste your time doing things you’re not good at unless you can pull off some weirdly artistic vision with it.

I first started getting into programming and I wouldn’t say I was bad at it, but I didn’t enjoy it. Had I gone down that path, I probably would have had a larger hand in coding our game, but I wouldn’t like it, which is kind of the point.

So find what you like to do in video games and do it well. That will get you further in the industry rather than doing a bunch of things half-assed. Nobody is going to say, “Wow, you can do a lot of things really half-assed, you’re hired!” Find people that you work well with and make games. Everyone can come up with ideas, good ideas even, but the execution of those ideas is really what takes lot of time, effort and heart.

What does the word ‘indie’ mean to you?

I hate for the term indie to start becoming co-opted like it is in the music industry. Lets be honest, it doesn’t mean a damn thing in the music industry any more. The whole wave of press and attention for the indie scene is fantastic, but it’s going to get to a point where EA will have its ‘indie division,’ which is still just EA, they’re just making goofy games here and there. Look at Clover Studios, big companies sometimes just have unrealistic sales expectations for these kinds of games. A lot of games on Xbox LIVE Arcade are made by these small studios based out of their basements, and while we’d all like to get rich, our game isn’t going to sell like Battlefield: Bad Company. Just because Braid sold millions of unites doesn’t mean indie games are going to be incredibly hot sellers. You’ll get some here and there, but that’s not the point.

I think indie means people who are making games because they love making games. It’s just like what indie used to mean in music, it meant indie-pendent, it was guys that were making it because they love making music.

I think there’s a point when a guy, who considers himself an indie developer and loves making games, might get picked up by EA, or somebody. It’s the point at which his soul gets crushed, that’s when he stops being an indie developer. When he’s just like, “Sure, I’ll do BlowBlow’s Big Adventure. I need a paycheck.” Maybe that’s when it stops being indie, I don’t know.

For example, Star Control II was this massive game, imagine Mass Effect multiplied by a thousand and put it in a Commodore 64. It was made by a company named Toys for Bob. Their publisher, Accolade, approached them and said they needed to publish the game, and they told them the game wasn’t ready yet. But Accolade kept riding them and so they picked up all their computers and equipment and just disappeared. I think they rented a cabin out in the middle of nowhere Alaska to finish the game; Accolade even hired private investigators to find these guys and get their game so they could publish it.

Those guys are fucking indie.

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