There’s a lot that goes into every videogame that gets made, and especially for indie developers, the games that the eventually manage to release are deeply personal. Independent By Design: Art & Stories of Indie Game Creation – or Indie By Design for short – is a deep dive into twenty major indie games from the last few years.
The book was funded on Kickstarter back in the middle of 2015, and though it’s a year late, it’s now available both to backers and anyone who fancies a nice book to read about games, for £25 when bought directly for a short period of time, or £30 if you prefer Amazon.
Spread across 240 pages are in depth interviews with – take a deep breath – 11 bit studios, Acid Nerve, Acid Wizard, Adriel Wallick, Cellar Door Games, Chris Hecker, Croteam, Deconstructeam, Dennaton, Failbetter Games, Frictional Games, Introversion Software, inXile Entertainment, Lucas Pope, Messhof, Roll7, Subset Games, The Chinese Room, Tom Francis and Vlambeer. Those have then been augmented with interviews with Dean Hall, Graeme Struthers, Jessica Curry, Richard Lemarchand, Simon Parkin and Tom Jubert, to get different angles on the industry.
There’s a lot of book here for anyone that’s interested in seeing what goes into game development, and I know that the co-authors Stace Harman and John Robertson sweated the details over the quality. The 240 pages are all silk-touch 170gsm paper, threadsewn bound with top and tail bands, and it’s a soft-touch laminated hardback.
All of this is just a fancy way of saying it’s a nice book.
