There are a thousand differences between indie and mainstream gaming- for most people it's the tone of the games, and the graphics. You'll always hear that it's the graphics. That's because the plebs don't know the real difference is the code.

It helps to know what a manhour is. One man working 10 hours creates 10 manhours and 10 men working 1 hour each create 10 manhours. To be succinct, powerhouse gaming companies simply have access to more budget, and so more manhours (not to mention at least one Jolt guzzling guru, the guru's important). You're probably thinking of dozens of guys with pocket protectors and retainers typing at the speed of light and arguing about which demon is hottest around the crappy Keurig in the break room.

You're probably right about the Keurig convos (the watercooler has been replaced in gaming culture). But the innovative code comes from the old hands, the higher echelon of the company- enter the guru. Yes, they have location specialists and PR people, artists and marketers. But the real superstars are the ones who come up with unique code.

Indie gamers experienced a bump in satisfaction with the release of Unity, an easy to use game building engine that allowed indie gamer developers to bypass the cost of hiring people with tons of experience, who can handle unreasonable gameplay concepts the way that Mega Man handled obstacles on the way to destroy Dr. Wily. Major gaming corporations actually create mini engines like Unity to meet specific ideas.

That new combat interface? It was a review of previous code that was then written, possibly from scratch. Even the average joe game developer is opening code and noodling around with it, to see what's going on.

How hard is that? It can make you or break you. While your codemonkeys are cranking out gameplay by the manhour using your demo build and sending in feedback, mods and suggestions, an indie coder is inserting gameplay pixel by pixel. It gives their games the same personalized feel as a major gaming company, and puts a heavy focus on story (which can get lost in the production line), but interface falls by the wayside, due to project constraints.

So your coder is still the most important person in the house, either way, although you hopefully have a great storyline writer as well. It's why people come back for more, and what keeps the Indie industry afloat.

Know an indie developer that is trying to code from scratch? Kick them this old shareware. These guys made it off of their FAST (Fluid Action Software Tech), and studying it will up their interface tenfold. It's DOS based so the game can be opened for them to study.

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