The Indie Collective

Developing games is an art form that combines four key disciplines: Code, game design, art, and sound. Very few people are masters at one of those -- let alone all four. In the traditional game industry, it takes hundreds of individuals combining their specific talents to make a game that has a great design, bug-free code, beautiful art, and rich sound. In Flash, we rarely have two people, let alone two hundred.

Indie games only make money after they are completed, so there's rarely any salaried work in this business. That means there's no employer and no employees, which in turn means disagreements in a game's direction are very hard to resolve. In a game company, a dispute can be settled by the project leaders, but in a world without regular paychecks or an office, small issues can halt an entire project. If you do this for a living, one major halted project could be the end of your career.

So we're caught in a very tricky paradox. Working in teams can be prohibitively difficult. At the same time, virtually no humans on the planet possess the skills necessary to create a great game completely on their own in a reasonable time frame. This very problem is what Stencyl is solving.

Stencyl's collaborative and community-based approach to development could revolutionize everything in the world of Flash game development. Stencyl comes with several open-source game examples that show you the basic ideas of how to build various types of games. You're free to play with them and learn from them, and it's this idea of building off of the work of others that will allow Stencyl to completely revolutionize this industry. The Stencyl community enables every developer to benefit from the other members of the community, whether it be through a private collaboration or learning from the publicly available resources on StencylForge.

This collaboration with other developers will help us to finally stop re-inventing the wheel. There is no reason why every single flash game developer on the planet should need to write the code for a platforming game from scratch, but for the most part, they do. Our games will flourish as an art form when we can spend more time focusing on making the games fun and less time creating systems from scratch that have already been built hundreds of times by other people.

The beauty of the Stencyl Forge is that we can give to it as easily as we take from it. I began using Stencyl in September and was able to complete my first solo project very quickly using the Jump and Run platformer kit as the basis for the game. I appreciated this so much, that it has inspired me to give back by creating my own open source kit called "Drop Block", and to contribute to an existing kit for Run and Gun shooters, both of which are completely open to the public and can be used however anyone wants to use them.

As Stencyl enters public beta, the content available will exceed what can even be imagined right now. Rather than have small teams of people with specific duties, an individual developer may be able to pull resources from the minds of dozens of other developers and combine them into a single product. We'll have the manpower of a studio, but while maintaining our independence and creative freedom.

It is this concept that drew me to Stencyl in the first place. It's the reason I'm here writing about it. This could be a landmark event in independent development, and I'm really excited to watch it unfold.