Show Video-game Video indies start to make their mark Alex Pham Los Angeles Times James Silva is one of the amateurs changing how the billion 40 video-game video industry defines fun The from Utica year old NY paid his way through college by scrubbing dishes at a diner That job might help him become the Quentin of video games He used it as inspiration for The Dishwasher in which the title character becomes a ninja and slashes his way out of a kitchen overrun by villains Microsoft Corp agreed to publish his stylized action game on the console and highlighted it at the Game Developers Conference here recently More than people many of them novices with similar ambitions attended the show This has been my dream since forever Silva said in an interview It sounds cliche but butI I actually have to pinch myself just to make sure Im I'm really awake Hes He's not alone Much as r.- r. ti f j 1 l' l tu t I S 4 t l lH r H r r v 1 T j r ZAH r L-a L L. L TL a LUJ Ul nuu J The Thc Dishwasher creator James Silva at the Game Developers elopers Conference in San Francisco said This has been my dream since forever It sounds cliche but I actually have to pinch myself just to make sure Im I'm really awake is giving unknown video a chance to find audiences the video-game video industry is opening its doors to upstart developers Major companies including Microsoft and Sony Corp are starting to snap up and promote games by amateurs and indie developers develop rs as Video-games Video Continued on AS Indie Video Games Continued from nom AI an antidote to the soaring budgets of mainstream games Highlighting the shift the conferences conference's Game of the Year award went to Portal which was developed by a team of students from the Institute of Technology in Redmond Wash The puzzler beat out budget big-budget industry franchises such as Super Mario Galaxy Rock Band and Call of Duty 4 The lines between the professional developer and the community are beginning to tos s shimmer immer said Jamil the conferences conference's executive director Its It's bringing the games industry back to its early days when two or three people could team up and make a hit game A few years ago aspiring programmers such as Silva wouldn't have stood a chance The games business has adopted the movie-industry movie approach of spending big in search of huge hits Creating a single new game can require tens of millions of dollars and more than developers working several years But a recent proliferation of use to and cheap or free software has made it possible for fora a programmer with a good idea to tomake tomake tomake make games out of his bedroom Theres There's a market for those games now Microsoft Sony and Co have built online stores where millions of players can buy and download games via Internet-connected Internet consoles bypassing traditional retailers that refuse to stock anything but blockbuster titles Take Kyle Gabler In 2005 he created the prototype for a game called World of Goo in four days on the floor of his unheated apartment while he lie was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University He graduated and went to work at Electronic Arts Inc the worlds world's largest game development company where he and friend Ron Carmel Cannel sought to make their own title rather than work on other peoples people's ideas But the two quickly realized that they would have to wait years for that chance inside EAI EAI EAI EA I wanted to make my own game on my own schedule said Carmel adding with a wink I also have problems with authority So Gabler 26 and Carmel Cannel 35 quit and started their own shop Boy They refined World of Goo on year old laptops while living off ofT of their savings The result a wacky cartoon world where players make structures out of goop to solve puzzles won awards for technical excellence and design innovation at last weeks week's conference has signed the game to sell through its Vii Ware online store Games such as World of Goo Goolack Goolack Goolack lack the pixels and polish of big- big studio titles But they make up for that with style quirkiness and humor that oozes unfiltered from the minds of their idiosyncratic creators Indie games are the new form of self-expression self for the motivated misfit Gabler said Many of these games dont don't fit into the tidy genres that publishers rely on to sell their wares such as action racing or role Even experienced developers have taken advantage of the indie vibe to launch quirky quirk pet projects made by a one-man one operation called Studios is just what it sounds like Players maneuver a vehicle with gelatinous wheels around oddly shaped obstacle courses Imagine trying to pitch that said Chris Satchell who heads up Microsoft's Game Developer Group Youre a car made out of jelly Theres There's no story no fancy graphics no racing Its It's just that jelly thing Satchell's group is working hard to scoop up these kinds of games to showcase on its Live online marketplace giving independent developers a way to put their titles in front of 10 million players Microsoft is one of several companies to release free software tools that cut the tedium and complexity of traditional programming Its It's the game industry's equivalent of putting video cameras and editing software in the hands of aspiring movie directors EA is taking simplicity one step further At its recent conference the Redwood City Cali based based f.-based company unveiled The Sims Carnival This version of the popular world virtual-world franchise lets players create their own games r from scratch without having to write a line of code Instead they use a drop drag-and-drop menu The game publisher hopes to unleash a wave of player-created player content and become a Y for games unlocking new business models modelS' in the process Like parent Google Inc which hasn't yet made much money from the video-sharing video service game companies are trying to figure out how to make money from amateur work Some games will be sold as downloads on consoles for 5 to 25 with developers receiving roughly 70 percent of the revenue Others will be given away for free rree and surrounded by ads on Web sites such MTV Networks' Networks Addicting Games But for now game companies are content to see if the masses can add creativity to an industry that some say has fallen into a rut of predictable and tired franchises The whole idea is to broaden the kinds of people who could make games said Rod Humble head of the Sims Studio at EA We asked ourselves What would it be like if my mom could make a game |