Choose one of the indie designers / developers and outline why there work and approach is of interest to you.

 

Indie games are usually created for the very narrow group of viewers. The reason for that are obviously huge studios with advanced computer equipment and hundreds of workers, which monopolise the game market . Although it does not mean that it is not possible to create exciting games in a small team.

An example of game considered by me as one with the most stunning graphics was made by only few people and it is called Samorost. It’s designer Jakub Dworsky is definitely worth attention because his way of design is very unique.

He takes an inspiration mainly from the style of traditional east European cartoons and animations. The other thing which influenced his career was old primitive games such as Goblins.

Jakub Dworsky puts great effort to make every game have exceptional and original art style. For example he was not happy about his perfect hand drawing in the game Machinarium so he drew all the graphics using left hand. When it comes  to Samorost, decision about the final art style was very difficult. He tried to create fantasy world made of photos, the next idea was to do it with pencils, after all Dworsky mixed photography and drawing which looks truly magical.

In my opinion Dworsky’s works are very inspiring and hope-giving. His design process is an evidence that working on graphics in games doesn’t mean to be a craftsman sculpting one of thousands objects. You can still create incredible things and be an artist in small indie projects.

 

What do you think could be the most exciting indie projects that are in development?

 

These days almost everyone can create their own game so there is a variety of indie projects in development and finding the interesting one can be challenging.

The one I’m looking forward the most is definitely The Last Night by Odd Tales. The game is being made since 2014 and the major changes have been made since this time.

The main inspiration for the developers was games such as Another World (1991), Flashback (1992) or Oddworld (1997). The other source of inspiration was the variety of Hong Kong city.

The distinguishing feature of this game is an art style which basically is a pixel art style but because of the enormous amount of lighting and shading layers it gives an impression of being realistic. It is worth to mention that developers mixed the twentieth-century way of design with modern technology of animation to get completely new effects. The movements of characters are based on the recordings of real people. All of perfectly matched pieces make a wonderful atmosphere of dark cyberpunk.

Everyone misses the old times of great 2D games but people are getting used to new standards of graphics and mechanics. I think that it is exactly the product which will fulfil this gap.

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