bubez’s Reviews > Independent By Design: Art & Stories of Indie Game Creation > Status Update

The Tom Francis chapter is one of the most useful of the entire book.
"I wish more people were inspired by things they hate rather than things they love."
After that one, the Vlambeer story.

Subset Games and The Chinese Room. Okayish, but the authors are always inventing some weird morale to apply to the very singular stories of every studio they write about, just as it is some universal truth. It was not true at the time of release, it's even less now, few years later.

I found the Lucas Pope, Messhof and Roll7 chapters possibly the most interesting ones so far in the entire book, for various reasons I'm not able to explain here now. They felt different than the others, in a certain way.

The Simon Parkin interview is useful for indies who still didn't understand some of the main reasons why the press chooses to write about a certain game and not about another one.
After that, the story of Lucas Pope.

Between the chapters about Frictional Games on horror and constraints in design and history of Introversion Software, there are a couple of pages from Jessica Curry's Everybody's Gone To The Rapture music sheet.

- John Walker wrote a somehow "harsh" review of Gods Will Be Watching, so Deconstructeam's De Paco will never forget his name.
- After Croteam and maybe others I can't remember right now, this one too is a story of indies starving but delivering the success when the bomb was about to explode.
- Another game from Ludum Dare to success.
- Devolver Digital. Again. Is this an official DD celebration promo book?

Jessica Curry offers an interesting point of view being (at the time of printing) both the composer and the director of a studio, and why most of the time audio in games seems to be an afterthought

"Here, the risk remained but the belief that it was one worth taking fuelled the creation of something worthy of celebration."
As in this passage about the development of The Talos Principle, the book dances here and there around dangerous concepts, similar to the ones that a lot of viewers got from Indie Game: The Movie.