5 December 2009
Welcome to IndieZen

Getting it done, Indie Style. plus:
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Summary of the book by Patrick Lencioni

Indie Game Developer’s Guide – Team Building
Written by Tony Richards
Thursday, 03 December 2009 14:13

Whether you’re a beginner, hobbyist, aspiring game developer, or a seasoned veteran, this article provides some great guidelines and hints for creating a great Indie game development team.

The article assumes you’re putting together a zero or low-budget team to build an Indie game. It answers questions like “Who is the leader?” and gives you great advice on how to keep your team motivated and making constant, steady progress on your game.

If you’re considering starting a game development project or if you’re already part of a team, this article is definitely a must-read.

This article is a work in progress.. I don’t pretend to be an expert on team building. Lets discuss this in the forums under this topic (click here) and we can collaborate and polish this article. –read more–

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

There are five things to look for when building an Indie team. One of the most difficult points to handle in the Indie Community is the geographic isolation of your members. This makes the next five topics all the more significant when choosing your team members.
There are five dysfunctions that we should watch for when building a team. From professional sports to corporate boardrooms to online communities these five personality traits can breakdown cohesive focus and slow productivity to a crawl, and in the Indie community that will kill your project. –read more–

28 November 2009
Welcome to IndieZen

Getting it done

Here at IndieZen we wish to bring the power of knowledge to as many game developers as possible. Through the re-use of existing knowledge we can achieve this goal more quickly. To that end, we bring a very valuable series of articles from GameDev.net to the attention of our readers. The Enginuity series is a wonderful primer for anyone wishing to design games and game engines. So put on your thinking caps and pop on over to GameDev.net. Once you finish there come back and see all the groundwork that has already been finished for the IndieZen Game Engine, aka ZOSS.

Enginuity Part 1

14 November 2009
Welcome to IndieZen

OGRE, OGRE, Ogitor… Now what?
I got Ogitor running… Then I tried to use it to create a basic level layout… Then (4 hours later) I realized I am not a 3D artist and I know very little about making meshes and animations in Blender, or any other 3D program for that matter. The prospect of cramming thousands of hours into learning 3D animations to produce level designs was an overwhelming thought and on my schedule, extremely difficult to fit in.

Enter the OSS graphics people. Thanks to you all at WorldForge for providing such a great resource for the non-3D-Artist types. I was referred to the previous link by another team member, Matt Gray of HatBoy Studios, on the IndieZen development team. WorldForge in a useful 3D asset library that can be used and modified under the GPL series of licensing. Check out the FAQ for the details. In the mean time, for use with IndieZen I downloaded the resource library and will begin using it for level design beginning immediately.