About This Series STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT: INDIE CITY is a documentary video series about the people building a new indie scene from the ashes of Chicago's triple-A failures. Featuring: Young Horses, (Octodad), The Men Who Wear Many Hats (Organ Trail), Culture Shock Games (We Are Chicago), William Chyr (Manifold Garden), Trinket Studios (Battle Chef Brigade), Greg Wohlwend (TumbleSeed), Chris Wade (Sausage Sports Club), DePaul University, Bit Bash, and more. Written, directed and produced by the creator of polygon.com’s "Human Angle" webseries, and author of the books "How Video Games Are Made" and "Sex, Drugs & Cartoon Violence." 1075eedd30 Title: Stage of Development: Indie CityProduction:Flying Saucer Media, LLC.Distributor:Devolver Digital FilmsRelease Date: 9 Feb, 2017Country: United StatesVideo Resolution: 1080pAspect Ratio: 16:9Audio: StereoContains: Adult LanguageSeasons: 1Episodes: 5 Stage Of Development: Indie City Activation Code after watching all of the videos i was left feeling disapointed. This could have been so much better. :(. Stage of Development... where to begin...First of all, for those who'd rather a more "tl;dr" opinion, I absolutely would not recommend this at its full price. On discount I still don't think it was worth the price tag, but it depends what you're looking for. Clearly, the title suggests it's a series about the progression in indie game development. To an extent that's true, but it's more about the developers' stages of development rather than their creations. The main problem with this series is that it doesn't seem to know what it's about, but it seems to be a "quantity over quality" scenario. Rather than having a focus on a few developers there are interviews with a countless number of developers, and subsequently you sadly don't really learn that much at all.If you're interested in indie development and you haven't seen it already, I highly recommend "Indie Game: The Movie", but more on that further down. When I started this series, after a few minutes I thought, "Hey, this is pretty cool", but unfortunately over time it seems to have less and less of a focus on game development and more on less related matters. It feels like reality TV that's about the people but not necessarily what they do. With that said, it's not terrible but wasn't what I expected. And in this instance, that is not a good thing. It starts off well, so I'll go through each episode...Episode 1 - Here We Are, Having a Company: This episode is actually pretty good which set me up for disappointment. It's mostly about the developers of Octodad, how the developers met each other and how they established an actual business. This felt very relevant and useful to those curious about game development. It's a shame the next episodes don't follow the same idea. If they were all twenty minutes long (so we learn more about each team) and like this one it'd be a fantastic purchase. At any rate, if my review's useful to you I recommend only getting this episode.Episode 2 - The Hermit of Hyde Park: I thought the episode seemed interesting at the beginning. Rather than focusing on a development team it's mostly about a single developer called William Chyr who made a physics game called Manifold Garden. The problem is that the majority of the episode is spent talking about William himself and not the game\u2014rather, just a few nuggets of information about it. This is where the series starts becoming more artsy-fartsy. He strolls around Chicago and tells us about his past juggling, and doing other things, and how looking at the architecture around Chicago gave him his vision for making this. I wouldn't call it a bad episode but I didn't learn anything from it.Episode 3 - Indie City: This one's actually okay. It just suffers from a couple of the problems I listed above. It starts off about a meeting a lot of Chicago-based game developers go to and what they did to establish this as previously Chicago didn't have this kind of event. This was interesting. Close to me there's a meet-up like this (though not half as big) and it's a great thing for indie developers. Then various developers talked about their history making games, and their experiences with companies such as Midway and Disney. We do get a few minutes of game footage too with some information on how the devs came up with these ideas, which is nice. The main problem is the quantity of people interviewed. You're left feeling you haven't learned that much because it keeps cycling, but at least this is the second worthwhile episode.Episode 4 - We Are Chicago: Things plummet here. To be brutally honest, I just found it boring. Very little of it is about games. Maybe with some artsy interpretation you can connect the dots and understand what they're trying to say, but as the title suggests the episode is about Chicago and the difficulties faced there. I get it: things must really suck in areas of Chicago. I live in the UK, and Manchester doesn't entirely consist of safe neighbourhoods. Same goes for London. So, the developers in this episode mostly talk about the injustice in Chicago and the unfortunate situations a lot of people find themselves in. They're trying to explain what goes on in Chicago in a game of their own. That's perfectly fair enough\u2014or, it would be\u2014but you only see a very small amount of the game and most of the episode is just about Chicago. If I wanted to know about Chicago I'd Alt+Tab and go to YouTube. I think it's a noble idea to make a game like this but it isn't what I imagine most people pay for.Episode 5 - Idiots Doing a Dumb Thing: What an apt title. This episode is a cringefest and almost as bad as the last. All that saves it is that it's more relevant to game development than the last one, and that's not saying much. Still, it was a double whammy of boredom so I didn't pay as much attention as I did with the first couple of episodes. I just wanted it over. So, from what I do remember it's about a game festival where a bunch of (mostly) game developers meet up to party. Kind of like the third episode but without any actual work, so you learn nothing about indie development. But hey, if you enjoy watching people using the PlayStation Move, or some random hipster guy with a top hat and pink pants dancing about like a fool, maybe this one is for you.There you have it. As explained I'd only recommend the first and third episodes. Like I said, see Indie Game: The Movie if you haven't. It's a lot longer and only focuses on a few developers and their games. One of them is the much-hated Phil Fish, but on the whole it's a really fun documentary and covers the "Stages of Development" (ho ho) of three critically acclaimed games: Braid, Fez and Super Meat Boy. That documentary you'll learn something from. This one I mostly felt was a waste of time. The fifteen-minute Octodad episode is well worth watching, though.
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