Quote:
Back in the 1990s, indie game design in real time 3D was out of our reach.
Nope. Back in the days of DOOM, Quake and Unreal, indie game development was what it as all about! Anyone (and I mean ANYONE) with an idea could create a game and have a chance at being successful with it. Why? Several reasons: 1) It did not cost zillions of dollars to create a game back then and therefore it was within most people's budgets. 2) It did not take hundreds of man-hours to create a game at that time and therefore you did not need a team of 20+ people to create a game. 3) You did not have to worry about the variety of hardware that we do today (i.e. no one had 3D video cards, etc). This was the day and age of games like Commander Keen. This was before there were any real shareware distribution centers. It may not have been as easy to create the game as we have it today, but a team of one, two or four could get a good game out the door in a few months.
Also, to think things are easier now may not be the case. They may not have had game creation kits in that day like we do know, but they sort of did. Myst wasn't completely coded from scratch. Cyan used a piece of software from Macromedia that was similar to Director (forgot the name). While this was a more "general" tool, it facilitated game creation in that you did not need to code from scratch.
I will disagree with your statement. In the beginning of this all, indie game creation was at its height and was in the reach of ANYONE that cared to dive in. Today, the budget and manpower needed puts it virtually out of the reach of most people despite the tools provided. This is not to say it is impossible ...
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