Indie Case Study INDIE CASE STUDY: MOMMY'S BEST GAMES

The romantic idea of the indie game designer is a bespeckled twenty-something artist sacrificing his health and happiness for his craft, but the reality is indie game design can be quite suburban.

Nathan Fouts is inarguably the happiest indie game designer I know. He has the tall lanky frame of a basketball star and always wears a t-shirt and a goofy smile. My first interview with him, back in 2008, was delayed 15 minutes because he was midway through repairing the front door of the family home. Every interview since, I've noticed that when given the chance he likes to bring up his wife and child.

"The best part," says Fouts about being an indie developer, "is feeling like you're out on some boat on the ocean ... charting the course ... deciding where to go. You're like, 'I like these games. I like to think about these problems. How do I make gameplay out of this? What would be an interesting project?' And also, 'what would contribute to culture and game design? What would maybe enrich someone's life if they played it?' I know we make violent games, but that kind of stuff, just thinking about it and talking to my wife about it is really fun."

Fouts's good ol' boy personality and suburban lifestyle make his violent games all the more jarring. They're retro masculine shooters, odes to being a teenage geek in the 1990s when games were played in arcades on sticky floors, under the din of heavy metal radio stations. They're surreal and raw; when you play them you can feel the rough edges.

Fouts lacks any affectations, which is to say he doesn't try to be what people think of an indie game designer. Neither does he hold any grudges against his competitors at AAA publishers. Perhaps because he once worked for them.

In 2007, Fouts left Insomniac Games, the creator of big-budget shooter franchise Resistance. As Fouts puts it, the company, annually named one of the best places to work by Entrepeneur.com, had provided a comfortable home away from home, but after 10 years at a big business, the family man was ready to do something different: creating games on his own.

Mind you, this was before Apple's App Store would turn 99 cent games into overnight success stories. "[The time] was actually still terrifying," says Fouts.

Operating from his home in Indiana, he became one of the first experienced designers to release a game on the new Xbox Live Community Games service, an alternative to Xbox Live Arcade that didn't require a product to meet all the demands necessary to simply be considered for that service.

His first game, Weapon of Choice, sold moderately well. The follow-ups have sold similarly, some slightly better or worse. None have been megahits or made Fouts an instant millionaire like the designers in Indie Game: The Movie.

"The hardest part is the business part," he says. "Because those numbers are not fun. Those are the hard things to deal with when a game doesn't do well." Fouts is currently trying to win a $250,000 grant from Chase Bank, which would help to lighten the financial burden on himself and his team.

His most recent game was commissioned by another designer who wanted an indie reimagining of an already successful IP. Serious Sam: Double D, available now on PC and coming to Xbox Live Arcade this fall, is a side-scrolling shooter in which the titular hero can stack weapons atop one another. A shotgun, atop a chainsaw, atop an assault rifle, atop another chainsaw or three: all attacking in tandem, like different instruments in a symphony of fleshy giblets.

The project isn't a treatise on art, nor was it entirely self-funded. It's definitely violent, filled with weapons and severed limbs. But most importantly, it is the game Fouts wanted to make. That's why he went indie. To make what he wants to.

"I think [the indie community] is doing well," says Fouts, "but it's also kind of sink or swim. It's sometimes tough to be swimming and reach down and help someone else that's falling and be afraid they're going to drag you down. There's a little bit of that, there's a little bit of pretension, there's a little bit of snobbiness, and there's definitely a lot of goodwill. I think it's doing well ... I think the biggest part is it shows everybody cares about it. When you have people fight and argue that much, it shows they're really into this art."