Marco Williams never knew how hard game development would be. He and the team at Hashbang Games—which included his brother and his best friend—spent eight months working on Orbital Blaster, a space shooter that pays homage to games like Galaga. The development process was riddled with problems from the get-go, and even the process of making a simple game turned out to be a bigger endeavor than expected. To make matters worse, Williams' effort to fund the game's development on Kickstarter failed at around three percent of its $75,000 funding goal.

“I've never designed and developed games before,” he admitted to Ars over the telephone. “I have a 15-year background of programming, but I've never successfully designed and launched a game.”

It was in the middle of the Kickstarter campaign that Williams was inspired to try his hand at full-scale game development for the first time. His inspiration was based on the promise behind one word: Ouya. The $99 cube-shaped, Android-powered, TV game console has been generating intense interest from independent game developers new and old since it attracted the support of 63,416 Kickstarter backers last year. The system will ship out to its initial backers on March 28 (ahead of a June launch to the general public), so many developers are gearing up to finally see their games on their living room TVs for first time. Heck, many will be seeing their game simply become playable for the first time.

Of the 480 launch titles compiled by one Ouya fan forum, a great number are being made by small-time developers with little to no experience making games. There really aren't any big budget, triple-A titles to speak of unless you count a few indie success stories that are porting their titles over from iOS and Android. Overwhelmingly, the Ouya's first crop of developers are regular people who see the system as their chance to break into the game industry—on a device that's geared toward people just like them.

You might think these developers would want to try their hand at developing for the established PC or mobile platforms. After all, it's a risk to develop for an unreleased console being made by an Internet startup with no track record and no proven market share. But when talking to a few first-time developers who are supporting the Ouya in a big way, the same message is heard again and again. This tiny, unproven box represents a way to fulfill their dream of getting a game on their TV set. It can turn indie gaming into something bigger than it is now.

Mobile is OK, but console is better

“If the Ouya was not launching, I would still be doing mobile contracting right now,” said Zachary Burke, one half of the two-man development team at Hypercane Studios. “My previous day job was mobile development…kind of the hot place to be right now.”

Zachary and his brother Jacob have been working on Rage Runner for the past six months. Zachary handles the development, Jacob handles the art, and the soundtrack is provided royalty-free by an artist named Teknoax. Rage Runner is a three-dimensional, fast-paced obstacle avoidance game that feels quite a bit like the mobile title Star Wars: Trench Run. Each level takes about a minute to play flawlessly, but Zachary said that “typically you die so many times it’s more like 20 minutes.”

Hypercane Studios had originally planned on heading straight for the PC and using Steam as its distributor. But when the Ouya came along, Jacob said the duo was “stoked about this console for indie developers." The Android-based console seemed to address a lot of the issues that had the pair discounting mobile game development in the first place. "We've just gotten a sour taste for mobile development,” Jacob told Ars. “I myself, as an artist, hate limitations. That’s why the Ouya is so nice: it allows me to do higher poly counts and a lot more than we can do on mobile.”

For Zachary, the Ouya's physical, dual-stick controller was one of the big reasons the Hypercane team chose the console for the debut of their first gaming creation. “If you compare the amount of control you have on a phone with the amount of control on an old school Nintendo controller, you’re much more accurate on the latter,” he explained. “We were really interested in games that use physical controllers and that are four-player simultaneous on one screen, and that’s something you just can’t do on mobile right now."

Zachary also feels that platforms like the Xbox just don't seem as accommodating to indie developers. "I don't like the Xbox Indie Games [section]...They have that whole thing locked down and then they have a maximum file size you can't exceed." He added that "they kind of tuck away the indie games behind several different menus—I don't feel like they're front and center and I don't feel like they treat you like a real developer. It just feels something that's kind of behind the curtains...an area for 'sad' games to live."

To keep Rage Runner evolving and to keep the community engaged well beyond this initial launch, players will be able to create their own levels and then publish them to share with others in the community. But the pair is already worried about the long-term financial implications of remotely storing those customized levels and things like players' high scores. “We’re really concerned about breaking even on server cost,” Zachary said. “A flat purchase fee… we would lose money on, and we obviously want to avoid that situation.” He added that they’ll be looking at in-app purchases to allow players to unblock certain features as a revenue model.

Despite this challenge, the brothers remain optimistic about their future—and the Ouya’s. Zachary is particularly positive about Ouya’s recent announcement that it would be launching updated hardware every year. “You know you’re going to be able to unlock more graphics capabilities and have more power to work it,” he said. On the other hand, “it will be a little more work to make sure it runs… At least with the Ouya, it’s going to be one vendor, different hardware.”

Zachary is also looking forward to the opportunities the Ouya will bring. "We were just thrilled at the chance to have our game on people's TVs in their living room. That's not an opportunity that's been available to us in the past." He added that while they hope to be hugely successful, "if we just get our name on the map and we get a couple of fans out of it, I'm going to be pretty happy with that."

Making games for a better cause

Across the Pacific Ocean from Hypercane's efforts, Kamil Czajko and the first-time developers at Australia's Kactus Games are putting the finishing touches on an Ouya role-playing game called Legacy of Barubash. The game puts players in the role of Kaleb, a young hunter who is forced to venture out of the small village he always called home in order to save it. The ambitious team is trying to combine the story mechanics of a title like Dragon Age in a two-dimensional, classic Square Enix-like package. “All of the team members have grown up with video games,” the game's website says. “We wanted to best of the JPRG with what we enjoyed from the western style RPGs, as well as to make something more complex than a casual game for the Android platform.”

Kactus Games consists of Czajko and his wife Sue, who acts as art director, writer, and world creator, along with art assistant Jonathon Morald and a couple contractors in the Netherlands and New York who work on sound and art assets. The team is devoting significant resources to its first indie title. A blog post on the site details how Gina Zdanowicz, the New York-based contractor, recorded the theme music for one of the characters using the live recording of a harpist and a soprano at Serial Lab Studios.