The Future of Indie Game Publishing?

There is an interesting article that came out about a week ago discussing the use of 3D printing and the game “Pocket Tactics“.  The author notes several things of importance including:

Monopoly isn’t what they call a fun board game.

Paying between $60 to $120 for a game is a bit ridiculous, but part of the industry now as people need lots of little miniatures, and

Using a 3D Printer can change all of that.

Pocket Tactics is simply a modular board game which is being created by Arian Croft of Ill Gotten Games.  In the article they note that their studio had been working on a roleplaying game for almost a decade, but things really changed for them when they started using 3D printing.  The big kicker is that the studio is now using software called Tinkercad which they have made open source, and invited others to not only try out, but to make their own games with.  As things have expanded, they have collaborated with Thingiverse who does 3D printing, and allows fans and interested parties to go in and print out their own 3D pieces.  Tiles, terrain, miniatures, whatever the program can do, people can print out.

While the pieces do not have the highest of detail (as you can see here at Thingiverse) it opens up the world of game design, including the ability to create your own pieces for your very own game at a cheaper cost than hiring an artist to sculpt, produce, and modify pieces.  This could mean the birth of more indie games out there, meaning that we may see even more games with lots of nice little bits.  What is even better is that the games will most likely be cheaper than a lot of your big box games.

I’m excited for 3D print, I think this is just the beginning of what may be an exciting change for the game industry.  Especially the Indie side of things.

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Agent 88, also known as Nick to a few intelligent species of the Earth, dates most of hist interest back to the days of his childhood where his dad made the claim that he was really Darth Vader. Despite decades of video and computer games, it was not until his 20′s that Agent 88 picked up roleplaying games, mostly focusing on Star Wars and D&D/Fantasy. In the 12+ years since then, he has dabbled in a variety of games and systems, and has now taken up the world’s most expensive hobby: Warhammer 40k. In his other life, Nick is an assistant professor at a university somewhere in the world. His research uses statistics, math, game theory, and other concepts to examine sporting contests and other games. Nick is currently attempting to design a board game based on his research and love of games, though his non-stop pvping as a Jedi Sage in SWTOR gets in the way of accomplishing this goal.

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