Christian Heilmann

[worth watching] Indie Game – The Movie

Friday, December 14th, 2012 at 11:18 am

We might be late to the party but yesterday we splashed out a wild $10 to download and watch Indie Game – The Movie directly from the makers.

indie game the movie

The very nicely priced movie came in numerous high-quality DRM free download formats including subtitles, captions and creator’s audio track and is a great example how film distribution should be done in almost 2013 rather than telling me I am not in the correct country.

You can watch the trailer here:

Like almost anything awesome, the movie by James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot originated in Canada and follows a few indie game developers in interviews: Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes building and shipping Super Meat Boy, Phil Fish trying to finish and get the rights to release Fez and Jonathan Blow creating Braid.

The imagery and movie making technique is amazing and beautifully done and the movie is a very interesting documentary about the issues indie game developers have to deal with: publishing issues, legal obligations, public feedback and above all personal problems and social anxieties. Whilst a portrait of highly gifted and intelligent people you will be hard pushed to find anybody “normal” in the conventional social sense here.

I was especially taken by the interviews showing the makers dealing with online feedback, demands for the game to come out, hate mail, odd reviews but also all of them reacting badly to positive feedback. As someone who publishes a lot online and spreads out whatever I do for free I could very much relate to these parts.

All in all this is a must watch for anyone who wants to publish in our market – not only games, but anything really. You won’t get car chases and shoot-outs but it is still a very much worth your while movie.

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160: Graphs and RAGs explained and VS Code extension hacks Graphs and RAG explained, how AI is reshaping UI and work, how to efficiently use Cursor, VS Code extensions security issues.
159: AI pipelines, 10x faster TypeScript, How to interview How to use LLMs to help you write code and how much electricity does that use? Is your API secure? 10x faster TypeScript thanks to Go!
158: 🕹️ Super Mario AI 🔑 API keys in LLMs 🤙🏾 Vibe Coding Why is AI playing Super Mario? How is hallucinating the least of our worries and what are rules for developing Safety Critical Code?
157: CUDA in Python, Gemini Code Assist and back-dooring LLMs We met with a CUDA expert from NVIDIA about the future of hardware, we look at how AI fails and how to play pong on 140 browser tabs.
156: Enterprise dead, all about Bluesky and React moves on! Learn about Bluesky as a platform, how to build a React App and how to speed up SQL. And play an impossible game in the browser.

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