The indie game community and the Linux community have lots in common. They both live happily outside of the mainstream, they’re both forward-thinking, and they are both created and maintained by small communities of developers. So if you like indie games, there’s a good chance that you might also like Linux. If you’re considering making the switch, here are ten indie games you can play on Linux right now.

1. Minecraft

Minecraft is not only the best indie game for Linux, it’s one the best indie games ever made. It’s almost certainly the most successful. Minecraft’s success makes it easy to forget the game’s humble beginnings, since it began as a solo developer project.

Minecraft has its own culture, and it’s probably the most watched game in history. The variety of custom maps and building projects makes it just as fun to be a spectator as a player. If you haven’t yet played this game, you’re denying yourself the most important game of the last ten years.

Click here to find out more about Minecraft.

2. Faster than Light

In Faster than Light you journey across space on an important mission. You move from sector to sector and each area of space contains a new problem which you will need to deal with. This often means fighting other spacecraft.

The fun lies in upgrading your ship and seeing how it fares against the range of enemies you encounter. Will the shields hold out? Will you run out of oxygen? Will your new laser destroy the opposing ship’s hull? You’ll escape from certain disaster time and time again, and each time you’ll have created a new story. Read a full review of Faster than Light here.

Click here to find out more about Faster than Light.

3. Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress is the kind of game I’d have expected to play on Linux before I knew about Linux gaming. It’s complex, forbidding, and geeky. But once you get past the ASCII graphics you’ll see why so many people are willing to sit through tutorials to learn how to play.

In Dwarf Fortress your goal is to survive. This normally means creating a fortress for your dwarves and helping them to find food and drink. They’ll be attacked by a range of mythical beasts so you’ll also need military protection. The game is very difficult, and embodies the phrase “losing is fun.” Each time your fortress falls you have the opportunity to create a new one, and the fun begins all over.

Click here to find out more about Dwarf Fortress.

4. Kerbal Space Program

What’s more fun than flying a rocket? Crashing a rocket! At least, it is for the first few attempts. Kerbal Space Program lets you build and fly space craft around a fictional solar system. It accurately simulates the physics of spaceflight, which makes it difficult but rewarding. Eventually you’ll have to complete missions to earn money for ship building. For now there’s a sandbox mode, which lets you create as many crazy ships as you like. That mode is ideal because you may well be crashing quite a few of them. You can read a full Kerbal Space Program review here.

Click here to find out more about Kerbal Space Program.

5. Dungeons of Dredmor

Character creation is often the most enjoyable part of RPG games. When you make a character, you are free to theorise about what will or won’t work, before being tied down by the realities of the game.

Dungeons of Dredmor realises how fun character creation can be, and lets you experiment with your choices. The game sees you attempt to reach the end of a randomly generated dungeon. The combat can be repetitive but the options for character progression keep the game interesting.

Click here to find out more about Dungeons of Dredmor.

6. Super Hexagon

Games don’t get much more simple than Super Hexagon. You control a small triangle and your goal is to move left or right to avoid incoming lines and shapes. The addictive appeal of Super Hexagon lies in its difficulty. To get it right you’ll need to react quickly and achieve a state of ‘flow’ . The simple controls, throbbing visuals, and heavy audio mean that it’s easy to fall into a trance and forget everything apart from beating your high score.

Click here to find out more about Super Hexagon.

7. Warsow

Warsow is one of many Quake style FPS games released for Linux. The game-play is fast paced, and focuses on smooth and fluid movement.

Of the FPS games for Linux, there isn’t any one particular stand-out. Warsow just happens to be my favourite. It works well and the graphics are relatively unique for the genre. You’d get a very similar experience from any of the indie FPS games on Linux such as Nexuiz, Open Arena or Red Eclipse.

Click here to find out more about Warsow.

8. Dungeon Defenders

Dungeon Defenders puts you in control of an adventurer who can run around, attack enemies, cast spells and summon towers.  Your goal is to prevent enemies from destroying your crystal. You can play on your own, or cooperatively online. Dungeon Defenders doesn’t bring too much new material to the genre of tower defence – this is simple, wave after wave fun.

Click here to find out more about Dungeon Defenders.

9. Battle for Wesnoth

Battle of Wesnoth may be the best strategy game you’ve never played. Despite being relatively unknown, the game has an established  and dedicated community. Gameplay wise, there isn’t anything especially revolutionary, but Wesnoth is polished and fun. There are a variety of add-ons to download, including a variety of single player campaigns. If you’re a fan of strategy games, give Wesnoth a try.

Click here to find out more about Battle of Wesnoth.

10. Anodyne

Anodyne is a top-down action/puzzle game. If you’ve played The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening on Game Boy this game should feel familiar. The graphics and gameplay are a very clear nod in the direction of Nintendo’s classic dungeon explorer.

Anodyne is far from a clone, however. It’s much simpler, with hardly any items to acquire and only one weapon – a broom. The majority of game will have you searching for keys to progress through various areas. This can feel repetitive but the main appeal of Anodyne is it’s strange atmosphere, and interesting locations. The core of the game won’t take you long to get through, but there are a number of hidden extras to keep you exploring.

Click here to find out more about Anodyne.

Why you should switch to Linux

With all these indie games on Linux, and more to come, Linux has never been more tempting for gamers. It’s easier than you think to make the switch – you can even keep your Windows installation.

If you’re already a Linux user, do you think there are any games missing from the top ten? Leave a comment below and let us know which games people should be playing on Linux.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

A good example of just how blurred the line between indie and non-indie games is Chucklefish Games. They are referred to as an “indie” games company which develops indie games… when in fact they are also a publisher. This is important because the technical definition of indie states that these games cannot have a publisher, and yet two “indie” games (Wanderlust Rebirth and Stardew Valley) are published by Chucklefish.

Wanderlust Rebirth, published by Chucklefish

“Indie is being able to make what you want without a publisher or client breathing down your neck. There are big indies and there are small indies but as long as you’re making the game for yourself, I think you can still be indie, no matter what your team size is.” – Alex Gold, director of Dark Scavenger

Stardew Valley was developed entirely by Eric Barone, and was planned to be self-published until a little while ago when it was announced that Chucklefish Games would be publishing it. Should Stardew Valley still be considered an indie game?

An interesting thing about the definition of indie games is that it never specifies anything with regard to sales, meaning that even if an indie game outsells a AAA game it is still considered to be indie. Therefore, unlike some people think, there should not be any connection between sales and the indie label.

Stardew Valley by Eric Barone

“An indie game is one which is made by an individual or small team driven primarily by passion. Indie developers make games because they like making them, not because they have to.”  - Andrew Sum, creator of Dungeon Dashers

At least part of the blame for the industry’s confused interpretation of indie is because of companies abusing the term. A great example of such abuse is EA’s “indie games bundle” which was released on Steam in May of 2012, containing Shank 1 and 2, Gatling Gears, Warp, DeathSpank and DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue. All of these games were developed by small studios but published by EA, technically making them non-indie.

I believe that journalists in the gaming industry can help the situation by putting at least a little more focus on how games they’re covering are being funded and what makes them indie if it is claiming to be indie.

EA’s “Indie Games Bundle” on Steam

“It’s not about trying to be professional. A lot of people come into indie games trying to be like a big company. And what those game companies do is create highly polished things that serve as large of an audience as possible. The way that you do that is by filing off all the bumps on something. If there’s a sharp corner you make sure that’s not going to hurt anybody if they bump into it or whatever. That creation of this highly glossy commercial product is the opposite of making something personal. Things that are personal have flaws. They have vulnerabilities. If you don’t see a vulnerability in somebody you’re probably not relating with them on a very personal level. So it’s the same with game design. You know it was about letting me take my deepest flaws and vulnerabilities, and putting them in the game… And let’s see what happens. ” – Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid (Indie Game the Movie)

Perhaps we’re just looking at this in the wrong way. Another way people tend to describe indie games is by calling them the innovators of the games industry, which can be true. Indie games do sometimes innovate, and the top-rated and best-selling ones typically do. However, this isn’t always true. While I’d love to say that indie gaming is all about innovation, often it really isn’t. Indie developers and studios also need to feed themselves, so they are often just as worried about turning a profit as big publishers and studios are. This isn’t necessarily a problem, although it does mean that even indie gaming tends to follow trends, meaning that many of the same type of game are sometimes released within a short period.

Braid sold over 55,000 copies on day one

“In our view, an indie game or indie developer is simply one that is independent from a publisher or a game in which the developers call the shots for how the entire game is made. For us at Superboss Games, that means being able to do things that are riskier gameplay wise and closer to our real vision of how that game should be which we think is important for new gameplay experiences.” – Rob Storm from Superboss Games

One thing I think we can say for sure about indie games is that they tend to be new IPs. Publishers are often focused on milking what they can out of their big money making franchises (ie Nintendo with Pokemon or Ubisoft with Assassin’s Creed). Just think about it… when was the last time Nintendo developed or published a new IP? I can’t think of any recent examples. Publishers are often reluctant to try anything completely radical because it’s outside of their comfort zone and outside of our comfort zone as gamers. Gamers today are usually more comfortable with iteration rather than innovation, meaning that we like (or are at least more comfortable with) things that are familiar to us rather than things that are completely radical and unheard of.

Project Stormos by Superboss Games

Of course, that’s not to say big blockbuster titles are lesser than indie ones, because that’s absolutely not true. A big problem that’s forming right now is this division being created between AAA games and indie games. In the end, they’re really not that different except for the way that they’re created. They’re both designed to entertain gamers, so why would we try to divide the two? It doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense, the worst of it being the indie elitism that I’ve been seeing in recent history. This elitism is the categorization and segregation of indie games from non-indie games to the extreme by gamers and developers; These people are compelled to separate the two because they feel that indie games are the only good type of game on the market. Indie games and AAA games can indeed exist in harmony, contrary to what some people seem to believe. Both of these types of game creation have value and both of them have produced some pretty amazing games.

I’m going to pose a question to you. You’ve got to answer honestly, otherwise there’s no point in even discussing this. If a game is good, does it really matter much how it was made? Does it matter whether or not a video game is developed independently by an indie development studio or by a big publisher? Does the way the game was made actually have any sort of impact on your experience?

Of course it doesn’t. In my mind, the very notion of that is ridiculous. Obviously a good game is still a good game, regardless of who it was developed by. To me, it doesn’t matter if a video game was made by Electronic Arts or Chucklefish Games. Don’t be a fanboy, if you want to objectively judge the quality of a video game, you must put past experiences aside and only focus in on the now. I say this because although there’s been a lot of uproar and controversy over EA lately, they are still capable of making good games and the judgement of games developed by them can’t be influenced by anything else other than the elements of the game. As gamers, we need to get out of the habit of segregating games. If EA makes a good game it is still a good game, regardless of the fact that they are a publisher rather than an indie development studio. This is also true in reverse, indie games are not necessarily lower quality than games made by big publishers. Elitism (both in indie games and in AAA games) is not a good thing and is rather unhealthy for the industry… something that we need to stop.

Minecraft recently surpassed 10 million sales on PC

“A game made by a large studio that isn’t backed by a large publisher. Since they usually don’t have a large budget they have to rely on creativity to sell their games.” – James Scott, Independent Video Games Journalist

At the end of the day, no matter what anybody says, there really is no universal interpretation of what indie games actually are. Nobody I asked about it seemed to be 100% sure, and all were wary about providing an answer as it’s a very difficult and loaded question… one that requires a lot of thought. One thing that I do want to see stop though is this idea of indie games being superior to AAA titles and vice versa, as it’s absolutely not true and judging a game whether it was made by a large company or small studio is stupid. What constitutes an indie game is subjective, what constitutes a good video game is not.

All opinions represented here are my own unless otherwise noted and do not necessarily represent the views of The Indie Mine or any of its staff.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

The guys at Gristmill Studios are hard at work getting ready for the release of their upcoming XBLIG title XenoMiner. Before the big day arrives, they’ve taken some time out of that schedule to talk to us about the game. It’s also a fascinating look into how indie studios can make it work despite a number of members with different opinions and different real-life priorities. I hope you find their insights as fascinating as I do.

Congratulations to you and your studio for making it into this year’s Indie Games Uprising. How does it feel to be included in the event, and how did the team react to the news?

Rod: Amazing! I think we’re still taking it in. This is our second year developing for the XBLIG channel. We’ve been growing our team, and stretching our talent to push as hard as we can on each new title. We raise the bar for ourselves every year. For Devilsong we played it safe and stuck with the standard flight/shooter approach to an engine, but with XenoMiner we quickly realized that wouldn’t work. There’s been a lot of open source voxel work out there, but most of it was abandonware, or just not ready for the Xbox experience. So we built it up almost entirely from scratch. There is still so much to do! We’re super stoked that all of the work is paying off though, and that being part of the Summer Uprising is giving us such good exposure. We can’t say enough about what Dave Voyles, Michael Hicks and the guys heading up the Uprising have done for us and the other developers on this platform.

Jesse: We’ve been hammering away at these different ideas and game concepts in obscurity for closing on two years now, and it’s great to finally get some people noticing what we’re up to.. and with that the chance that more people are going to invest their time in having these experiences we’ve been trying to build. I was surprised when we got into Indie Games Uprising 3: We tried with Devilsong last year and didn’t make it. When I found out we were getting in this year, I thought: Well, I guess we better make a logo for the studio and try to start blogging more!

XenoMiner is the latest title from Gristmill Studios

XenoMiner is your game that was chosen for the event, but Gristmill has had some other titles also released or in various phases of development. Tell us a little about the history of your studio and some of these other titles.

Rod: We began as a small group of friends, talking about games and our ideas at lunch or over the water cooler at our day job. We quickly discovered in each other a not so secret passion for building games, but we were caught in the 9-5 world of software development and wanted to be storming the pixelated beaches of iOS, XNA and Steam with the rest of the indie crowd. Then, and I’m not even sure how it happened, we stepped off the ledge and started work on ZPOC. It is a zombie survival game mixed with sandbox world-building that we’ve gone in and out of development with, but we just haven’t been able to push to completion. Dream.Build.Play rolled along last year and we decided to take a break from zombies, insane survivors and client-server code and take a run at it. Never mind that we only had 30 days until the deadline. We built the game from concept to release in that time. That was an intense experience, and I think it’s had us all hooked ever since. From there we moved on to Etch, a game we entered into the Independent Games Festival contest. At the tail end of that project we returned to ZPOC, with the intent of reskinning it with a voxel engine. But by then Dream.Build.Play was looming once again. This time we gave ourselves 90 days instead of 30 and sprinted on our current title XenoMiner. We had already begun work on a voxel engine for ZPOC, but with 90 days there wasn’t enough time to build a voxel engine, a procedurally generated world, and get some type of zombie raiding/combat system with mob AI going, so we decided to experiment just with the world, the voxel engine, and more generalized survival. Setting that in a post-apocalyptic world didn’t seem quite right, but on a moon orbiting a gas giant? Perfect!

Jesse: Yeah, I was working on a scratchy, post-apocalypse diary interface when Doug got on Skype and said, “Oh hey, about that interface.. we’re kinda thinking of switching things up a little. Instead of post-apocalypse we’re wanting to move into space, and instead of zombies.. well there aren’t going to be any zombies in space.”

There seems to be a wide variety of genres amongst that list. A lot of studios tend to stick to what they know or do best, but Gristmill seems to want to try its hand at just about everything. Why is that?

Rod: Part philosophy and part strategy. Philosophically we just don’t want to let off the gas, or let ourselves pigeon hole into one genre. There’s a comfort trap there that’s not healthy for developers of any stripe in this fast moving environment, so we want to stay sharp and challenge ourselves on every front. Strategically, it’s allowing us to create small pilot titles to release on different platforms to see what sort of mileage we get, and how much we enjoy working in that particular genre or platform.

Etch is an ideal “touch” experience, for example, but the iOS App store is so crowded right now that we decided to build some buzz for our studio before releasing it. XenoMiner has struck a chord in all of us. Not only are block builders fun to play and popular right now, but we believe we’ve been able to put a new spin on an otherwise crowded niche.

Our only regret is that 90 days is not nearly enough time to put in all of the cool features we’ve drawn on our whiteboard! We’re thinking of this game as a type of Kickstarter project: We just want to throw an introductory idea out to the community and see if they like it as much as we do. If the response we get is strong enough, you can be sure to see some of the features left on our whiteboard become reality!

What’s the development environment like for Gristmill? Do you all crowd into one office like sardines? Are some of you working remotely? And what are some of the benefits or challenges that you encounter in your day-to-day activities?

Rod: Our work environment is probably familiar to most Indies. All of us have our day jobs, then gather at one of our devs’ apartments to jam. We’re a group of hobbyists trying to go pro, but without an office or a budget. We usually have 4 guys plugged in around the kitchen table, another guy in the sun room, then someone on the couch cranking out art ideas or writing up text descriptions and dialog. Then there’s the disembodied voice of Jesse emanating from a notebook sitting on the kitchen counter.

Jesse: At the moment I’m the only one outside of Wisconsin, and I Skype or Google Hangout in from Missouri.

Rod: The primary challenge, in my opinion, hasn’t been location though. We struggle with the fact that we’re all gathering after our day jobs and dealing with the reduced energy and time that this implies. We manage to do this once a week, then some of us work from our homes on off nights.

We’ve talked with 1-person studios where producing artwork or music is the most strenuous aspect of the process. Other studios talk about how promoting/marketing their work is the most difficult task. What’s the toughest part about developing games for you guys?

Rod: There are really two issues there. Producing the game, then trying to get that game to market. We are heavily time and budget constrained, so our features list is always compressed into something that we believe we can handle. This is certainly not unique, even to AAA studios, so I guess we can join the chorus there! Getting the game to market is tough though. The XBLIG store and iOS app store, as well as Desura and Steam, are making content delivery quite easy. Getting our titles in front of customers has been a huge challenge. We’ve been doing pretty well with a $0 marketing budget, like getting covered by you guys at The Indie Mine, and that’s exciting!

Jesse: Our promotions and marketing are really aided by the fact that we have a well rounded team. John, Matt and I make art and interface designs for the game, but between us we also have backgrounds in web development, social media marketing, user experience and video production. Being able to produce graphics, websites and videos in-house really helps us out.

As much as I enjoy getting a peek inside the development process, we’d be wasting a perfect opportunity if we didn’t talk about your latest game, XenoMiner. Can you tell our readers all about the game?

Rod: Please check out the game description at http://www.gristmillstudios.com/xenominer

More data on XenoMiner can be retrieved from the official site

Keep in mind, that’s the game as it exists now. As I’ve mentioned before, a lot of features needed to be cut to make the Dream.Build.Play deadline. We managed to get a few new things in before the Uprising deadline, but there is a xeno-ton to do yet. We’ve put a lot of work into the engine and really need to get more content in to show off what it’s capable of. So be on the lookout for content and feature updates after September 19!

How do you decide which features make it in and which get axed? I have to imagine in a group with varying opinions that that process can be even more difficult.

Rod: Sometimes that’s true. Generally though, someone is the champion of the running project and the final call falls to them. We’ve changed that role a few times, and each time the current champion has been pretty flexible. They are the gate keeper of the vision though. So the approach has been to pitch an idea and get the entire team excited about it. That means the leader needs to have a clear vision to start, and once the team has bought in we’re easier to keep on target since the vision is king.

Add to this that XenoMiner is a large project and there are a lot of pieces to work on. That allows each of us to add our personality to the code or subsystem that helps expand on the theme. We’ve come up with a lot of cool additions that way that enhanced the theme, rather than fighting over pet ideas. We rarely get into arguments over features, and I’m proud of our team for that. A creative bunch generally has more strife, but we’ve been professional enough to avoid that.

Is there something specific you can mention that isn’t going to make the initial release that you really wish had made it in?

Rod: One?!? Hostile aliens, meteors, trams, turrets and other defensive structures. The thing is, we’ve just had to be practical about this. Our intent has always been to do incremental releases, we just don’t have the time to do it all in one pass. A few years ago I may have tried…

Are there any desires from the staff to make this a full-time gig?

Rod: Hell yes! Bootstrapping is rough though. We’ve gone well past the point of treating this studio as a hobby. The issue is building up a viable portfolio to continue to scale up and earn increasingly more revenue. At this point, we’re aiming for any revenue! We’ve stuck with it this long though, and we keep getting better, so we’re confident that persistence will eventually pay off.

The only bootstrapping here is the one done to keep you from flying off into space

What advice would you give to small groups of indie developers just getting started? 

Jesse: I think the most important advice is to be consistent with your time. It’s hard to be an indie developer because you have to work all week at your job or career, and often the last thing you want to do when you get home is do more work. Being a game developer isn’t about how skilled you are, it’s simply about participating in the act of development. At Gristmill, we have Tuesday nights set aside for game development. That ensures that once a week you make progress on something, and it also clears your head of “I really need to work on the game” the rest of the week. When you don’t have a set development time, projects start getting stuck or abandoned.

Well I’m sure a lot of the press and consumers out there are going to want to know what separates XenoMiner from other block builder games. As you said earlier, it is a crowded market. Why should Xbox owners try your game?

Jesse: We’re all avid gamers, and several of us have been playing block builders like Minecraft and Ace of Spades since early in their beta days. We’ve lost sleep over Dwarf Fortress and played games like M.U.L.E., Utopia and Rampart as far back as elementary school. That’s all to say that we love this genre. We love building and destroying, and it shows in XenoMiner. When we release on September 19, XenoMiner will include two features that we always wanted in block builders. First are gravity boots: these let you completely rethink the regular x/y/z axis of a building game. You can make a ceiling your floor or a tower a bridge. Next are the bots. I can’t quite describe how great they are: you can automate mining and tunnel exploration with them, along with totally geeking out over writing your own ‘recipes’ for whatever you can imagine, then watching it being built before your eyes.

I’m only naming two features, both of which will give you a completely new experience in the genre. If we can get the community behind us and our visions, there will be lots more to come.

Developers, how do your experiences compare to those of Gristmill? And gamers, what would you want to see different in a block builder game? Leave your comments below.

Additional XenoMiner coverage:

The XBLIG – Prelude to the Uprising: XenoMiner

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.