You’re stuck in some crapped-out office complex. Overhead, fluorescent bulbs hum as you take a slug of cheap coffee. Across the cube wall, a co-tenant is blabbing to an irritating sales lead about popcorn and movies. “Sir, our product tastes just like what you get at the theater,” he drones. You snarl at him under your breath and hammer out another line of code. Emo hardcore wafts from your bargain-bin computer speakers as you ponder the date. In three hours, an E3 demo is due to the big-name publisher, and it needs to work perfectly or else the company will scrap its plans for a corner booth at the show.

This is the life of the independent game developer—among the most unglamorous, high-tension jobs on the planet. Tight project schedules, anal press relations staff, and publishers expecting pure-gold games made from garbage-can metal—not exactly the road to the money farm. At any time, the publishing advance can dry up, executives can cancel contracts, and you can end up broke and destitute with nothing more than 10,000 lines of code and stale popcorn. Ask any indie game developer: Creating computer games without corporate backing is seriously stressful. But it has its rewards, too—enough that some companies have actually chosen this way of life, forgoing the bureaucratic monoliths in favor of more idealistic separatism.

GarageGames: Life in the Trenches

These days, making a game usually involves some sort of publishing agreement or corporate funding. Some development shops have loose ties with large publishers and signed contracts that keep the cash flow steady. A few big-name developers founded the GarageGames publishing label, but it operates under a completely independent model: Developers aren’t funded by a traditional publishing agreement—they’re simply allowed a presence on the GarageGames website and full creative control over their endeavors.

“We don’t have to answer to anybody but ourselves and our customers,” says Jeff Tunnell, GarageGames’ founder. Early on, the company offered developers a low-cost development engine called Torque (purchased from Sierra in 1998), the same engine used for Tribes 2 and Starsiege. Torque allows developers to create 3D games with all the latest bells and whistles: scripting, particle effects, texturing…you name it.