Hello JGO,
I don’t do a very good job paying attention to popular indie game genres/trends. I’m more of a programmer. Can anyone help me and/or catch me up on the genres/trends?
Thanks,
DarkCart
Here’s a trend: Clone the sh*t out of everything.
make everything survival horror with no real gameplay
Release default Unity asset “world” with nothing to do under the guise of “non-serious” game on greenlight. Don’t.
Flappy bird and 2048 clones still seem to be popping up around the place but I think they’re almost gone. MOBAs seem to be still going. I think there was a recent craze with crappy Unity “simulator” “games”. (Note the double quotes)
Hardcore, “realistic”, (sometimes horror) survival games are still going, but hopefully not much longer. I think we need a break.
Games a bit like towerfall (2d combat-oriented pixel-art platformers) might be coming in on the indie side of things, and I’ve noticed quite a few space sims popping up. I love both of these a lot so I’m happy. Also a lot of unique indie FPS games, which is looking promising.
I have no idea what the next AAA craze will be. Probably because I don’t follow along unless Linux ports are involved.
Copying.
- Jev
No one mentions roguelikes? Weird, I think they still have a huge fanbase.
Super hard platformers (I wanna be the guy, Super Meatboy, Spelunky etc.) are pretty popular too.
Also people are going crazy over fighting games and RPGs but those are not a really easy genre to make games in.
I kinda agree on the survival horror thing, people are getting bored of it and honestly it wouldn’t have become so popular in the first place if famous YouTubers don’t pick it up.
My personal advice would be to do not follow the trends as long as indie game development is just a hobby to you and you do it for fun, not for a living. 
Survival horror is doing just fine. Zombies are a bit less popular these days. Free-to-play is still where all the money is.
Cas
On the subject of simulator games, I’d like to write a bumblebee sim. Navigating around the garden, finding flowers, dodging spiderwebs and the ambush spiders inside the flowers, bringing food back to the nest, fighting off wasps, going psycho at the end of the year and killing all your hivemates… It would be much harder to write than Rock Simulator, of course.
Next AAA craze? It seems the current AAA craze is, has been, and always will be Doom and all its transparent clones like BF4 etc.
Now that I think of it, I wonder what people are doing in the game dev industry. It looks like Unity is getting popular, but other than here, I don’t really see any game programming. No devlogs in other languages in the past few months really.
Every game developer has to program, even in Unity, UDK, Cryengine or GameMaker. You simply can’t get away with drag-n-drop logics if you want to make anything advanced.
Most people in the game industry (which includes AAA, not only indies) doesn’t have a devlog, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t making progress.
Lots of people, including me has an NDA with his employer that does not allow discussion of the WIP titles (this is why you see no progress of AAA games until they hit at least the beta stage), thus they couldn’t document their progress even if they wanted to.
By the way there are still tons of devlogs out there, problem is you’re looking for them on the wrong place. Sadly, since JGO is only focused on Java it isn’t exactly the most popular forum where people write their devlogs, that would be TIG forums or Unity forums. :point: