From the outset, the word "indie" was tossed around quite a bit at Cadenza.  Regardless of the squabble among the game community at large to define the word, we generally imagine indie to mean that we are our own representatives to the world.  We realized that our games would have to speak for themselves, and that we would not benefit from an in-place network of knowledge and contacts.  We also realized that we were going to be making this game on a shoestring budget, and our plans all had to center around the strength of a small team: mobility.

Whether it was on the code side or the design side, the biggest advantage we have over larger teams is the ability to be experimental.  Knowing that we could scrap work that didn't pan out set us free to test features that showed some potential but seemed risky.  Our code team intentionally selected C# with the XNA framework as our basis for development to support rapid prototyping, and it let us get our hands dirty with ideas we otherwise may have put aside.  With this basis in mind, the core team set out to make a turret defense game that would encapsulate our best experiences within the genre and hopefully leave the genre better than we found it.  The concept of orbital support was formed early enough that we knew this was where our great experiment was to start, and also where we hoped we'd be able to make Sol Survivor stand out in the genre.  Still, our first versions were prototypes with flat landscapes, no buildings or "doodads," and a single creep and turret type.  As you might expect, there was much work to be done.

Each week our three full-time team members would get together on the weekend and host a meeting for the part-time contributors.  Through these meetings, we expressed our likes and dislikes with the current build of the game, and sent everyone away with a clear goal and workload for the week to come.  With every weekly meeting our opinions came out into the open and, through debate, we selected the strongest designs to be incorporated into the game's next build.  It was through this averaging of opinions that our design came together.  Each iteration of the game gave us one more thing to think about, and one more improvement that seemed natural after the last one had been made.  Philosophically, we were ready for that kind of discovery process, and that kind of mobility seems essential to the process.

As the game started to evolve, we expanded the scope of the team to include designers, artists and a musician.  To harness the free time of these part-time contributors, and to ensure that they never sat idle waiting for someone else, our code team provided a design tool (Improv) that they actively maintained throughout development.  When a map needed work, the designers could find an hour here or there to do it without adding more work to the code team's bottleneck.  While creating something like Improv seems elementary to an industry veteran, it may seem like a lengthy task for a smaller studio.  It was worth every hour put into it, and to this day Improv has facilitated rapid content generation for testing that was every bit as nimble as the code and design processes behind it.

Having our weekend meetings let each member of the team, regardless of their hourly contribution, feel like they had a stake in the design of Sol Survivor.  We were able to harness the opinions of a group of friends by playing the game and talking about what worked and what didn't.  Decisions we made early on about wanting to be flexible, with code and with design, let us stay true to our iterative model.  We still look at the game and see things we'd like to change.  We talk a lot with players, and in a way our release feels like a larger weekend meeting, with a lot more opinions.  Our big response to those opinions?  Co-op campaign mode, coming in a patch in the weeks to come.
 

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