Vlambeer: "If you don't have support for indies your platform will fail"

Nuclear Throne is being developed very publicly, in fact much of the process is being livestreamed and fans have been playing as development progressed, and so as we caught up with half of Vlambeer - Rami Ismail - we thought we'd talk about that process and game development in general.

"When we decided to pick this up as a full project we decided to keep livestreaming," says Ismail. "We started to see a lot of benefits. You get to talk to people playing the game before you're done, so you really get to tweak the game and figure out where things are not quite working."

Much of the conversation revolved around indie development, how it is getting fragmented and how it is also spreading to regions where game development didn't used to be common at all.

"I travel a lot around the world," says Ismail. "I've flown enough to fly to the Moon and back again last year. I just visit different development communities all across the world, also in like Africa, South America, and it is really starting to become a global thing. And I'm really looking to see if we as an industry can support growth of the games industry in territories outside of Europe and America. And it's actually really, really exciting. Like a lot of fan favourite games are coming from countries outside the established territories, both on like mobile, but also on console and on PC. Things are changing, and again that's really exciting."

Traditional AAA development and indie development is sometimes pitted against eachother, Ismail has his own views of why indies are stepping in and dominating much of the selection of games on new consoles.

"AAA is getting so risky, so few titles coming out that really we need indie to fill up gaming," says Ismail. "There's just not enough budget to have multiple AAA productions in production for most companies. And even like the big, big ones are being really careful right now. You can see that with games like The Order - it's a really, really pretty, beautiful game, but a very held back game design. And I think people want more games. They just want more games and especially next-gen right now. Indie is a majority of those games. And on PC same thing. So people are supporting indie, because indie is such a large part of gaming right now that not having it would make for a really boring industry.

"I mean I love my AAA games," continues Ismail. "I'm still playing Destiny, well when I'm home but, indie is such a large part of what you can play right now that seeing more support of that just makes total sense. If you don't have support for indies your platform is going to fail. It's the way it is."

If you're interested in Nuclear Throne and it's development head over to the official website.