Independent Game Companies

As an aspiring game designer, I suppose the best way to start is at the bottom and work my way up. My focus was to be part of a creative team that could flesh out and help a project or idea come to fruition without the immediate need for texturing or complex programming. 
After the recent acquisition of the hugely successful Bizarre Creation's studio by Activision in January this year, Activision decided to dissolve the company, leaving many of its employees without jobs. This worked out in a favour of sorts, as many of the people who worked for the company for years have split off and started NWindies, an independent game developers community compromised of the various ex-members of the BC.


A good starting point for myself who wanted to gain experience of how to create and develop games on a basic level, since most if not all of the subcompanies have shifted their limited output capabilities to an easier sub-industry; portable media.
Although there is only evidence of one or two games on the offshoot sites from NWindies, the majority of the ex-employees from BC are in their 30s-late 40s, as are most developers. I however hope to bring some fresh ideas to the table and bring my knowledge of whats happening in terms of new interactive media and hopefully pitch some ideas that could be developed from some of my own work.

Pawprint Games

Some of the games that they had worked on prior to setting up their own business:

LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean
LEGO Star Wars 3: The Clone Wars
LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga
LEGO Star Wars 2: The original Trilogy
LEGO Indiana Jones 2: the Adventure Continues
LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4
LEGO Bionicle Heroes
Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
Transformers: The Game
F1 2005
Galleon: Islands of Mystery

Paw Print Games aims to deliver polished family friendly products that have mass market appeal, so something that is user friendly without need to produce artwork that requires much detail would be appropriate and a good place to start. I have had no problems with family friendly games before and would be a good place to start and hear about what its like in the game industry.

http://www.cleverbeans.co.uk/games

http://www.tiga.org/train2game

http://hogrocket.com/