Tiger Style co-founder Randy Smith (Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor) delivered the keynote of the Indie Games Summit, encouraging indie developers to embrace a philosophy of immediacy and depth to hasten their popular ascendancy. Opening with a self-deprecating “I do have a worry that this presentation will not live up to expectations or achieve what it could,” Smith outlined that his background may not be “indie” enough for the crowd — having worked for …
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One benefit of being an indie developer is that there is a community out there made up of people who want to see the scene flourish. But organizing that community can be a challenge. Jeff Lindsay, contributor to indie community events such as TIGJam and SuperHappyDevHouse, offered 10 ways to nurture your local indie game community, at GDC’s Indie Game Summit on Tuesday: 1. Hold Events “Nothing beats in-person,” said Lindsay. His SuperHappyDevHouse events grew …
Wolfire, developer of Overgrowth, managed to create a lot of buzz for its game before it was even released – in fact, the game still isn’t out, but John Graham, one of four people on the team, says that it doesn’t matter. You can and should create buzz as an indie even if your game isn’t finished. “When you’re beginning a company you have to figure out how you want to approach that issue,” he …
As part of a technical talk at GDC’s Social Games Summit, Amitt Mahajan, lead developer of Farmville, revealed a number of interesting statistics about the game, including current stats of 32 million players per day. Farmville, a Harvest Moon-like farming social game, is one of Facebook’s biggest success stories, earning the small team huge accolades before being purchased by Zynga. The game took only 5 weeks from conception to launch, developing the back end, using …
Panelists billed as the world’s foremost experts on funding, buying and selling game companies have a view of gaming’s future that’s likely to be controversial to those working in traditional development. In a panel at GDC 2010, Northwest Ventures’ Tim Chang, Trinity Ventures’ Gus Tai, Pacific Crest analyst Evan Wilson and Making Fun and Minor Studios CEO John Welch discussed what companies and products will get funded today — and according to them, it’s not …
iPhone developer ngmoco released the virtual pet game Touch Pets Dogs onto the App Store in November 2009 as a “freemium” download. But it wasn’t always planned that way. When the studio was working on the game in early 2009, ngmoco producer Matthew Roberts said they felt the game should be sold for $19.99, in the same price range as games sold on Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. By mid-2009, ngmoco thought it’d be wiser …
Codemasters has announced Bodycount, a new game under the creative direction of Stuart Black, best known for the Criterion Studios shooter Black — and which draws inspiration from J.J. Abrams and Lady Gaga. Though Black has been at Codemasters for “two or three years now,” he says, he “actually started on a different project, another original IP that’s kind of been on the back burner… We started [production] work on Bodycount about nine months ago.” …
The New York-based Education Development Center (EDC) has received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation supporting the development of handheld games designed to improve reading comprehension among struggling middle school students. The Gates Foundation grant supports the EDC’s two-year research project “Portable Word Play: Discovering What Handheld Games Can do for Adolescent Reading Comprehension,” conducted in collaboration with the game development studio 1st Playable Productions. Researchers at the EDC’s Center for Children …
Every week, sister iPhone site FingerGaming rounds up the top-grossing iPhone and iPod Touch applications, as current that day in the iTunes App Store, and this chart is now available on Gamasutra. This week’s U.S. iPhone revenue charts see EA’s Monopoly take the lead over Square Enix’s Final Fantasy, while Ragdoll Blaster 2 ranks high in its debut week. This relatively recently-added chart allows end users to see who is making the most money on …
Microsoft has announced version 4.0 of its XNA Game Studio development package, which includes support for its new Windows Phone 7 Series, as well as enhancing features for Xbox 360 and PC game development. The details have been posted on Microsoft developer blogs, including this lengthy post from XNA Development Platform lead program manager Michael Klucher and this quick breakdown on MSDN from Shawn Hargreaves. The platform will now support development for Microsoft’s newly announced …
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