Indie Fund, the New Publishing Model
Mar 10th
Asked Carmel, “How do we do for funding what Valve did for distribution?” The answer, according to Carmel, is Indie Fund, which will essentially turn the traditional publishing deal on its head. The Indie Fund aims to differ from traditional publishing deals in a few significant ways. The Indie Fund will offer a transparent submission process, make its standard contract details publicly available and provide a flexible development schedule.
Perhaps the biggest bullet point of all, however, is that Indie Fund doesn’t seek to own developer IPs or exert any editorial control over the IPs it funds. It’s also worth noting that Indie Fund won’t actually publish or market the projects it funds. Those tasks are left up to developers, though Carmel noted that the members of Indie Fund would be happy to share their experience in securing distribution deals with services like Steam.
Portal 2 ARG up and running?
Mar 2nd
For anyone wanting to help solve a mystery and maybe be the first to see some Portal 2 goodness, Valve has updated Portal with radios that transmit clues… kind of… well, read more here…
Not a lie: Valve updates Portal with secret radio broadcast images – Boing Boing.
I love scavenger hunts/mysteries! Which is why ARGs captivate me so.
neat: Game Room Challenges
Feb 17th
If you haven’t heard, Xbox LIVE will be launching Game Room on March 24th. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a service that allows you to buy and play classic arcade games.
But what they didn’t mention (but the Giant Bombcast did), is you can setup CHALLENGES and send these off to your friends. What are Game Room Challenges? From what Giant Bomb said, you can setup a challenge like “Who can get the highest score,” set how long the challenge runs for and then send it to your friends and it’s on! They also said you can setup challenges from anywhere within any game. So you can play Defender for 10 hours and then setup a challenge to see who can last the longest from that point on with only 1 life.
This is damn cool! Not only will this push sales of Game Room games (some people can’t walk a way from a challenge) but it will also bring your circle of friends on Xbox LIVE closer. The more we interact with each on LIVE, the more it will feel like a community (Facebook) and not just a list of friends (phone book).
I’m really looking for to Game Room now!
Dead Rising 2 demo’ish
Feb 13th
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/02/12/x10-dead-rising-2-case-zero-prologue-is-stand-alone-will-be/
…"It’s not an add-on, because it’s set before [Dead Rising 2] and you won’t need [either] retail game in order to play it," the devs told us. As for pricing, they could only say that, "it won’t be free, but we’ll make it accessible for a lot of players."
When we asked about a possible Dead Rising 2 demo — whether it be single- or multiplayer — they replied, "We think the prologue is going to give gamers a good sense of how the game is going to play….
I really like this idea of making the demo a whole new experience. The studios have to go out of the way to make a demo, why not make it an unique part of the game? As long as this is planned from the get go, I don’t see this slowing down/costing a studio anymore money. I see a lot more studios doing this.
Now paying for it… I’m not to big on, but if it’s meaty enough, why not.
read: Truth in Game Design
Feb 4th
Former co-worker wrote up a nice article over at Gamasutra about… well, Truth in Game Design…
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4263/truth_in_game_design.php
mind: the dust
Feb 3rd
I’m merging my portfolio and my blog into one site and getting a fresh theme on it. Don’t mind it if things are kind of a messy and unorganized for a bit.
watch: BattleBlock Theater
Feb 1st
The Behemoth’s 3rd game…
One part Smash Bros, one part classic platformer. So much going on and it looks so fun! Can’t wait to play!
damn! Flight Control = $2 million
Jan 25th
Firemint has informed TouchArcade that Flight Control has hit over 2 million in sales over the past 10 months with an average daily sales of 6000. Peak sales were over 30,000/day in late March and reached over 20,000 on Christmas Day 2009.
http://toucharcade.com/2010/01/25/flight-control-lands-over-2-million-in-sales/
game.001 prototype'd
Jan 14th
So the wife and I have been throwing around a game idea for a while and I got a simple, Flash prototype up and running. Very basic, but an user can play the game and now I can test two things…
- Is it fun?
- Can I make levels for it?
Answer to both, yes (it’s fun to me) and yes.
Next step, better code. Right now, there is no code saying you beat the level and the user must “manually” do something that should be automatic. After that, more levels and better art (yeah… I made dev art 