Romero: upcoming indies should stop “waiting for permission”
Loot Drop’s John Romero has been offering advice for upcoming indies during the “Back to the Garage: The Return of Indie Development (From Those Who Were There and Some Who’ve Just Arrived)” talk at GDC. Romero has previously worked on Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM and Quake, and is regarded as one of the first ever indie developers. He says these days there’s too much too much procrastinating and not enough developing going on.
“This whole getting a job question, it hasn’t really changed that much since the 80’s,” he said.
GDC 2012 has just kicked off. We’re live on the show floor
The Games Developers Conference has just begun in San Francisco. Devs from every corner of the industry are congregating to talk about their craft. It’s a very exciting time.
GDC is less console iteration and booth babe than E3. It’s more about quiet announcements and candid industry chatter. That said, this year’s show is already shaping up nicely, especially for us PC gamers. We have men on the ground, sniffing out scoops in real-time.
Will Valve open the Pandora’s box that is the Steam Box? What’s the mystery game that EA are due to announce on Tuesday? What will Sid Meier have to say in his keynote speech? Are Hitman Absolution’s crowds extremely good or a bit good? Read on for the highlights.
OnLive indie showcase lets you try 16 IGF nominees for free
You can play free trials of 16 IGF-nominated games right now using cloud-streaming service, OnLive. For the next two weeks you can log in and play 30 minute demos of games like Dear Esther, Dustforce, Frozen Synapse, Space Chem and, as Tom mentioned earlier, the excellent FTL. When GDC kicks off next week all OnLive games formerly nominated for IGF awards will be discounted by 75%
There’s a list of links to the OnLive demo page for each IGF nominee below. You’ll need to sign up for a free OnLive account first to get access.
Dear Esther sells 50,000 in one week
When Dear Esther turned a profit in six hours it was already obvious that it would exceed expectations. Dear Esther’s Indie Fund backers were originally unsure about funding Dear Esther, but it looks like their faith has been well placed. It sold 16,000 copies on Steam on day one. A week on, it’s sold more than 50,000.
Developers, Thechineseroom made their sales public over on the Dear Esther blog, saying that the 50,000 figure is “an extraordinary amount for an indie release.”
Dear Esther turns a profit in five and a half hours, sells 16,000 in a day
A post on the Indie Fund site responsible for backing the development of Dear Esther says that the team have recouped their investment of $55,000 in just five and a half hours and is currently the third best selling game on Steam.
“To be honest, we are a little surprised by how many people bought Dear Esther so quickly,” say the Indie Fund. “We were expecting the game to have a niche appeal. In fact the situation is quite different.” Dear Esther has so far sold more than 16,000 copies in its first day.
The Fund were slightly reluctant to fund the game in the beginning because they were worried it go down well with Steam’s mainstream audience. “We appear to have been very wrong about all this,” they say. “We are happy to have been wrong.”
For our verdict on Dear Esther, check out our Dear Esther review.
Public alpha imminent for intriguing action-RPG, Krater
Krater is attempting to fuse the fast, bloody combat of Diablo with more thoughtful squad management. The devs are listing big names like X-Com and Syndicate as inspirations, and there will be a massive crafting system to back up the exploration and monster mincing. Your squad will change as members leave or die, and as every item in the game can be crafted, you’ll have complete control over your squad’s gear and set-up.
Krater is about to go into public pre-alpha testing, in which they’re aiming to get tons of feedback on an early build. If you’d like to get involved and see how Krater’s shaping up, you can follow the latest announcements on the Krater site and follow developers, Fatshark, on Twitter. Meanwhile, here are a few of the latest screenshots from the current build.
Dwarf Fortress update adds “secret vampire dwarves” and werewolf invasions
Remarkable indie adventure generator, Dwarf Fortress has just received a great big update. Version 0.34.01 is now free to download from the official site, adding fresh new ways for your Dwarves to die horribly. Vampire dwarves can infiltrate your settlements and full moons bring the added threat of werewolf invasion. More unpleasantly, “Ingested syndromes are now possible” in adventure mode, so you’ll have to watch what you eat when exploring the new cities present in the latest update.
There are some gems in the bug fix list as well. “Demons masquerading as gods will try a little harder” and the devs have “restricted mandates so they’ll be more reasonable.” Thank heavens for that! Find the rest of the patch notes below. For more Dwartress, check out our Dwarf Fortress diary, a tale of seven drunk dwarves and their quest to reach hell.
Gratuitous Tank Battles preview
When I arrived at the Wiltshire HQ of Positech Games I was met at the door by receptionist Cliff Harris. The studio’s PR manager, Cliff Harris, then made me a mug of tea before introducing me to the head of development, Cliff Harris, who took me down the hall to meet the lead designer, Cliff Harris.
Positech Games isn’t a typical developer, so it’s hardly surprising that the upcoming Gratuitous Tank Battles isn’t a typical tower defence game.
Tucked away in a small backroom in his 18th Century home, 21st Century Cliff is building a game that’s as much about galloping through the Valley of Death as ensuring the Valley of Death is good-and-deathy. As well as being asked to line wiggly assault corridors with all manner of turrets, towers and infantry bunkers, we’ll have a chance to sample the slaughter from the other side, sending our own armies of inexplicably eager mechs, tanks, and grunts down AI-controlled avenues of doom.
Dustforce review
Playing Dustforce whisks me away to some of my fondest and most formative gaming memories, when every ounce of my being was devoted to full completion of Donkey Kong Country 2 on my dingy Super Nintendo. Today, I’m grown up and paying off bills, but the elements that make a great platformer are pretty much the same. Sublime music, well thought-out controls, gorgeous graphics, and accessibility that scales into supreme difficulty—Dustforce possesses all these traits in glorious abundance.
Introversion on why they’re done with Darwinia
We had the chance to catch up with Introversion at Bit of Alright recently, to talk about their new project, Prison Architect, the fate of Subversion and their plans for the future. One thing’s for sure, Darwinia won’t be part of it. Creative director, Chris Delay and managing director Mark Morris told us how the company ended up working on one game for so long when, in the beginning, they set out determined to keep making new games every one or two years.
“We’d started it in 2002 and it didn’t ship until 2005″ said creative director Chris Delay. “Then we had Multiwinia, which was 2008. And we had Darwinia+, which was 2010. So we’ve kind of been working on Darwinia for 10 years and it was never meant to be that big a project. To say that we were sick of it is an understatement.”
One of the strengths of a small team of indie developers is their ability to throw up new ideas and change direction faster than large, publisher-funded studios. In Introversion’s case, Darwinia’s runaway success only slowed them down.
Graph: how Double Fine raised $450,000 for an adventure game in eight hours
Not long after the creator of Minecraft offered to fund a sequel to their much-loved Psychonauts, Double Fine looked to a different source to fund a different game. Kickstarter lets anyone donate to a project in return for rewards proportional to their investment, and they don’t have to pay anything unless the project gets enough pledges to go ahead. Double Fine set out to raise $400,000 for a point-and-click adventure game, in 34 days. They raised $450,000 in eight hours.
It’s a fantastic and exciting accomplishment that reflects how the games industry is shifting towards one where passion, as much as mass market appeal, can make games happen. But, much more importantly, it involves a bunch of nerdy numbers I can make a graph from.
Double Fine give increasingly ridiculous rewards for donations of amounts varying from $15 to $150,000. As you’d expect, the cheapest options were the most popular, but not proportionally so. Which of them actually made Double Fine the most money? I know, because I made a graph.
Prison Architect “paid alpha” planned for later this year
We met up with Introversion at A Bit of Alright last week to talk about how development is going on their new project, Prison Architect. Creative director, Chris Delay and managing director Mark Morris told us about their plans for a “paid alpha” later this year.
The alpha could be released “maybe half way through/two thirds through of this year, so maybe September time,” says Chris. The paid alpha will give players the opportunity to pay for a pre-order to get immediate access to the build that Introversion are currently working on.
Indie Gala 2 is live, includes Greed Corp, InMomentum, Roboblitz and more
The second Indie Gala bundle is go! It includes three escalating indie game packages. The Carebear Bundle contains Critical Mass, Fortix 2 and Bunch of Heroes as well as three music albums, Casey Lalonde’s Skitter EP, Comfort by Giraffage and the Beautiful EP by The Numbers. You can choose to pay between $1 and $5.55 for that lot, and can choose how your payment is distributed between the developers, charities (Save the Children and Child’s Play), and the Indie Gala organisers.
Musical puzzler AVSEQ gets a demo, out now
AVSEQ stands for Audio Visual Sequencer. It’s a puzzle game in which you must draw links between descending orbs to vapourise them and unlock new notes on an audio sequencer cycling through the background. The idea is to build up massive chains to gain mega-points and unlock new notes for the gradually building musical score. You have to collect every note before the time runs out to beat the stage. It’s join-the-dots against the clock with the added satisfaction of a swelling musical accompaniment.
There’s a catch, though. If those orbs touch the bottom of the screen, they evaporate and break any chain they’re hooked into. Each level becomes a frantic but absorbing game of risk vs reward as you try to sketch more and more ambitious webs over an increasingly kaleidoscopic backdrop. A two-mission demo is available now on the AVSEQ page of the Big-Robot site. If its musical tendrils manage to snare your attention, you can grab the full game here for a mere $5.
Dear Esther trailer has beautiful island vistas
The first official Dear Esther trailer has appeared on the Dear Esther site, celebrating its four IGF award nominations and upcoming release on Steam on February 14. It offers a short but haunting glimpse of the island that you explore for the duration of the game. As you move over its hills and through its caves, you’ll uncover scraps of narration that resonate with the environment, resulting in an interactive letter of “love, loss, guilt and redemption.” It also looks as though it’s going to be the most beautiful thing ever made with the Source Engine.
