Indievision http://www.indievision.org/index.php Supporting Small Independent Game Developers Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:28:43 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 The Big List Of Indie Marketing And Business Tips http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2269 http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2269#comments Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:51:32 +0000 RichHW http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2269 A collection of links related to indie marketing and business things. Enjoy!
If you should know more sites / articles that would fit here please mention them in the comments.

Navigation

…

]]> A collection of links related to indie marketing and business things. Enjoy!
If you should know more sites / articles that would fit here please mention them in the comments.

Navigation

MARKETING

PRESS RELEASE SITES

BUSINESS

INTERVIEWS

FLASH GAME INCOME

ADVERTISING

(place your game banners, buttons and squares on related sites for a little fee)

E-MAIL MARKETING FOR A SMALL BUDGET

JOBS

INDIE FUNDING

This list was created by PixelProspector.com © Copyright 2009-2010. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

]]> http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?feed=rss2&p=2269 0 The Big List Of Game Development Resources http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2275 http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2275#comments Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:05:57 +0000 RichHW http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2275 Big resource for game development related things…
Enjoy :)

Game Programming

Game Design

Graphics

…

]]> Big resource for game development related things…
Enjoy :)

Game Programming

Game Design

Graphics

Music & Sound

Game Programming

GAME ENGINES

SOURCE CODE EDITORS

PROGRAMMING TUTORIALS

USEFUL TOOLS

Project Management Tools

GAME DESIGN

GAME DESIGN

GRAPHICS

IMAGE EDITORS (PIXEL)

IMAGE EDITORS (GENERAL)

ONLINE IMAGE EDITORS

PIXEL ART TUTORIALS

PIXEL ART FORUMS

PHOTOSHOP TUTORIALS

PAINT.NET TUTORIALS

GIMP TUTORIALS

MUSIC & SOUND

ROYALTY FREE MUSIC

(note: read licences before you use the music)

FREE SITES

COMMERCIAL SITES

ROYALTY FREE SOUNDS

(note: read licences before you use the sounds)

FREE SITES

COMMERCIAL SITES

INDIE MUSICIANS

CREATE YOUR OWN MUSIC & SFX

DIGITAL AUDIO WORKSTATIONS

This list was created by PixelProspector.com © Copyright 2009-2010. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

]]> http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?feed=rss2&p=2275 0 Making Of ‘Solar Struggle’ http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2285 http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2285#comments Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:15:34 +0000 RichHW http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2285 Rich talks to Andreas Heldt of Z-Software about the making of the XBLIG title Solar Struggle.

Background

Where did you get the concept

In 2008 we met Sasha Kemper, who had the original idea,…

]]> Rich talks to Andreas Heldt of Z-Software about the making of the XBLIG title Solar Struggle.

Background

Where did you get the concept

In 2008 we met Sasha Kemper, who had the original idea, at the games convention in Leipzig, Germany. He was one of the guys who could show their indie projects at the “newcomer@gc” area at the G.A.M.E. booth in the business area. The project looked very interesting and already made a lot of fun, so we decided to help Sasha and provide him with original artworks and technical support.

How long did it take to develop

From the first concepts until release it took roughly 2 years to finish.

How many people

The game was developed by a single person for about a year. As the complexity of the game increased over the years, it became too much work for one person to do alone. As a consequence, three people joined the project in 2009. One was responsible to create tools which aid in building the campaign and the other two did new artworks for the space ships.

In 2010 another two people started working full-time on the project. Of course there were countless other people who helped throughout the project lifetime who did small pieces of artwork, helped with technical questions or did something else the project benefitted from.

How many were full-timers, and how many freelancers

At the end of the project three people were working full-time on the project. Two were working as freelancers.

Did you go over your planned development time/financial budget

Actually, we wanted to finish the game in April 2010. But we weren’t satisfied with the result at that time so we decided to postpone the release until August 2010. That was the right decision as the result is a lot more polished and the campaign benefitted greatly from it.

Development

What challenges did you face

First of all, there were a lot of technical challenges when we started to port the game to the Xbox. The game was developed for a long time on the PC only without minding about the limitations the Xbox has. For example we had to parallelize a big part of the game code to run smoothly on the Xbox’ three cores so we can stage bigger battles with more enemies. Another challenge was to show the game at the gamescom this year.

Did you run into any problems that slowed development and/or release

Before any indie game is published at the Xbox 360 marketplace, the community has to review it and give their thumbs up for the release. There are some conditions which can make you fail the review, like crashes. Then you’ll have to wait another 7 days before you can retry to submit your game. Unfortunately, we missed a bug in the game and (gladly) someone found out during the review process that the game crashes if you sign-out with a local profile during the loading screen. As a consequence we were forced to wait a week. The bug itself was fixed within seconds but we took our time and spend the rest of the week polishing the game even more – for example, the ship engine trails or the booster blur effect were re-done within this week.

As we re-submitted the game, we already were very very late – it was the Sunday before the gamescom week and on Wednesday, the game had to be on the marketplace so we could show it at the redspotgames booth. As the complexity of the game is fairly big, it took some reviewers some time to play the whole game and we passed review on Tuesday evening. But as every game has to be in review for 48 hours and we submitted it more on early Monday then Sunday, we had to wait until Wednesday morning until the game was finally “Approved”. Some more hours passed but finally the game showed up inside the marketplace at lunch.

Marketing investment

How much have you budgeted for marketing

We can’t tell exactly as our partner, redspotgames, was responsible for the marketing. They showed it at the gamescom 2010, so we think the marketing budget couldn’t be that low. We also spend some time doing marketing on Facebook or twitter.

Describe your marketing plan – i.e. which outlets are you hitting, what are you doing with each

A big part of the marketing was done by redspotgames, so we can’t tell you a lot about it. We made several videos and posted them to youtube and we also set up a blog for the game (http://www.solarstruggle.com/) and a Facebook fan page (http://www.facebook.com/pages/SolarStruggle/141640955866114/).

What social advertising have you planned

As I said before, we created a fan page for the game on Facebook. The Solar Struggle blog is also connected to Facebook. These were our first attempts at social advertising.

Are you doing any competitions

We don’t host competitions by ourselves (yet) but we support some community portals so they can raffle off free keys for Solar Struggle.

Who do you send freebie copies to

We send free copies mainly for reviews, so if you host a community portal, games blog or write reviews of Xbox 360 games and want to review the game, don’t hesitate to contact us!

Piracy

Do you have any plan in place to deal with piracy

The game is released on the Xbox LIVE marketplace, so we don’t expect any piracy of the game.

Sales figures

What are your sales forecasts

Our target is to sell about 5000 to 10000 units.

What is your breakeven point

Our breakeven point is pretty high, but we plan to release the game on the PC too and part of the technology used for Solar Struggle will be used in other games. The game is also kind of a “test” how high-quality games can perform on XBLIG and if it is a real alternative.

What difficulties do you expect with hitting decent sales figures

We think the price might scare some people of buying the game. 400 MS Points is the highest price for indie games. Still, we believe the game has the quality of an Arcade title   which sell for 800 MS Points or more.

Another point is the game demo. You really need some time to get used to the controls and the flight physics to experience real fun. XBLIG demo time is 8 minutes and it might not be enough to show people the potential of the game.

A big thanks to Andreas Heldt.

]]> http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?feed=rss2&p=2285 0 Xbox Live Arcade Sales Analysis, July 2010 http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2281 http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2281#comments Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:24:59 +0000 RichHW http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2281 [As Summer of Arcade kicked off with titles like Limbo, GamerBytes editor Ryan Langley offers charts and leaderboard data to get an idea of which titles are hits on the service this summer.]

In Xbox Live Arcade’s history, July…

]]> [As Summer of Arcade kicked off with titles like Limbo, GamerBytes editor Ryan Langley offers charts and leaderboard data to get an idea of which titles are hits on the service this summer.]

In Xbox Live Arcade’s history, July 2009 was bolstered by the release of Battlefield 1943, Secret Of Monkey Island and the second coming of the Summer of Arcade promotion.

Conversely, July 2010 saw six new releases – Monkey Island 2: Special Edition from LucasArts, and Blacklight: Tango Down from Zombie Studios and Ignition Entertainment, Deadliest Warrior: The Game from Pipeworks and Spike TV, DeathSpank from Hothead, plus the first two new titles for Summer of Arcade in 2010, Playdead’s Limbo and Vector Unit’s Hydro Thunder Hurricane.

Make A Monkey Out Of Me

The first Monkey Island’s Special Edition was released on July 15th 2009 – and in its first three weeks, we saw 66,000 players added to the Leaderboard. Despite Monkey Island 2’s larger budget, and possibly larger fan base, the game only added 29,398 players in a similar time frame.

However, unlike the original, Monkey Island 2 was not a timed exclusive. The game was also released on PlayStation Network, iPhone and iPad in the same week, so it’s quite possible that consumers picked it up on another device. The PlayStation Network version only supports the top 1,000 players on the Leaderboards, so we’re unable to follow it.

Zombie’s Blacklight: Tango Down did remarkably well – nearly 50,000 players in the first week and almost 100,000 players by the end of the month. For a game that requires an online connection, it means 100,000 Xbox Live Gold subscribers were hungry for a new shooter. It might not be selling a million like Battlefield 1943 last year, but it’s still a strong performance, and the title will likely continue to trot along for a while – well, at least until Halo: Reach in September.

xblajulynewreleases.jpg

Deadliest Of All Spanks

The last two releases before the Summer of Arcade promotion were Deadliest Warrior, the first game published by Spike TV’s entertainment division, and DeathSpank, Ron Gilbert and Hothead Games’ action-RPG.

DeathSpank did quite well, with over 34,000 players in its first week on the Leaderboards, and a total of 62,638 players by the end of the month. This is already triple what the second episode of Penny Arcade Adventures sold, and nearly as many as the first – though the first was also 400 Microsoft Points more expensive. The game was also released worldwide on PlayStation Network in the same week.

The most surprising game this month was Deadliest Warrior – a 3D fighting game loosely based on the gonzo TV series. Despite some poor reviews and a Metacritic rating of 58, the game has sold remarkably well. It was still the third-best-selling title in its third week, and while we don’t have single-player Leaderboard statistics, we do know that at least 70,000 people have played at least one game online, which is an amazing feat and beyond expectations.

One major reason for this could be advertising – Spike are in the unique position of owning a television network, and are promoting the game through Deadliest Warrior and through advertisements – a first for an Xbox Live Arcade title.

Read the full post Here…

]]> http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?feed=rss2&p=2281 0 Self-publishing on XBLIG http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2237 http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2237#comments Wed, 18 Aug 2010 11:21:36 +0000 RichHW http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2237 Fritz from Triple B Games prepared this excellent guide to self-publishing on XBLIG. Triple B have just self-published the rather superb looking NLL Lacrosse 2010 on XBLIG, and prior to that Fitba, also on XBLIG…

XBLIG is an open channel on the…

]]> Fritz from Triple B Games prepared this excellent guide to self-publishing on XBLIG. Triple B have just self-published the rather superb looking NLL Lacrosse 2010 on XBLIG, and prior to that Fitba, also on XBLIG…

XBLIG is an open channel on the Xbox 360 that allows indie developers to sell their games through the Xbox 360 dash without requiring any platform holder approval. Games developed for XBLIG must be developed in C# using the XNA libraries provided by Microsoft. In order to develop & release on Xbox 360 a Creators Club membership is required, priced at £65/$99 per year.

The Good Stuff

  • Open channel, no platform holder approval required.
  • Channel not flooded, currently just over 1000 games available on the channel.
  • Reliable sales tracking and payments from Microsoft, games can be priced at 400,240 or 80 Microsoft points, ($5/$3/$1) with Microsoft taking a 30% cut. Sales and trial download figures are available daily, a day after they have occurred.
  • No ESRB or PEGI ratings are required, although Indie Games cannot be purchased by child accounts.
  • Development is done on retail Xbox 360’s – no devkit costs.
  • Active and friendly community at http://forums.xna.com/forums/
  • Use of avatars in game, although there are restrictions as to what you can do with avatars, you can’t dismember them, dress them, have them talk etc.
  • You are issued with codes to distribute review copies for your game once it has passed peer review.
  • C#: Once you’re used to C# going back to C++ feels primitive.
  • Releasing games developed in XNA is possible on XBLA, there are extensions available for registered developers that add support for Leaderboards & Achievements.
  • Conversion ratios are good – over 30% for the best titles.

 

The Middling Stuff

  • XBLIG aren’t for sale in all territories, they are currently only available in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, Sweden, Singapore and Spain.
  • Localisation is supported, but it slows down the approval process as each language submitted has to be separately approved before the game can be released.
  • The Peer review process can be frustratingly slow, around 2 weeks per submission, with an enforced weeks delay before resubmitting if your submission doesn’t pass.

 

The Bad Stuff

  • XBLIG are treated a bit like the red-headed stepchild of the Xbox 360 family, shunted off into their own channel in the dash, they don’t show up if you search All Games. Potential players have to navigate to the indie games section of the dash to find your game.
  • No achievements.
  • No support for Live Leaderboards, although various peer to peer leaderboard methods have been developed to get round this.
  • In game advertising is prohibited.
  • C#: if you’re thinking of porting an existing game you’re going to have to convert to C# & XNA, if you’re writing a game specifically for XBLIG then you’ll most likely have to convert to C++ if you wish to target another platform.
  • Sales numbers don’t compare to AppStore numbers – the best selling game (I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1) has gone over 200k units @80MSP.

PC development using XNA is also possible, although you are not allowed to use avatars or the Live Networking functionality, and Windows Phone 7 game development is going to follow the XNA\C# route.

Sales figures are posted by developers in this thread http://forums.xna.com/forums/t/28044.aspx or if you don’t fancy wading through the 60 odd pages of that you can see how the top 20 games of 2009 did in this thread http://forums.xna.com/forums/p/45585/272243.aspx#272243

]]> http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?feed=rss2&p=2237 0 Drakkar Dev http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2259 http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2259#comments Wed, 18 Aug 2010 20:20:25 +0000 RichHW http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2259 CONTACT: info@drakkardev.com WEBSITE: http://www.drakkardev.com/ LOCATION: Catania, Italy]]> Drakkar Dev S.r.l. is an independant game development company based in Italy. Founded in early 2010 by Daniele Cariola, Domenico Gallo and Manlio Greco, Drakkar Dev’s main goal is to create high quality videogames for multiple platforms, from main home consoles through handhelds.

To deliver our products on time with a small team, Drakkar Dev uses third party licensed technologies. The use of a commercial game engine gives us the opportunity to focus on the game content and design, also assuring stability and fast multiplatform portability.

CONTACT: info@drakkardev.com

WEBSITE: http://www.drakkardev.com/

LOCATION: Catania, Italy

]]> http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?feed=rss2&p=2259 0 ReplicaNet – Game Networking Middleware for Indies http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2245 http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2245#comments Wed, 18 Aug 2010 11:53:18 +0000 RichHW http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2245 We are looking to start a series of articles from Middleware Companies & Contractors offering indie specific services at a realistic and affordable price point. So first off we have ReplicaNet and RNLobby, so over to Martin at ReplicaNet…

With online…

]]> We are looking to start a series of articles from Middleware Companies & Contractors offering indie specific services at a realistic and affordable price point. So first off we have ReplicaNet and RNLobby, so over to Martin at ReplicaNet…

With online games becomming more complex the need for well behaved bandwidth saving technology increases. ReplicaNet and RNLobby are two network APIs designed to tackle two different areas of game networking, session management and lobby. 

ReplicaNet is a session management and object description API that enables C++ game objects to be described as a collection of class member functions and class member variables with network update filters. Each C++ class is treated as a potential network shareable object on the machine that allocates it. This machine has control over the C++ classes and can change variables or call member functions as normal. Once the object is ready to be shared to other machines the object is published on to the ReplicaNet network session. The underlying ReplicaNet software detects changes in the object and automatically updates the replicated classes on the machines connected to the network session. Any changes made to the member variables of the C++ classes can be extrapolated by ReplicaNet using several pre-defined filters to reduce the amount of network traffic when transmitting changes in the object. As network games tend to have increased in complexity a visual debugger (RNVisualDebugger) is included to aid the developer to spot network bandwidth spikes and drill down to which class members are causing the problem. Armed with this debugging information tweaking the class member’s filter parameters can help reduce the network bandwidth used by the session.

RNLobby provides lobby functionality and the tools needed to maintain a persistent online space for online games. Features include binary difference file patching, CD/license key verfication, NAT detection and punch-through, advertising of game sessions, user account creation, persistent user data storage and statisics for game sessions.

The creator of ReplicaNet, Martin Piper, has spent a long time in the games industry since Argonaut Games was on the scene writing Star Fox and knows what it is like as an indie trying to get a project off the ground.

So for the indie developers if you mention Indievision when talking to Replica Software you can receive a discount on their libraries and other services. Martin also contracts out his services for helping with multiplayer game coding.

http://www.replicanet.com/

]]> http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?feed=rss2&p=2245 0 Intel and The Game Creators Team Up in Games http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2252 http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2252#comments Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:41:30 +0000 RichHW http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2252 Several Prizes Up For Grabs Including An All Expenses Paid Vacation

The Game Creators have teamed up with Intel to offer game developers the chance to win some amazing prizes for developing new games for netbooks. There are several fantastic…

]]> Several Prizes Up For Grabs Including An All Expenses Paid Vacation

The Game Creators have teamed up with Intel to offer game developers the chance to win some amazing prizes for developing new games for netbooks. There are several fantastic prizes on offer with the top prize being an all expenses paid vacation worth up to US $5,000!

We’ve all been there, on the road on vacation with the family and our trusty old netbook is ready at the go to Facebook, Twitter and surf the web. But after all the chatty time, aren’t you really just itching to have a death race, zap alien ships, and kill zombies on your netbook too?

Well Intel wants your help, and has partnered with The Game Creators to seek out, recognize and reward excellent game development for netbook devices. So, if you’re on your summer holidays, on a break from work or just simply love to develop games, The Game Creators and Intel want you!

The Game Creators’ Financial Director, Rick Vanner, said “This competition is aimed at empowering the many talented amateur game makers that love to spend their spare time coding games and demos. The Intel AppUp store will give them a direct channel to market and sell their small game apps to millions of users worldwide. By using Dark Basic Professional or Dark GDK they can create games in a very short time scale. We have a very creative community and it will be very exciting to see what they develop.”

For this competition there is a deadline of 3rd October at 12PM GMT so those looking to enter need to get cracking now!

Further information on the Games for Netbooks competition can be found at:

http://www.thegamecreators.com/intelcompo/index.php

Further information on The Game Creators can be found at:

http://www.thegamecreators.com/

]]> http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?feed=rss2&p=2252 0 Continuing Adventures on WiiWare, Now with Added PSP Minis http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2170 http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2170#comments Wed, 04 Aug 2010 13:52:38 +0000 RichHW http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2170 This is a follow-on piece to WiiWare – Be Prepared!

We finally hit the US performance threshold on our first title (hooray), some 8 months after first release. We now have to wait until the end of Q3 to get…

]]> This is a follow-on piece to WiiWare – Be Prepared!

We finally hit the US performance threshold on our first title (hooray), some 8 months after first release. We now have to wait until the end of Q3 to get our royalty statement, and 30 days after that we should finally see some money.

PAL region not so good, according to current weekly sales figures we have another 17 weeks to go if things stay as they are. So, in total, a little over a year to hit the target, plus the rest of Q1 2011 and the thirty day payment wait. So about 16 months from release to first royalties if my maths is correct. Sob!

We’ve also just released a second title now on WiiWare; sales are fairly slow so far, but I think the summer months are probably the worse time of all to release.

NTSC region is disappointing, if sales continue at the current rate it will be about a 42 week period (since release) until we hit the threshold. PAL is actually doing quite well at the moment, but it is too early to give any sort of time-frame as it is only a few days since release.

PSP Minis

Interestingly we also released our first PSP Mini. Now while US sales are fairly low and are certainly living up to the PSP Minis poor sales reputation, the PAL regions are doing quite good numbers so far. We hit our lifetime sales projections in just two weeks, although we were very conservative with our projections – 2,500 units.

What Next

So the big question – how can we boost sales, particularly on WiiWare. The reviews were not as good as we were hoping for our WiiWare titles, but then I keep reading that reviews are not supposed to have that much impact on sales of downloadable games. I suspect that this is not entirely true and they can have a big effect, but it is impossible to say for sure.

The other key issues is marketing, we had a fair bit of press coverage for our press releases and what-not leading up to release, but beyond that we haven’t done a great deal  – and to be honest I am slightly unsure how to approach the marketing of the WiiWare titles, especially given our zero budget.

Conclusions (So Far…)

Right now I would find it very hard to recommend WiiWare as a platform for self-publishing. Even once we hit the thresholds, we will not come close to re-cooping the development costs. We need to hit at least double the performance threshold sales to cover costs for each title (and add a little profit), but realistically that is never going to happen.

Our future plan for all our WiiWare titles is to work within the lower 16Meg size, rather than 40Meg size we have been so far. Although this is restrictive in size and what you can fit in, the thresholds are much less punishing so you will see money sooner.

Unless you are producing something that is a graphical showcase, such as Jett Rocket, the limitations are workable.

But all is not lost – we spread our bets with a few other titles, and for each we have a multi-platform release strategy. I really can’t recommend this enough – with each additional SKU so the costs drastically reduce, and you start to see the possibility of actually covering development costs and making a profit.

Add to that one or two publisher funded projects (3DS is very appealing there) and things can tick over very nicely.

Just don’t put all of your eggs in the WiiWare basket, or you may well come to a sticky end (sorry!).

]]> http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?feed=rss2&p=2170 2 Bit Barons http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2174 http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2174#comments Wed, 04 Aug 2010 12:05:29 +0000 ReaperOscuro http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?p=2174 CONTACT: Alexander Zacherl, az@bitbarons.com WEBSITE: www.bitbarons.com LOCATION: Munich, Germany]]> Bit Barons is an independent game studio from Munich, Germany. The three-man-team got together in 2009 after finishing their (game) studies. They are currently developing their first game, Astroslugs, which will be released in 2010 on PC and Mac and later this year on mobile devices and consoles. Astroslugs is a colorful and soothing puzzle game that is extremely easy to pick up and allows you to create and share your own puzzles.

Bit Barons strive to create many more games in the Astroslugs universe, each sporting a unique and easy-to-use interface that is perfectly suited to it’s gaming platform.

CONTACT: Alexander Zacherl, az@bitbarons.com
WEBSITE: www.bitbarons.com
LOCATION: Munich, Germany

]]> http://www.indievision.org/index.php/?feed=rss2&p=2174 0