Dev Blog: Shop Talk
There are a lot of indie games currently in development, and some of those discussed in today’s Developer Links include an homage to 16-bit platformers, a multiplayer shooter fully developed in four weeks, a game about a couple meeting in a virtual café, an open-source tool for use with tabletop role-playing games, and lots more.
5 Tips For Making Great 16-Bit-Style Action Games (Gamasutra)
“‘A lot of people look at those games with nostalgia, but they don’t really identify the fact that those games never actually stopped being fun,’ says indie developer Kris Durrschmidt. ‘These games aren’t outdated. The game mechanics aren’t outdated. People just stopped [making them].’”
Project Lineup (Cipher Prime Studios)
“So what’s next at Cipher Prime? We have a few projects on hand actually. While Dain and Andrei are in the process of wrapping up the iPad version of Splice, Will and myself have been working on two other side projects as we gear up for Auditorium 2: Duet.”
Alpha 2 (Bientôt l’été)
“In this new version Apparitions and building changes have been enabled. Thanks to the modelling efforts of Theresa Schlag and Daniel Hellweg, you can now find strange things on the beach and different buildings on the dike, often referring to Marguerite Duras’ life and work.”
Help Fund Dragons Gameboard, Get New Onslaught!-Style Pixel Art (Lost Decade Games)
“The awesome team over at Brass Monkey has just launched a really interesting kickstarter called Dragons Gameboard. It’s an open source, virtualized role-playing game mat that allows up to 16 simultaneous players. Instead of role-playing on a tabletop, imagine lounging around on your couch, with the gameboard visible on your television set, and everyone interacting with their mobile phones. Sounds cool to me!”
Business Analytics With Regression (AltDevBlogADay)
“So you’ve got a nice group of players interested in your game. Maybe you’ve even got a possibility of profit coming up! Now the challenge is to keep your success rolling along. You need to identify ways to reach out to customers, and figure out which players could benefit from a promotional offering. It’s time to develop a regression model for our data!”
Joe Danger The Movie Trailer! (Hello Games)
“Joe Danger The Movie is starting to come together, we’re so excited we can’t sleep! We’ve made a trailer showing some bits of the game (there is plenty we aren’t showing though!) We hope it gets you as excited as we are!”
The Videogame Kickstarter Report – Week of August 10 (Zeboyd Games)
“The big new thing since last we met is the Oculus Rift – a virtual reality headset. The kickstarter has the support of industry legends like Gabe Newell (Valve), John Carmack (id), and Cliff Bleszinski (Epic) so to say that there’s a lot of excitement about it in the developing community is an understatement. Keep in mind that the kickstarter is for dev kits – if you want one for gaming purposes, they recommend you wait for the official release since the finished product will be better than what they have right now. It’s currently up to $1.5 million, way above its goal of $250k.”
Glorifying Hatty In the Gift Shop (The Behemoth Development Blog)
“Today, we explore our Gift Shop area of BattleBlock Theater. As we developed our story for Hatty we found his overall presence was lacking throughout the game. You would see him in the cinematics, and occasionally spread out within the game, but we wanted to make sure Hatty’s presence was more immediate so that the player would feel motivated in what they were doing in trying to save him. We expect that the Gift Shop will be the most visited area in the game and since Hatty has an uncontrollable greed with the currency of BattleBlock Theater, this would be the most natural and fitting spot to have him hang out while the game progresses.”
