Dev Links: Paralysis Of Choice
Today’s Developer Links offer discussion on Interactive Fiction, code censoring and the later stages of crowdfunding.
Crowdfunding, One Year Later (Gamasutra)
“What does the crowdfunding landscape look like for game developers one year after Kickstarter exploded onto the scene? We asked devs behind several major crowdfunding pushes from the last year — Chris Roberts (Star Citizen), Brenda Romero (Shaker), Greg Rice (Double Fine Adventure), and Jim Rossignol and James Carey (Sir, You Are Being Hunted) — for their thoughts and advice on what worked for them and what they’d do differently.”
Roundtable: The Interactive Fiction Renaissance (Gamasutra)
“Text games have come a long way from Zork. Thanks to new tools, new authors, and ubiquitous mobile devices enabling new players, the interactive fiction genre is enjoying a revival of sorts. Game Developer spoke with Inklewriter dev Jon Ingold, longtime author Andrew Plotkin, indie dev and advocate Anna Anthropy, Failbetter Games CEO Alexis Kennedy, and interactive-fiction pioneer Emily Short about how (and why) the IF scene is expanding.”
Code Share: Source Censoring, Part 2 (AltDevBlogADay)
“A while ago I shared the tool we use for censoring source code in the Bitsquid engine. Quick recap: We need to censor the code in our source distributions because there are parts of the code that are covered by NDAs to third parties and cannot be publicly disclosed. We do this with a tool that strips out the secret code and replaces it with blank lines, based on preprocessor definitions. The stripping tool is only part of the solution, though. It works well if you only distribute code drops. You take a snapshot of the code, run the stripping tool to strip out secrets, zip it up. Done!”
Interview with our Composer Gareth Meek (Instant Kingdom)
“I love game music. I listen to tracks from my favorite games almost daily, and Driftmoon is no exception – I must have listened to the soundtrack hundreds of times already (and the amazing part is that I still like it!). It’s been almost three years now since we teamed up with our good friend Gareth Meek.”
BattleBlock Theater: Furbottom’s Features (The Behemoth)
“Last time, we featured a bunch of the awesome content our beta testers had come up with for the BattleBlock Community Theater: a magical place where user-made levels go once they’re uploaded from the Level Editor. While we hope you enjoyed that peek behind the curtain, some of you may have been thinking, “Hey, what about the awesome content I plan to make? If only MY levels could be featured in a feature somehow.””
Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 4 – Title Theme Song (Zeboyd Games)
“Here’s a new song from Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 4 – The Title Theme!”
Planet Stronghold deluxe version available (Winter Wolves)
“[The above screenshot is] from the deluxe version of Planet Stronghold which is currently in beta testing, you can download it here.”
EA veterans investing $40 million in indie mobile games through Tilting Point (Polygon)
“Tilting Point, a company created by video game industry veterans including the former head of EA Partners, will invest $40 million over the next three years in mobile and tablet games from independent developers, according to a press release from the company.”
