With the weekend well and truly behind us, the Humble Bundle Mojam has quite clearly come to a close and the results of the 60 hour development session are in!Mojang, Wolfire Games and Oxeye Studios all made a game in the allotted time while raising money for charity and entertaining those watching via the livestream on HumbleBundle.com. All together a total of 80,197 Mojams were sold and a grand total of $449,718.96 was raised for charity! Not bad going for a couple days work.If you were one of the people who did donate to charity then you can now play the games, well, two of them at the time of writing. Each team stuck to the RTS Shmup with a steampunk ancient Egypt theme and all had quite different results.Mojang created Catacomb Snatch, which has you playing as an old English hunter, shooting his way through tombs to get the diamonds and various monies on which to spend on little gadgets to help fight back the snakes, bats and mummies. It even supports multiplayer.The Wolfire guys come up with an interesting concept although it needs further development

Original Source: ‘Humble Bundle Mojam’: Three Games, Fundraising And Bacon Slapping

This Article was originally posted on our sister site, The Indie Game Magazine written by Chris Priestman.

It’s only been a few months since we last highlighted updates to Wolfire Games’ massively exciting upcoming rabbit-punching sim, Overgrowth, but there’s good reason for such frequent commentary. This isn’t a game that sits quietly in development limbo whilst outsiders look on, praying for news – any news – that the project isn’t dead in the water.

Indie Bundles are all the rage right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if a couple more companies weren’’t lining up similar packaged games to offer at a discount rate. I actually recently wrote an editorial on the subject a couple days ago. You should check it out, if you’re wondering where this bundley future will lead us.

It’s difficult to argue against at this point as it’s increasingly likely that we’ll find our favorite indie games in a bundle of some sort, but could it be that the future of indie games and whether or not an indie game becomes successful depends on whether or not it is “bundled?”

Let’s start with some perspective. In 2010, the two Humble Indie Bundles generated around $3 million dollars and were able to donate $1 million of that total to charity. With a little word of mouth, a favorable internet attitude and some luck, Jeffrey Rosen and John Graham of Wolfire Games were able to shake up traditional sales models and build upon the pay-what-you-want models with their new way of delivering games to the masses.

Geoff and I listened to a talk the team gave at PAX last September, but their latest breakdown of their sales prowess included the second bundle that went on sale in September and clocked in $1.8 million of the total sales between both projects.

Their second bundle proved that the first instance wasn’t just a flash in the pan or another event on which one could hang the label of “the perfect storm.” The first bundle, which took the press (even ourselves) a moment to catch on to, ended up selling 130,000 copies. The second bundle cracked 200 and landed on around 230,000 copies sold. The excitement surrounding the second bundle was enough to blast around $500,000 in sales in the first 24 hours.

While we’ve already been over some origins of the bundle, it’s notable to catch that Wolfire Games’ first attempt at such a project was their collaboration with Natural Selection 2 in which the two games bundled up to sell preorders. They pulled together over 1,600 people who paid $39.95 for the combo.

If you recall, the second Humble Indie Bundle didn’t include any games from Wolfire themselves. On this matter, they formed the company Humble Bundle, Inc. and accepted “tips” on behalf of their managing of the sale. Of all the funds diverted through the games in the second bundle, Wolfire Games earned around $133,000 for their work putting it all together.

Their swords were sharpened for the second bundle, because they knew the amount of traffic they may have to anticipate. On the second go-round, they had 70 instances of the Google App running so that nobody would crash the program or the servers while trying to nab their games. With a chat client that had them running 18 operators helping people through tech issues, this tiny team of independent developers achieved the kind of customer service that a major corporation could only dream of. These operators were faced with up to 30 chat sessions at a time seeing each and every problem through to its closure.

The bundles were unequivocally a success. That cannot be denied. And with the creation of the corporation Humble Bundle, Inc. we can foresee more bundles coming down the pipeline. Only time well tell which titles make it into the new package. The deal seems to be a success for the developers, the players and the organizers: the trifecta of good business.

The second Humble Indie Bundle promotion has come to an end, and most would agree the event was another rousing success. The bundle brought in a whopping $1,822,922.02 from 232,846 contributors — around half a million dollars more than the first promotion made back in May.

The good news doesn’t stop there though, the Revenge of the Titans dev promised to release its source code if the total reached $1.75 Million. Those interested can be expecting it just as soon as they get it packaged up and figure out the licensing and hosting details.

Now onto my favorite part, let’s go next level with these delicious stats:

• With the addition of the first Humble Indie Bundle to the package with a minimum contribution of $7.77, the overall average finished right above at $7.83. Windows users averaged $6.67 a purchase, Mac at $9.26 and Linux a sizable $13.76 per bundle purchased, and as expected the Windows version finished near 66% of all contributions made with Mac and Linux evenly splitting the rest of the pie.

• The largest contributions came near the end of the event, with contributor Nexus Scorpion topping the list dropping a saintly $6,132.96 for the cause followed by a whopping $5,555.55 contribution from a very generous person who chose to remain anonymous. The top 10 contributors alone brought in $27,791.10.

• Additionally, offering customers the option to increase their contribution paid huge dividends to the tune of over $19,000. Hey look at that, some really swell people out there.

If you’re interested in upping your bid you can find instructions to do so on your personal download page — the one that includes your games and the Steam and Desura keys. You can also sign-up to receive an email when the next Humble Indie Bundle project is launched here. Thus far it looks to be a semi-annual event, see you in late May HIB3?

With Super Meat Boy coming out almost two weeks ago today, there’s been a lot of hype surrounding the game not only amongst gamers and the media, but also amongst fellow indie developers. Team Meat added many other characters into their game and, in turn, other indie devs have been incorporating Meat Boy into their game as well. While Overgrowth isn’t exactly a game that would be well suited for Super Meat Boy, the did manage to pay homage in their own “Super Meat Bunny.”

Now, before you watch the video, let me just say that Overgrowth is going to be amazing. Everything we’ve seen from Wolfire up to this point has been great. While I contend that Super Meat Bunny certainly has a disgusting factor about him, I am just that much more amazed that their game was even able to do something like this as it seems like it would be hard to implement.

Anyway, enjoy the video. The developers never mentioned whether he would make it into the final game or not so don’t get your hopes up.

[Wolfire Games]

Video

Developer Wolfire Games, creator of Lugaru, has released a new trailer for their upcoming spiritual sequel Overgrowth. While even the developer admits that their trailers are usually more on the whimsical side, I think we can all agree that this trailer is nothing but pure 100% awesome.

In other Overgrowth news, the game was recently submitted to the 2011 IGF and if this trailer is anything to go by we could possibly be looking at a future grand prize winner. Seriously, it’s that good.

[Overgrowth]

Trailer

Back at PAX 2010, both Peter and I sat in on a panel entitled: The Humble Indie Bundle. It was basically a synopsis of how the bundle idea got started, how the developers reacted during the sale, and ultimately how well it did (hint: very, very well). There was also something hidden in one of the slides that panelists John Graham and Jeff Rosen (Wolfire Games) were all too quick to skip through: a hint that the Humble Indie Bundle was returning.

Well, today I can confirm that the Humble Indie Bundle is definitely returning. While I didn’t want to report on this back in September due to not having any concrete information at all, today things got a little spicier with this appearing on the Humble Indie Bundle’s website:

I’d say this, combined with my earlier hint is all the proof we need that we’ll definitely be seeing a second iteration of one of the most popular game bundles to ever get released.

There’s currently no information involved on what games/developers will be involved, however, as mentioned above, I’d recommend signing up to be notified when there are any announcements. It’ll certainly be exciting to see what games are chosen next.

[Humble Indie Bundle]

Wolfire Games has dropped a new video showing off their open-world brawler Overgrowth and its new animation technology. A six-and-a-half minute showcase of what the sequel of Lugaru HD will be able to do, commentated quite enjoyably by the awesome John Graham (personally can account for the awesomeness.)

There’s even music which includes a live flute performance, nobody ever said Wolfire didn’t know how to put together a demonstration video. Overgrowth is in development for PC, Mac and Linux with a release date still to be determined.