GDC Gallery: How The Indie Fund Could Change Game Dev Destiny (boingboing)
“Like UK studio Introversion’s indie-rallying clarion call at the 2006 Independent Games Festival, the announcement of an indie-led investment strategy — simply called the Indie Fund — could be the next watershed moment for the future of independent gaming.”

GDC 2010: Please Finish Your Game (TIGSource)
“The inimitable Chris Hecker ranted at GDC this year. His rant, titled “Please Finish Your Game”, addresses the issue of development time in the mainstream and indie communities. Specifically, he asks developers to pursue good ideas to their “logical and aesthetic extent”.”

‘Splosion Man Dev Reveals Next Project: Comic Jumper (GSW)
“Twisted Pixel, the indie studio behind beloved downloadable titles The Maw and ‘Splosion Man, revealed its next XBLA game at SXSW yesterday: Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley.”

Interview: Markus ‘Notch’ Persson On The Making Of Minecraft (GSW)
“Minecraft is an interesting case when it comes to indie games. Based on the ideas of another indie game, Infiminer, Minecraft is the product of Swedish developer, Markus “Notch” Persson. His game is currently available to play for free at www.minecraft.net and players have congregated to the multiplayer side of the game”

Towering Inferno: Sol Survivor Preview (RPS)
“It’s that time of year again when the fresh spring towers erupt from the ground and begin to gun down passing alien body-snatchers. We’ve seen tower defence games overhauled again and again, but the greenest and most flexible of these rejigs is probably Sol Survivor, which I’ve been playing on and off all week. Read on for some thoughts on a game which makes titanic efforts to raise this least-appreciated of genres.”

Preview: High Strangeness (IndieGames)
“With the above pre-alpha footage just released, now is as good a time as any to discuss High Strangeness. In development for Xbox Live Indie Games and iPhone, the game is an attempt by a team of four to create the kind of experience they used to play on the SNES as kids.”

The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Promethium Marketing (Joystiq)
“”We sometimes neglect to give independent developers our coverage love (or loverage, if you will) as we get caught up in AAA, AAAA or the rare quintuple-A titles. To remedy that, we’re giving indies the chance to create their own loverage and sell you, the fans, on their studios and products. This week we talk with former Xbox community staffer Chris Paladino, who’s in the unusual position of working with a games consulting firm, Promethium Marketing, that decided to step out with a game of its own, an unusual hybrid of Twitter and tower defense called Tweet Defense.”

Semi-Indie Related:

Budget Win: Tax Break For UK Developers (RPS)
“British videogame designers have long been campaigning for tax breaks in the UK, similar to those in New Zealand and Canada. In today’s budget, it seems that something has finally been done to help. Alistair Darling has today announced a pledge for a tax credit system that will aid creative industries, including game development.”

Study claims hardcore PC gaming hardware revenues will continue to rise (BigDownload)
“The PC game industry may be switching from a retail business to a digital download revenue model but gamers still need to buy hardware to play their games.”

Unmissable Mods Month (UserCreated)
“Mods are awesome. Like, really awesome. So awesome it hurts. Do you know what else is awesome? Lists. So what have we done? Why, we’ve only gone and written down the names of our 20 favourite mods of all time in an unordered list, and we’re only going to write about one of them every day for the next month (except weekends, when we’ll do a sleep).”

On One’s Own is a column about, you guessed it, independent gaming. The wayward wanderings of DIYGamer’s James Bishop might lead to probing art, gameplay, design, reception or a number of other aspects related to independent games. But you can rest assured that all things indie will be carefully considered on a weekly basis.

As discussed before, a major problem with coming up with a definition for “indie game” really comes down to the single fact that larger non-independent publishers will occasionally pick up what some might have previously considered an indie game. Is Shank any less of an indie title now that EA Partners has teamed up to publish and promote it? Games like this continue to be indie titles, arguably, but have a major push in the public relations department.

But how does this relationship actually work? Is it really beneficial to both parties? It’s an excellent question that your average gamer might not even ponder about twice. In a way, it is comparable to how most goods tend to be made overseas and then packaged wherever they are going to be sold. For example, the shoes on my feet were made in Vietnam. The box, however, was made in the good ole United States of America. I have absolutely no idea how that all actually works, but I’m sure someone in Vietnam is getting the short end of the stick on that deal. (I paid forty bucks for these!)

Of course, the particulars are all different. I wouldn’t necessarily compare independent developers directly to sweatshop workers, exactly, but the situation is analogous. Your average indie developer signs a deal with the metaphorical devil in the shape of a publisher in order to fund and promote their game. This isn’t always the way that these kinds of games come to the attention of the general public but it certainly constitutes the majority.

This is not just an issue for indie games either as the entire industry battles with this sort of thing regularly. The recent hubbub at Infinity Ward stemmed partially from the fact that Activision publishes the games they develop. Per their agreement, it seems, the Call of Duty franchise essentially became an Activision franchise. All developers, mainstream or indie, need funding to either continue to work on their games, start work on a new games or promote their games in general. Which is typically how indie games become affiliated with larger publishers.

As briefly mentioned above, Shank from developer Klei Entertainment recently entered into a publishing agreement with EA Partners. And though this column is mostly about the negative aspects of the developer-publisher relationship, Jamie Cheng, Klei Entertainment founder, had nothing but good things to say about the partnership with Electronic Arts. Speaking with 1Up, he was quoted as saying, “We had a clear vision of what we wanted to do with the game, so we had an opportunity to partner up with [EA] and have their marketing muscle.” Perhaps his tune will change in the future but he certainly seems to be happy to be letting someone else do that pesky marketing.

And it is not just Klei Entertainment that holds this opinion. Other developers seem to share this same kind of hands-off approach to marketing with Jamie. If a super-giant publisher wants to promote it, that’s on them to do all the dirty work. Instead of a much smaller company funneling every last dime into a marketing budget, larger firms like Electronic Arts can step in and do that for them. That way the developers can focus on what truly matters to them: the game.

Which is partially the major disconnect between publishers and developers. The developer wants to create an interesting, fun game while the publisher wants to get as many people to buy said game as humanly, and sometimes inhumanly, possible. In a recent panel at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, a number of student and independent developers sat down with the stated goal of helping explain how to make a successful game like they had previously. It included members of the development team for Portal, The Misadventures of P. B. Winterbottom and flOw. Noticeably, it seems not one spoke of publishing agreements during their brief panel.

Picking up student games, or most indie games for that matter, and getting them out there is a no-brainer for publishers. In terms of monetary investment, would you rather spend five years or more developing a game and a total of two years promoting it… or just promote a game for two years that already has a niche audience but certainly has the potential to grow beyond being only niche? Keep in mind that the game that has been in development for five years might not pan out or meet the expectations set for it.

The choice is fairly obvious. In a world where iPhone games developed by a single person can make a profit of $250,000 in just two months with little to no promotion, cutting a deal with a student showcase winner or other game festival entrants is akin to planting a money tree or two. A small investment is likely to bring in large profits. Investing in games festival winners is about as sure a thing as it gets in game publishing.

It is not always love and sunshine in this relationship, though. There are the horror stories about publishers dictating design to developers, the obscene amounts of money that publishers make off the creative assets they manage and, of course, the ever-present worry of groupthink in the community at large. Don’t just take my word for it, though.

Timothy Ryan’s blog on Gamasutra includes an entry talking about just this sort of thing. Specifically, he looks at the way in which publishers can either be far too hands-off or become too involved in the minutiae of development. He focuses in on publishing producers and the role they play in development. Is it really so hard to imagine this happening in an indie developer situation? The answer: Not at all. In fact, it probably happens often.

As for the obscene amounts of money that publishers make, we need look no further than the president of Q-Games, Dylan Cuthbert. Speaking with Develop back in January of this year, he made a pathetic appeal (derived from pathos, people) in what may seem like an effort to demonize publishers who bankroll smaller developers. He notes that he could make the entire PixelJunk series over again just on bonuses that some executives at these publisher make on top of their salary.

The groupthink worry is best summed up, albeit unintentionally, in an article by Jim Sterling about art games and innovation. Though he criticizes indie games and innovation in general, the nugget of his argument seems to be that innovation and indie games are not innately good or bad. They can be one or the other, sometimes both, but it all comes down to the effort put in the end product. This too stems from the complicated publisher-developer relationship. Though Sterling seems to be hit-or-miss for me, this one is definitely worth a read and really speaks for itself.

Hope is not lost, however. It is not as if this problem has existed within a vacuum and gone unnoticed by those with the power to change it. A number of developers have actually gotten together to form the Indie Fund. In theory, it will function in much the same way as a larger publisher would by bankrolling initiatives but skipping the whole signing in blood part.

Nathan Vella, president of Capybara Games, spoke with Ars Technica on the subject saying, “The end goal of a publisher is to hit sales targets, make a return on investment, and generate profit for their shareholders… In literally every way possible, this can, and normally does, conflict with the end goal of developers. Especially indie developers. Sure, we all want a return on investment, but we want that ROI to come off the back of a project we are passionate about and a final product we love. Developers want to make games that, on a small scale or big scale, push the medium forward. There’s a really big conflict there.”

2D Boy’s Ron Carmel added, “Developers often don’t get publishers and vice versa. Neither is evil, but both are too caught up in their own needs to really see things from the other’s point of view.” Sure, some households might agree that Bobby Kotick is evil or EA is where developers go to die, but it is ultimately a two-way street. Maybe the Indie Fund is the first step toward building more of these streets and stimulation for more introspection on the subject within publishers and developers alike.

Slam Bolt Scrappers was just announced as part of the Boston Indie Showcase which will be featured at PAX East for all of the public to play, but for now I’d be getting an early look. But before we got into the game, Eitan told me about Fire Hose’s background.

Eitan had never planned to make video games, he calls it an “accident.” After studying Biology and Computer Science, he fell into game design after being attached to a science related project that turned out to be a game. From then on out, he knew what he wanted. He entered the graduate program of MIT’s GAMBIT Game Lab and met Sharat Bhat. From there they recruited Ethan Fenn who used to work at Harmonix. They then found artists Jason Wiener and Jacques Pena, and attached Tovah Heller to round out the business side of things. Having such bright minds all in one place led to the acquisition of contract work, which allowed them to eat and pay the rent as they moved towards development of their first game. With the team and some money in place, they began brainstorming and prototyping the kind of game they wanted to make. They decided on a title about architecture, drawing inspiration from physical construction toys like Legos and Lincoln Logs.

While a long way from the game they’d eventually settle on, Eitan showed me a few different ideas they had thrown together. The first was a growth simulator balancing the elements of water, electricity and plants; the object was to grow as many plant blooms as possible. It’s the idea was to juggle the elements to better your score. They then turned into a different building idea with a superhero type character flying through the game world, punching a running dinosaur (which was actually the T-Rex from Dinosaur Comics) and collecting girders to build up a tower in the middle which the T-Rex would inevitably try to destroy. While you wouldn’t technically guess that this superhero build of a game eventually turned into Slam Bolt Scrappers, there are some key elements at play that made it work. Nine months worth of toying with game types finally led to the game they’d be putting all of their time into.

Slam Bolt Scrappers is a brawler, a puzzle game and a furious battle of multiplayer wits. Players choose their characters, outfit them with one of many hat choices including a viking helmet and a hard hat, and send them into battle. The playing field is separated into two (in our two player battle) columns, which is the area in which each player builds. A three by three golden block is stationed at the bottom far corner of each player’s column, which is what they must protect in order to survive. Each character flies around the screen and has the ability to punch the opposing player, or that player’s base which grows in size with different guns, missiles and shields as the game is played. But once you leave the safety of your own play area, your opponent’s guns can turn on you, rather than just your base.

So the trick is to build up your base quickly and strongly. To do this, the player acquires blocks of different shapes and colors by punching out beasts that float onto the top of the playing field. Each defeated beast drops a different building block, which are separated into shapes of different colors. You can pick up five pieces at a time, which trail you as you fly around the screen. You then must place the blocks on your playing field, rotating them as needed in order to build squares, which turn into guns, missiles and shields. The bigger the square, the more powerful your new base piece.

The gameplay is frantic. You’re required to think about the combat, the building, and what your opponent is up to. I destroyed Eitan in our first match, and while he’ll claim that he was busy explaining the Fire Hose story and the game to me, it’s really due to my quick reflexes. Just don’t ask about our second match.

The game is colorful and easy to pick up and play. Due to the fact you can undertake many different strategies to win, its replay value is ongoing. You can technically fly straight into your foe’s base and start punching their home, though in the current build you’re facing a ten second setback (Eitan said this would probably change) if you die. Ten seconds is an eternity in a world where your opponent has this bonus time to truly plan out their own way to bring your demise.

People are going to compare the puzzle element to Tetris, it’s just inevitable, but that’s an oversimplified comparison that doesn’t hold true. You’re not trying to clear anything, you’re building a base and not dealing with falling blocks. You have complete control over where the blocks go. You can even switch out certain gaps in your construction, so that you’re only placing the displaced block pieces that remain. So if you misplace a jagged block leaving only a single square empty, you can actually place a block to fill it and find a remaining area for the rest of the pieces to fit. This is an additional level of control over your standard puzzle game.

Fire Hose’s philosophy involves the idea that small indie teams are better able to find opportunities in the game world. Compounded by some market planning, they put Slam Bolt Scrappers together knowing who would play it and where it can be found. While they’re not announcing where it’s going to land yet, it’s a downloadable game that will work anywhere it actually does end up. It currently supports up to four player local multiplayer, but they can’t yet discuss the online aspect.

Playable builds of the game are being officially revealed at PAX East in two weeks, so I was intrigued to see it early. As they move toward release they’re going to be implementing a lot of new features, including more characters (only two were playable during our preview) and additional hats that will provide property changes for the character. He said they already have a build of a chef hat and a dog-eared cap, which add personality to the solid cartoon foundation of each player.

More news about the title will trickle down the pipeline in the next few months and we’ll be staying on top of its development. After we snag some assets from PAX East, we’ll get them up so that you can actually visualize the game as I described it.

If you’re interested in participating you can submit for the workshop by filling out a short submission form following the EGW guideline. Deadline for entries is January 26. Past participants include multi-award winners Braid, Flower and World of Goo.

[Experimental Gameplay Workshop]