For my final entry this week on why I've decided to go to LA for the Oct. 1-4th Indiecade conference/festival (and why you should come, too): a quick and dirty run down of all the games that have been selected as finalists for this year's show runs below, and continues below the fold.
See my earlier entries (pt. 1 and pt. 2) for more information on the star-studded keynotes and sessions that will make up the main Indiecade conference, and see the official Indiecade site for information on attending.
Continuing on from my last post on why I've decided to spend October 1st through 4th at Indiecade, and expect you should as well, conference organizers have revealed more of what to expect from the four days, including highlights of its keynote from none less than former Maxis head Will Wright.
Apart from Wright, day two will also see talks from Avaloop, the indie virtual world company behind their "self-expression, communication, environmental awareness" focused Papermint, Arts Game Innovation Lab director Tracy Fullerton on working with video artist Bill Viola on The Night Journey, an iPhone panel by the RadioFlare, Ruben and Lullaby, and Eliss teams, and Uncharted designer Richard Lemarchand talking with Giant Sparrow designer Ian Dallas, creator of void-painting game The Unfinished Swan.
Indiecade has also sent Offworld more information on the Day One conversation between Katamari Damacy's Keita Takahashi, Flower's Jenova Chen and thatgamecompany's Robin Hunicke, who have clarified that their talk will be a brainstorming session on "Fresh Ideas for First and Third-Person Shooters". Takahashi will discuss his theoretical FPS/TPS "where characters grow as they succeed," Chen will "brainstorm ways to make an FPS/TPS where the players have to be nice to each other," and Hunicke will talk about her own game where "shooting created things instead of destroying them."
The full conference schedule has been posted to the Indiecade site, which will also see Sunday sessions themed around "opportunities for aspiring young gamers, including a special workshop on colleges and universities that offer degrees in gaming, and a special pitch session where young designers can get feedback on their game ideas, as well as a series of sessions dedicated to adults interested in entering the game industry. Sunday's program will include a premiere of a soon-to-be-published indie game."
I'll do a final post wrapping up all the games to be exhibited at Indiecade in the very near future, and might have more surprises in store, as well.
What with all the vacation and GDC Austin goings on the past several weeks, it's been far too long since I last made mention of the upcoming Indiecade festival/conference coming to Los Angeles (Culver City, really) October 1st through 4th.
What that means is that while the time's growing close, there's still plenty of it to consider coming down, as I will be, to see what's frankly an impressive lineup of guests and exhibited games for this year's festival.
Indiecade's doing a slow-strip reveal of exactly who and what will be on display for the long-weekend happenings, but for my first post on the goings-on and why I've decided this could be unmissable, here's what we know for sure:
Friday will see a full day of conference sessions, including Greg Wohlwend and Mike Boxleiter of Intuition (behind games like Fig. 8 and Protonaut, I Wish I Were The Moon and Today I Die's Dan Benmergui, former MIT media studies program director Henry Jenkins on "expression and game literacy", and, best of all, a conversation between Katamari Damacy's Keita Takahashi and flOw/Flower creator Jenova Chen, moderated by new thatgamecompany dev Robin Hunicke.
Now basically fully recovered from the week of Indie Insanity that took place during and after this year's debut GDC Austin Indie Games Summit, I present (below the fold) a longer look inside the Summit with photos courtesy official Offworld photographer Rebekah Saltsman.
As I somewhat made mention of during this year's main GDC, the Indie Summit is quickly becoming an essential part of the convention, perhaps less so for the material covered (which is still nearly always incisive and inspiring), but for the opportunity to meet the people behind the games, and to experience the deep sense of community that's taken root and strengthened over the past several years.
In any industry, even outside games, it's hard to find a quarter so uncompetitive, so supportive, and so bound by a sense of collective creative drive under the quite literal strains of basic survival without otherwise gainful employment, and it's hard to come away without feeling like it's something that the world could use more of.
So, all that said, behind the fold you'll find photos of the people behind nearly all the Indie Summit talks, with more available directly from Saltsman's official Flickr stream -- though none un/fortunately, from our Saturday trip to Austin's Eagle Peak firing range, where Cortex Command creator Dan Tabar led an expedition to give what must have looked like the motliest of indoor-kid crews their first-ish non-digital/simulated rounds on a variety of handguns and assault rifles. Maybe we'll save that one for another day.
Watching Fantastic Contraption creator Colin Northway speak, you get the sense that he's discovered the magic formula, and despite the confidence that his undeniable success allows (he's converted, he figures, about 0.5% of the 3.1 million players he'd gained by the end of October 2008 into $10 paying customers [basically: cut those millions in half, move the decimal point one to the left, and put a dollar sign in front]), you get the sense that that success came as a surprise to him as much as anyone.
In what was easily the most entertaining session of the first day of GDC Austin's Indie Games Summit, Northway guided his audience through the rise and rise of the construction-puzzle game's development and near-instant user-crush in the form of a literally-bug-squashing timeline platformer, with his own mutton-chopped mug perfectly pixelated by I Wish I Were The Moon/Today I Die's Daniel Benmergui, and offered a number of guidelines for other developers hoping to mirror his accolades.
1.) Make your game in Flash
Northway draws a fine distinction between 'Flash games' (games where you "launch kitties into a spiky thing") and 'games written in Flash', but he's an evangelist for the platform more than anything because "the content discovery problem has been solved" compared to consoles, the iPhone, etc. Forums, emails, all pre-existing internet communities will do the work of keeping your game's name in front of other people, whereas, say, with the iPhone, "making money is hard to do if Apple doesn't spray the money hose on you."
2.) Make your game "live online"
All of those user good graces will be short lived, though, if your game doesn't make it easy for them to spread. Northway repeatedly conjured the idea of letting your game "live on the internet", something he's done by keeping user-made creations in a database accessible by a friendly URL, rather than 10-line encoded data URLs, that can be passed easily from player to player in emails and forum posts. But also, he notes, you get "no grace from people on Flash, versus a downloaded game" -- because they have no time invested in your game other than loading it in their browser, you need to "spoon feed them for the first five minutes" to ensure they don't leave as soon as they've arrived. "Take people who hate you and put them in front of your game," he said, "and write [those first five minutes] specifically to them."
3.) Leverage "pride based marketing"
Here's where Northway's advice gets more genre specific, or perhaps where it can urge designers to expand their designs to capitalize on what he's found: because Contraption lets users pass their intricately built puzzle solutions to each other, and because he's made that easier with his advice above, his players are "really keen on sharing something they've built". Using this "pride based marketing" to your advantage will "pay off so well for you in the way your game spreads."
4.) Make a free game that gives players 'a tote bag' if they pay
While Contraption asks for money as soon as you hit its home screen, the game's spread more easily because it's always been reviewed as a free game, with some 10 hours of play given away. What Northway does is give players a thing when they buy it -- in this case, access to level editors and its library of 40,000 user-made levels for that $10 fee (likening it to a PBS model of watching 9 hours of Red Dwarf, but getting spurred on to pay for that content by getting a tote bag). And while he has only converted that 0.5%, that's not far off from piracy numbers he's heard quoted elsewhere. Surprisingly, only five percent of the people who've paid have gone on to actually use the level editor, even once.
Northway saw his game go from release (with zero spent or expended in the way of PR or press outreach) to 20,000 users in his first weekend (spent lazing around on the couch) to 1.1 million in its first month (spent still working at his 'real' job, watching the first PayPal emails dinging in and saying "some human being thinks you're worth $10") to that 3.1 million before publisher inXile (also currently operating similarly viral web-diversion Line Rider) assumed control of the operation.
There seem to be other factors he doesn't mention that have aided in its success (taking something as daunting as physics-heavy construction kits and making it friendly with its flat, bubbly thick-vector interface), but, as was echoed by a number of indie devs following the session, Northway's model and story seems to be precisely the way that indie development should, as in, is meant to work.
The very first entry into Julian Togelius and Sergey Karakovskiy's Mario AI Competition 2009 -- Robin Baumgarten's A*-enhanced agent previously featured here -- has emerged the winner, barely scraping ahead of second place.
Above is a slow-motion run of Baumgarten's agent that shows you second by second the mindboggling array of potential moves the agent cycles through in working out what I'm almost positive would be a pretty instantaneous death for me.
With GDC Austin coming to down next Tuesday to Friday, now seems as good a time as any to do a quick guide to what you should see, and why, if you still haven't registered (with the early registration discount still running through today), you probably should.
1.) The debut of AGDC's Indie and iPhone Game Summits.
This year marks the Austin debut of the two Summits that have always brought some of the most dedicated crowds at the main GDC (many of the Indie Summit sessions this year playing to at-capacity audiences), and -- though I might be a bit biased as one of the Indie Summit's advisors -- the lineup here turned out quite good.
Yours truly will actually be speaking this year early Tuesday morning at 10 for a "New Indie Hotness" session that'll highlight (goes the description) "games and experiments that enchant or confound" -- that is, a number of the games you'll probably be familiar with from Offworld coverage, including some live demos of a few that haven't been played in front of an audience before.
Doing a full breakdown of the main conference sessions is almost too arduous to consider, but the keynotes will include Frank Pearce and J. Allen Brack talking about the Universe of World of Warcraft, Crazy Planets/Pet Society dev PlayFish's Sebastien de Halleux talking social games, Sony Online's John Smedley talking about free to play MMOs, with sessions including the writers behind Left 4 Dead, Mirror's Edge, Infamous, Fallout 3... check the full session lineup or the full speaker lineup to see everyone that's coming.
3.) The parties, game movies at The Alamo
And then also there's the real reason you're all coming: the drunken hob-knobbing, which this year will most notably be taking place at IGDA Austin's 128-bit party (with 'Gangsta-Style Rock Band' [?!]) -- GDC's got the full list of after-hour parties here .
Luckily, the ChaosEdge blog has taken up the task, most recently with their first hands on with Mythora, the game recently offered for sale via Edge Games' website as proof of its legitimate ongoing publishing operations.
You'd think simply receiving the game might have put some of the suspicious issues to rest, but instead, the Mythora post sprawls on and ruthlessly punctures even more holes in Langdell's rapidly deflating narrative, arriving, as it does, on an off-the-shelf Memorex CDR, with installer/auto-run files created about a week ago, despite being "published" in 2004.
Montreal art/game collective Kokoromi have just announced that they'll be bringing the latest installment of their yearly Gamma showcase (traditionally reserved for the Montreal Game Summit) to GDC in March of 2010.
The theme for this year's indie game showcase has yet to be chosen (you'll recall that last year's was the 3D theme that spawned both the original version of Infinite Ammo's Paper Moon and Kokoromi's own early-Offworld-exclusive super HYPERCUBE, and that 2007 was the year where Jason Rohrer first made news with the debut of Passage), but the group says submissions will open in November, and will give prospective indie game devs 6-8 weeks to build their games.
The chosen games will be "featured on large screen projections, and accompanied by the music of local and international DJs" at Gamma's San Francisco opening party, and then be "playable in a special GDC-donated booth on the Game Developers Conference Expo floor from March 11th to 13th."
PAX is a three-day game fest for tabletop, videogame, and PC gamers, and took place September 4-6 in Seattle. Perhaps folks more familiar with the details than I can update us in the comments here. Organizers are using the hashtag #paxflu to track updates on Twitter. Of course, this could also be a very crafty viral marketing campaign. Seriously, though: to those who contracted it or are at risk, get health care pronto, and get well soon. (via @willsmith)
[Brandon adds: our own Offworld pal Tiff Chow is currently donning a post-PAX 'sad sick panda face', which hopefully is entirely coincidental -- we all wish her better soon!]
But in less queasyGuitar Hero news, design studio Pentagram has just published a nice post-mortem on their work extending the franchise's visual ident to its Band and DJ followups.
The changes necessitated creating the new proprietary font above, which go look and see how gracefully they've modified it to cut a clean peaked and valleyed line between the words on all three brands.
There's a good chance you've already seen this by now, as it's been making the tear-stained rounds for the past couple days, and I've only held off in posting it because I still can't quite put my finger on why it's as depressing as it is (can you?).
I don't have much personal emotional stock in Cobain's death -- as tragic as it was -- and the co-opting of dead entertainers for advertising, promotional, and otherwise 'estate-of' toe-curling purposes has its own long and storied history.
I suppose it's just that Cobain himself never got to reach/steadfastly rose above the point of self-parody that makes MJ and EP so ripe for posthumous caricature, and it's probably got a lot to do with how clearly lovingly the 'Unplugged' sessions avatar was created straight down to the last thread of his Jeremiah the Innocent T-shirt (and it seems worth noting here that even Daniel Johnston's own tortured struggles are now yours to purchase in vinyl toy and fanny-pack form, though at least Johnston has lived to give what stamp of approval he can).
Either way, this is an image-control warning shot for all future performers. Read the fine print before you consent.
