Some thoughts on Xbox Live Indie Games Channel

Jump! is a fun game I found on XBLA's indie games channel. This is a great little game that brings back fond memories of classic old platformers and reminded me of an old love, Manic Miner. Totally worth the 240 pts.

Did some digging and found its by a small french indie developer called Arkedo. Impressively, the game was developed in only a month. The 3 man team are promising to deliver a new game a month, in fact the next one is already out on XBLA called Swap!.

I'm surprised not to see Jump! on PC and they don't seem to be doing much to push it (its not even mentioned on their website). It's a shame as I get the sense that the Indie channel remains a bit of a dead zone for gamers content.

I would love to see the Indie channel on XBLA really take off and things seem to be trending in the right direction. User rating for games on XBLA is a good step to helping the quality games get noticed. Yet its still hard to see these games getting more traction without a more comprehensive user review and viral marketing system.

I'd love to be able to post real reviews of games and have them viewable from the Xbox dashboard. One way you could do this is in partnership with Amazon. Amazon sells product codes for XBLA games now and people have gone on there and posted user reviews. MS could propogate the dashboard with these reviews and this would drive consumers to be more active in discussing/sharing the games they like and dislike.

I think the XBLA platform is also crying out to bring over some of the aspects that have made social games on Facebook successful. Can you post messages from your XBLA game to facebook? You should be able to. Start to get your friends to notice your latest high score in Trials HD. I would prefer this to the constant barrage of farmville posts I currently get.

Perhaps now that Facebook has come to XBLA, we will start to see more crossover between these devices. Anything that can help give more tools to the independant developer. XBLA is a great platform still in its infancy I'd like to see it be a viable way to provide a financial way of life for developers like Arkedo to keep doing what they are doing!

Art of the Pitch - advice for indies

Digital Distribution Summit - Sandra Sdraulig Opening & David Edery Keynote from Digital Distribution Summit on Vimeo.

Highly recommend this keynote from my buddy David Edery on how to pitch your indie game for funding.

Of particular note from David;

• Be able to describe your game in one sentence.
• Identify your target audience (don't just say everyone)
• Do your research, make sure you have sized your market and are pitching for the right budget (current XBLA budgets are sub $1M for example)
• tailor your pitch for the organization
• Try and identify gaps in the organizations portfolio and move quickly to fill it.
• make sure a prototype or video sells gameplay, don't over focus on story, tech or art (I've been guilty of this myself.

David is a super smart dude and formerly XBox Worldwide Portfolio Planner and has great advice. You can read his blog for more thoughts on the digital eco-sphere.

Also, kudos to Twisted Pixel for giving David permission to share their pitch material for 'Splosion Man. The gameplay video in particular sells the game instantly and is a perfect example of the right way to pitch your game.

Fig. 8: beautiful indie game

Check out this free little indie game called Fig. 8. It is the whole package.

Created by a collective from Iowa called Intuition Games.

Beautiful music and style, simple premise executed well. Control is simplicity itself but gets progressively more challenging in the environment.

I love the integration of the HUD and tutorial into the game map.
A very relaxing experience and perfect for unwinding at the end of the day!

Lucidity launches this week!

Just a reminder to everyone that this Wednesday is the big day where you will be able to get your hands on Lucidity.
It launches on XBLA & Steam for (I think) the very reasonable price of $10!

Later today we will be answering some questions from people on the development of Lucidity over at LucasArts Workshop. If you haven't checked out the site I recommend it, as we continue to post stories on the development of Lucidity.

We thought it would be interesting to share as much about the development process as we could, in the spirit of sharing key learnings and challenges with anyone else developing small games or interested in doing so.

In the mean-time, a pretty cool hands-on preview over on WorthPlaying continues to help build the good buzz prior to launch. We've been getting a lot of good buzz about the visual style and the audio, but this one gets into the nuts and bolts of the gameplay as well.

FTA;

Lucidity is a shockingly addictive game. The randomly generated nature of the items makes replaying stages exciting and interesting because there isn't a single set solution. Whether you're simply trying to reach the end of the stage or replaying to collect fireflies, the game encourages you to be creative and tricky

Article on Reductive Design

Read a great article from Rodian Joubert today on Gamasutra called Minimised Game Design For Indies: Yes Or No?. (the article is a republish from this site)

This quote from the article by Anna Anthropy sums up the point well;

"contemporary game design is a victim of clutter," says Anthropy. "because the games industry is hit-driven (big budget games need to sell huge amounts just to recoup their costs), games are designed to be everything to everyone. unfortunately, the result is a game full of features which all tug in different directions, and which stretch the idea of the game thin beyond recognition ... they stretch an hour's worth of ideas over eighty hours of filler."

This reminds me of conversations we had about the Lucidity gameplay during early prototyping. We started expanding the core functionality of the game, adding a much wider range of different pieces and also power-ups. We decided in the end to strip it back because we felt that the additions really didn't add anything.

Lucidity - Launch Trailer is live

The launch trailer has gone up on Gametrailers. I embedded this version that posted by BeastMode1100 on youtube. Alternatively you can watch it at gametrailers here.

The clip where Sofi pushes her grandmother over is one of my favorite moments.

We wanted to play around with the fact that we had 3D and 2D assets in the game 3D/2D and decided to have Sofi push the static card over to convey the drama of the moment when Sofi realizes all is not well in her fantasy dream.

IndieCade - Indie Games Conference in LA this weekend!

If you are in the LA area this weekend, I recommend you head over to Culver City to check out IndieCade!
This is a newish conference that started out as part of E3 but is stepping out to become its own thing.

Prices are very reasonable (from $20-$290) and there are some excellent speakers including Jenova Chen, Daniel Benmergui and Henry Jenkins, formerly of MIT now at USC. Come participate and support a conference that provides a platform for the awesome growing indie scene!

Get tickets here.

I am planning to head down Friday for the weekend so hope to see you there!