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Introducing: jamBOX!

jambox

For the first three weeks of November, members of the Indie Game Collective are going to be doing three one-week game jams, and we want you to join us for any, or all of them!

The schedule!

  • Week 1 (Nov 4-8): 96px

    • The interactive resolution of your game must have one dimension that is only 96px wide. Your overall screen resolution may extend larger than that, but the only thing that you can place outside of your interactive area is text, and that text cannot be interacted with by any means of user control.

  • Week 2 (Nov 11-15): Multiplayer

    • Simply stated: create an experience that requires more than one player.

  • Week 3 (Nov 18-22): Music First

    • Musicians will provide packs of both effects and at least one piece of music. They’ll pitch their pack, include ideas on how we might implement it, and then the engineers, artists and designers take the packs and run with it.

We only have a few rules:

  • All assets (art, audio, code) that are contributed to the jamBOX must be completely open-sourced and usable in commercial projects. You may license the assets with either the CC0, CC-BY, or MIT license.

  • You can spend no more than 40 hours per-person on what you contribute.

  • Teams can be of any size.

If you’re interested in taking part, watch our blog for a post on the Monday of each week — we’ll kick it off with a public Google Doc that will include all of the teams pitches, along with any needs that need to be filled.

We hope to create a bunch of new projects to get everyone inspired and involved in game development.

See you on Monday!

 

UNITE 2013 Talks

It turns out the IGC is going to be supplying a healthy amount of content for UNITE this year. Here’s the rundown of the talks we’ll be giving!

unite2013

Postmortem: Girls Like Robots. Or: How I Accidentally an Adult Swim Game.

Ziba Scott, Luigi Guatieri – Popcannibal
Thu. 16:00 – 17:00, Room 211
Small team? Tiny budget? Big aspirations? Popcannibal shares the corners they cut, the lies they told and where they rolled up theirs sleeves to make “Girls Like Robots” the 13th best reviewed iOS game of 2012 (metacritic). Scoff at our foibles and glean some tips for tiny teams with more ambition than time. Topics: Lazy 2D tech. Porting to 7 platforms. Art. Playtesting. Scope. Tutorial and puzzle design. Contractors. Boothing. Fear of plugins. Analytics. TV Advertisements.

Runtime Remix: Dynamic Audio in Real Time

Trevor Stricker – Disco Pixel
Thu. 17:30 – 18:00, Ballroom B
Dynamic soundtracks rock. When your player is being clever, your music wants to go dum-ditty. When the player is being really clever the music wants to go dum-ditty-dum. Ever try triggering samples to make music? It sounds like a toddler on a xylophone. Ever try storing an hour of music? Doesn’t work with a mobile game. You really want to generate the track on the fly, at runtime. This is useful for dynamic soundtracks, for drum machines and step composers. The examples will be in C#.

Console to Mobile: Bringing an AAA Console Title to Mobile with Almost Zero Asset Modification

Alex Schwartz, Devin Reimer – Owlchemy Labs
Fri. 13:30 – 14:30, Ballroom B
Owlchemy Labs discusses bringing Shoot Many Robots, an AAA 3D game for PS3 and Xbox 360, to iPhone, iPad and Android devices with minimal 3D model changes. With some clever optimizations and some early planning, we were able to create an entirely new mobile game with the original console assets in under 6 months. Attendees will get a peek behind the curtain at the shaders, pipeline and platform-specific optimizations as well as practical examples of our real-world limitations and constraints.

Successfully Avoiding Common Pathways to Heartbreak and Disasters in Your Art Pipeline

Elliott Mitchell – Vermont Digital Arts
Fri. 16:30 – 17:00, Ballroom A
Want to make games that look fantastic and run well on all platforms including mobile? Creating, tracking and optimizing your art pipeline is key to successfully avoiding common pathways to heartbreak and avoidable disasters. A little commonsense coupled with some best practices can go a long way to ensuring your art assets do not hinder your game’s success. Elliott Mitchell has been working across the games, education and 3D art industries for 30 years. In this session Elliott will share his accumulated knowledge of 2D, 3D and animation art pipelines as they relate to Unity across platforms including mobile, web and desktop games.

We hope to see you there!

25 Indie Games to Keep an Eye On

Kyle Orland and Sam Machkovech from Ars Technica wrote up an article about recently released or up-and-coming games, and both Drop that Beat Like an Ugly Baby and PWN were mentioned!

“The first thing that strikes you about this game is its extreme similarities to A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, which isn’t that surprising since both titles are from developer Dejobaan Games. Drop The Beat Like an Ugly Baby improves the concept of that first-person base jumping simulator in a number of ways. For one, the levels are now generated from MP3 files, Audiosurf-style, so the pillars and platforms you’re dodging fly by in time with the beat of the music you’re listening to. For another, the interface has been improved to show you just how close you are to the nearby objects that give you points.

The game is currently controlled with a mouse, which provides a much finer experience than the WASD controls. But the developers tell Ars that more control options may be in the final version. As long as I can plug in Tom Petty’s Free Fallin’ super-ironically, the controls can work however they want.”

—Kyle Orland

“Developer Erik Asmussen isn’t shy about his elevator pitch: to make a game that plays just like the cheesy hacking sequences from ’90s cyberpunk films. PWN drips with the style you’d expect from films like Hackers and Sneakers, from neon backgrounds and phony-looking “cyberspace” settings to big-beat techno and doofy-looking avatar art.

PWN sets two hackers against each other to capture every connected node, and its levels range from simple 2D grids of boxes to intense, criss-crossing arrays that must be spun around in 3D. Tap to control a node, then use a variety of “hacks”—like firewalls, trojan horses, and viruses—to corrupt your opponent’s progress and take over. What could easily devolve into a simple tap-fest does well with a nice balance of superpowers and grid-placement strategy, not to mention a pretty decent campaign full of cheesy ’90s-film writing. It earns its $2 price on the App Store and then some.”

—Sam Machkovech

Read the full article here.

 

At the MegaBooth!

This PAX East is turning out to be quite an exciting one, with a large amount of our studios showing games off at the Indie MegaBooth!

Our titles include:

  • Drop that Beat like an Ugly Baby (Dejobaan, HybridMind, Zapdot)
  • Drunken Robot Pornography (Dejobaan)
  • Girls Like Robots (Popcannibal)
  • Jungle Rumble (Disco Pixel)
  • Monster Loves You (Dejobaan, Radial Games)
  • PWN (82 Apps)
  • SpinSpell HD (VTDA)

After that, most of us are heading out to San Francisco to the annual Game Developers Conference. See everyone in a week!

IGC meets the Councillor!

We had a great lunch today with Councillor Leland Cheung and Tim Loew from MassDIGI.

Councillor Cheung took some time today to get to know the companies within the Collective and learn a bit about the local game industry. We spoke about the state of the industry and the challenges that small companies and entrepreneurs face in the current economic and consumer climate, and how that compares to other established hubs of the industry.

IGC with Councillor Cheung

If you’re interested in having lunch with the Collective, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us!

 

IGC Members Awarded at MassDIGI Game Challenge

A few members of the Collective recently participated in the MassDIGI Game Challenge. Ziba Scott of Popcannibal walked away with an Honorary Mention for Captain Astronaut’s Last Hurrah and Erik Asmussen of 82 Apps walked away with the Grand Prize.

The Game Challenge, a pitch contest, helps indie and student game development entrepreneurs hone their ideas and products for launch. Forty-four teams consisting of indie game developers and student teams from around New England competed in a sold-out event from March 1-2 at the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center showcasing the rapidly expanding game industry cluster in the region. A panel of videogame industry veterans served as judges for the competition.

A press release at Gamasutra details the event.

Boston.com: State of Play

We recently had a write up by local writer and indie, Jon Myers.

So what is it about our local independent studios that creates such concentrated success? I’d venture to say that it’s the camaraderie and support between local studios that can result in initiatives like the Indie Game Collective, a group of nine studios that work together in Intrepid Labs, a Cambridge co-working space.

Read it here.

 

Friday Lunches

Aside of picking each other’s brain as we’re chipping away at the development of our various games, we wasted no time in setting up a weekly meeting, on Friday, at lunch. Tentatively, this is called Friday Lunch, since we seem to have spent all of our creative juices elsewhere.

So, what happens at a typical Friday Lunch? Someone comes in with an idea, a game, or a specific question, and we spend an hour and a half doing a brain dump on it. One of the benefits of the collective is our varied backgrounds, which can provide an incredible amount of viewpoints on marketing, strategies for various platforms, and at the very least, entertainment, as we disagree with each other in front of our guest.

Visitors have included students, indies just getting their feet wet, and other developers such as ourselves, all who want access to a huge number of opinions and advice in a short amount of time. Our feedback is always honest, no matter how brutal, but always in the interest of making everyone more successful because of it.

Our meetings usually get booked anywhere from 6-8 weeks out, so if you’re interested, get in touch!