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!

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!

This past Friday, the Collective came together for a 13 person, 1-hour game jam. Ziba’s concept: randomly assign production roles to members of the Collective, and randomly select three words for a theme. The result was Xeno Overpass, a game about xenogamy and two other concepts I can’t quite remember. The rules:

1. Use the Z and / (slash) keys to make your aliens jump.
2. Alien 1 wins by marrying Alien 2 (which happens if they touch on their sides).
3. Alien 2 wins by avoiding Alien 1 until it dies.
4. Either alien dies/loses by being hit by a car.

You can watch the gripping documentary above or play Xeno Overpass here or check out the press kit.

Strangers sometimes walk up to me on the street and ask, “What does the Indie Game Collective look like, anyway?” Here’s a quick tour, someday to be replaced by a better tour.

– Ichiro

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.

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

It’s not unusual to hear stories of big successes on the part of small development teams. Two-person teams will sell millions of units of a quirky title, as was the case for Super Meat Boy and World of Goo. But those are the success stories; other independent developers struggle with the challenges of being small. Those who set up shop in the Boston area, though, can become part of a supportive community that will help get them over the hurdles and into success stories of their own.

Read more at 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.

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!