Tag Archives: indie

Not quite dead yet…

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… but not quite living in the same way.

In essence, Macguffin as it was previously – a four-person full time team of developers – is no more.  But after looking at ways to wind things down, and taking some time to evaluate what I want to do with my spare time once I have a job, I’ve decided to keep Macguffin around for my future gaming projects.

One of the big things I’ve learned in doing the past three or so years of game development is that I really do love creating games, doing the coding and game design.  Since shutting things down and starting to look for a job, I’ve begun coding and designing again on my own – and I’ve been having a blast.  Regardless of where I land I fully plan to keep working on games and blogging about it.  Who knows, perhaps I’ll even have something for the market someday.

Right now I do not have plans to return directly to All Heroes Die.  I say this for Therlun’s benefit (I know you’re out there!).  The two big problems with AHD are the limitations of BlitzMax, and the sheer scope of the endeavor.  Neither of those gets solved by me working on it nights.  The most likely path forward is that at some point I do a game inspired by chunks of AHD, or redo the game with a slimmed down design in another language.

In the meantime, I’ve been working in Unity using C#, and may have some upcoming posts about how that’s  been.  It’s also near time for the IGDA to begin its elections, and if I can get some help, I plan to cover the candidates again.  More on that shortly.

Announcing Mustache Mercenaries!

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(Hello, folks coming from Facebook!  We’ll be live in the next couple days – in the meantime, please Like the game on Facebook and join our mailing list!)

We’re extremely pleased to announce the new Macguffin Game, Mustache Mercenaries.

Mustache Mercenaries is a turn-based game of robots.  Robots powered by steam!  Robots fighting each other!  Robots with pilots!  Pilots like… Laura Ingalls Wilder?

Well, yes.  In fact, Laura has been interrupted one too many times by people that want her to keep crops from withering and to build general stores, and she’s had it up to here.  I’d stand back if I were you.

Mustache Mercenaries is what happens when you decide that what the Little House on the Prairie needed was steam-powered legs and the ability to thrash someone with a mailbox.  It’s what happens when The Emancipator doesn’t refer to Abe Lincoln, but instead to his handy axe.  Said axe happens to be inscribed with a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, but that might just be coincidence.

At launch, we’ll have the main single player component of Mustache Mercenaries live – a series of campaigns where you can play Laura Ingalls Wilder, Abraham Lincoln, J.P. Morgan, and Harriet Tubman as they pilot their giant robots through old-timey America.  John Wilkes Booth doesn’t stand a chance.

And once we get done with the initial launch, we’re going to be working full time on adding new features and new content into the game at an astounding clip.  We’ve just scratched the surface of what we want to accomplish with the game – we are planning new modes of combat, expansions to the functionality of your lab (Oh – yes, you have a lab.  It’s where Mr. Brain hangs out for the most part.), new mech parts you can purchase or find in fights, and a pile of other stuff.  We also plan to bring you folks into the loop – we want your suggestions on what pilots and features you want next, and anything else you want to tell us.

We’ll be launching the beta of Mustache Mercenaries some time in the next week.  We won’t be publicizing it at first – we want a little time to make sure everything is working right – but if you’d like to know when it goes live, please join our mailing list.  Once we’ve worked out the kinks, we’ll also be publicizing it as widely as our thin little indie pocketbooks will let us.  We’ll be counting on you folks to help us spread the word.  Please also feel free to Like the game on Facebook!

Our goal here is to make a Facebook game that doesn’t suck…  something with substance.  Silly substance, but substance none the less.   Welcome along for what we hope will be an awesome ride.

Boston Indies Take Over the IGDA Newsletter

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I’m really glad Alex Schwartz wrote this up – I wanted to, but didn’t manage it.  In Alex’s words:

Without prior planning, FOUR of the articles written for the newsletter were authored by Boston-area indie game developers. As a member of this awesome group of individuals, I take great pride in seeing Boston Indies in the spotlight.

Amen, brother!  Check out Alex’s post at the link above, and the IGDA newsletter here.

The Humble Indie Bundle

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If you haven’t heard, there is currently a thing called the Humble Indie Bundle.  It’s now officially  a Big Deal.  No pun intended.

The HIB, as we’ll call it, consists of all the following games: World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru, Penumbra, and Samorost 2.  They usually have a sticker price of something like $100.

Remarkable Thing One: All these folks got together and said, pay us whatever you think it is worth.  You can go and get all this for as little as $.01.

Remarkable Thing Two: You can then split the money you pay up between the developers and two charities – The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child’s Play.

Remarkable Thing Three: The bundle was on sale for about a week, and now has been extended a couple days further.  To date, they have had almost 125,000 separate contributiors and made over $1,140,000 in revenue, about a third of which is going to those two charities.  Several of the developers are also now releasing their games as open source, with Lugaru already out there.

Holy crap.

As Jay Barnson pointed out on the Rampant Coyote blog, they’ve shown how powerful some indies working together can be.  Without no marketing budget to speak of, they’ve galvanized over 125,000 people to pay money for their game.  These numbers don’t even include the pirates downloading it off BitTorrent and such!  Repeating this exact thing event would be difficult (if not impossible), but this should encourage all of us indies to be audacious and to try big things.

Another big thing to note is, they were really frigging smart about this.  They set up something that was pretty easily doable with out-of-the-box technology + the web skills they possessed.  For a minimum time investment, they set up what may turn out to be the most significant business event to date for game dev indies.

I’d encourate everyone to go buy the Humble Indie Bundle.  If nothing else, you’re getting some seriously kick-ass games at whatever price you think is a good one.


Post-PAX Report – State of the Beta and Everything Else

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Been a bit of a crazy last week.  This is the first real chance I’ve had to blog about things – and I’ll have to do it quickly, since there are a bunch of threads from our players in the forums that I need to answer.  (Side note – being able to write the last sentence was incredibly exciting to me.)

In the interests of just getting this damn thing up, I’m going to just get the whole Beta and PAX story out in one post.  This might make it a bit long, we’ll see.

Given that, I’ll tell you the upshot right here:

  • PAX itself was an amazing validation of the game we’re trying to create.  We were received with open arms by lots of gamers that think this is an awesome idea.  Many have since shelled out an electronic Abraham Lincoln and snagged the beta!
  • The other non-game highlights of the week were that I was on NPR (around 25 minutes in) with Mike Dornbrook of Harmonix, and that I and other area devs Ichiro Lambe (Dejobaan Games), Damián Isla (Moonshot Games), and Eitan Glinert (Fire Hose Games) were on a PAX Panel called, “Indies Will Shoot You In The Knees”, which apparently went over like gangbusters at the conference.
  • We intend to get our our first update this Friday, with a pile of bug fixes, at least one new piece of event art, and several new events.

Also – pics by fellow Boston Indies crony Mike Carriere.  There’s some of me later in the set.  I look like I’ve been awake for years.  Good times!

So, on with the show! Continue reading →

Practice Trumps Talent

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Before I go and do another IGDA profile, just wanted to share a fantastic post from Gareth Fouche’s Scars of War Blog.  Scars of War is a 3D RPG being built with Torque.

In essence, Gareth looks at a guy on DeviantArt who decides, inspired, that he is going to start painting and drawing, and keep going until he’s good.  I’ll leave it to you to click the link and see the results.

Starting my own studio has an exercise in ignorance.  Just about every day I’m asked a question or confronted with a decision that I have no basis for dealing with.  And hey, I’m supposed to know all this stuff by now, right?  It’s not like I started this all yesterday.  And man, I hate making mistakes.

Seeing this guy’s art… that’s inspirational.

Courtesy of the Rampant Coyote.

Hats, Schizophrenia, and Indie Dev – Lessons Learned From Trying to Enter the IGF 2009

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So, the last couple days slammed home several things that I’d already been considering.  Graham and I post mortemed the May-to-now timeframe, and the biggest problem we saw was that we seriously lacked project management.

But wait!  Scott, aren’t you a seasoned project manager?  Haven’t you produced games before?

Yep.  And it didn’t help.  Here’s why. Continue reading →

Microsoft to Indies: Don’t Quit Your Day Job Yet

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Recently Microsoft made a couple changes to the Community Games section on Xbox Live.  The first was that they changed the name to Xbox Live Indie Games.  The second and more significant change was to their pricing structure.

Previously, you could charge$10, $5, or $2.50 for you game.  The new structure will be $5, $3, or $1.

There are a couple things to see here, from an indie perspective.  The upshot for me?  I’ve never felt better about my decision to not create a game for the Xbox.

I think in the longer term, this price change hurts indies in general… but the big question mark here isn’t the price point, it’s how much more exposure the Community games channel will get to the public.  One thing is for sure – Microsoft doesn’t want developers like me making Community games.

It was already extremely difficult for an indie to make a living or run a company off Community games – the numbers we started seeing earlier this year confirmed that.  From what I saw, people mostly put this down to a lack of marketing and exposure for the channel to the Xbox 360 userbase.  Much like we see on iPhone game sales, if you’re not a big hit, you’re not going to sell enough units to cover your costs.  But on the iPhone, this is because the channel is so incredibly crowed and noisy.  On the Xbox, it’s because no one knows the channel exists.

The price change brings Community games more in-line with the iPhone game prices.  This could help some indies sell more games on the Xbox, because the pricing is just that much more trivial to the user.  But really, it still comes back to getting more people playing and buying Community games.

Longer term, this kind of pricing is a “race to the bottom”, as Jeff Vogel describes in an excellent series of posts on his blog.  In enforcing this kind of price structure, Microsoft is saying that more complex, longer games don’t have a home in Community games.  That’s the message I’m getting, at least.

A price point of $5 doesn’t make business sense for us on most any platform.  And for one where people aren’t showing up in large numbers it’s even worse.  What Microsoft is saying with these changes is, a) we only want games that you can make for about $3 a copy and b) trust that we’re going to publicize the channel a bit more.

I like Microsoft a lot – I used to work with them as a publisher, and I’ve always appreciated their excellent attitude on supporting their developers. But I’m going to need a bit better of an offer to prove out their business model for them when I’m taking all the risk.

Make Sure They DON’T See All your Content

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The conventional wisdom in the AAA games industry is that there is a sweet spot to hit with your content creation.  You want to create a rich game experience for your players, but at the same time you want to make sure not much of your content remains unseen – unplayed content in your game is tantamount to wasted time.

Personally, I’ve been moving away from that thought in the Heritage game design, and this morning it hit me how to enunciate the exception to this rule.  In essence, unseen “stuff” can keep your game fresh to your older players. Continue reading →