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Indies react: PAX East as a showcase for small studios
Like so many PAX shows before it, this year's PAX East showcased a ton of indie games -- the gaming equivalent of a Williamsburg dubstep show, if you will. In our experience at this year's event, larger industry players like EA and Bethesda showed off their titles with hired hands and private theater viewings, choosing to exhibit older demos rather than new content. The indies and smaller studios, on the other hand, were out in force. Beyond bringing playable versions of their games to the show -- even Fez was playable, for the first time in several years of development -- the indie studios brought themselves. They continued the tradition of directly engaging with attendees and, often, solicited game-testing feedback on the fly. "I approached PAX East as a three-day playtest session. I learned so much about what works and what doesn't just from standing in the back and observing how people played the game," Fez co-developer Phil Fish told Joystiq. "It's also an amazing morale boost to be told by so many people that your game is great."
The many hats of Demiurge Studios
Shoot Many Robots is Boston-based Demiurge Studios' first original game, and my hands-on with it at GDC was the first time that anyone at the developer ever gave a press demo. Studio head Albert Reed was, unsurprisingly, excited to delve into the studio's origins. "We got our start doing mods for Unreal Tournament. It was me and two other college buddies doing mods in the frickin' computer cluster at Carnegie Mellon. I'm not kidding!" Reed told me before showing off Shoot Many Robots last week. "Then one thing lead to another and those companies that were licensing Unreal Engine started hiring us," Reed added humbly. It turns out that the folks hiring Demiurge were developers like Gearbox Software, Irrational Games, BioWare, and Harmonix. "We did some work on the first level -- the lighthouse and that sort of descent into Rapture," Reed told me, casually explaining that his studio clandestinely assisted with one of gaming's most iconic openings: the beginning of BioShock.
PAX East todo: It's not the Length, it's the Mirth (Game Length Versus Value)
With new forms of distribution for video games come new pricing models. Outlets like Apple's iOS App Store and digital distribution storefronts like Xbox Live Arcade and PSN are challenging the convention of $60 AAA retail titles, and complicating the already peculiar brand of calculus that gamers use when determining "value". Why is $1 okay on iPhone but $6 is too expensive? Why is one ten-hour retail game criticized for being "too short" while others aren't? Why are we so hung up on game length? Join myself and a stellar lineup of panelists as we wrestle with this age-old quandary. Panelists include: Chris Hecker is the sole developer behind SpyParty, the as-yet-undated indie "about human behavior, performance, perception, and deception." Mike Wilford is CEO of Twisted Pixel, the Austin-based developer behind upcoming downloadable titles Ms. Splosion Man and The Gunstringer. Albert Reed is the studio director and co-founder of Cambridge-based Demiurge Studios, which has worked on everything from Mass Effect on PC to Borderlands, and its first original IP, the downloadable Shoot Many Robots. Chris Grant is a writer who works from home in his pajamas. The panel takes place at 4:30pm on Sunday, March 13, in the Wyvern Theatre (on the 2nd floor).
What's in a Name: Demiurge Studios
Albert Reed is the studio director and co-founder of Demiurge Studios, the Boston-based team responsible for the forthcoming Shoot Many Robots and a mess of contract work with Harmonix' Rock Band franchise, Gearbox Studios' Brothers in Arms and Borderlands franchises, and many more. Reed discussed the origin of his studio's name during an interview with us at GDC: "Late night with a thesaurus searching for words that mean 'creativity' and 'innovation.' So the demiurge was -- there's a bunch of different interpretations of it, some of which are sort of ... mean to religions. I don't know. But the one that we originated from was the Greek philosopher Plato needed -- there was no one in the Greek pantheon of Gods who sort of created the Earth, there wasn't much of a creation myth there. So the demiurge was sort of responsible for forming the material world. So the Earth and trees and all that stuff, right? And so since we make worlds inside of video games, that seemed appropriate." Shoot Many Robots is being planned for digital launch later this year on consoles, and currently has no publisher. Like this feature? Be sure to check out the What's In A Name Archives.
