indie-showcase
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Wayward Souls, The Spookening headline PAX East Indie Showcase
The PAX East Indie Showcase stars six mobile games from independent studios around the world: Crowman & Wolfboy, Wither Studios LLC: US Duet, Kumobius: Australia Framed, Loveshack: Australia The Spookening, Modesty: Sweden Tiny Dice Dungeon, Springloaded: Singapore Wayward Souls, Rocketcat Games: US The Indie Showcase at PAX East is a mobile-specific sampling of games, rather than the yearly lineup of higher-profile, mainly console and PC indie games in the PAX 10 at PAX Prime. This distinction is on purpose, Penny Arcade co-founder Jerry Holkins wrote in a blog post. "It may not be apparent outside of my own mind, but the PEIS has a specific mission to promote games on mobile," he said. "PAX10 is more broad. But mobile is an especially scary place to make games right now, and I think there's good to be done thereby. Unlike a lot of games at a show like this, a lot of times you can just grab your phone out of your pocket and buy something you like right there. As magic tricks go, that's a pretty good one." [Image: Rocketcat Games]
See hot indie game action (and cake) in the Supershow Collective marathon
The Supershow Collective marathon begins tonight at 7PM ET and runs through the weekend, with live streams of some hot Steam, Greenlight and other indie games, plus developer interviews, special guests and giveaways. The whole spiel is organized by indie developer Robot Loves Kitty and indie PC site Greenlit Gaming. The marathon starts with the Indie Showcase from Greenlit Gaming, which will feature more than 24 hours of continuous Steam gaming and developer interviews, including bits of Kingdom Rush, Contrast, Teslagrad, Race the Sun, ANNE, Risk of Rain, Mousecraft, Tower of Guns, Drunken Robot Pornography, Monster Loves You, Dungeon of the Endless, Broforce, The Novelist and Torchlight 2. Picking up where the Indie Showcase leaves off, the Indie Dev Showcase from Robot Loves Kitty begins at 7PM ET on Saturday, featuring streams and interviews of Hot Tin Roof, 6180 the Moon, Dyscourse, Continue?9876543210, Reus, Cloudbuilt, Droquen, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Life goes On and more. The Indie Dev Showcase ends with cake at 7PM on Sunday (cake not provided). Watch (and eat) it all right here.
EVO 2013 Indie Showcase features Towerfall, Aztez, SpyParty, 6 more
EVO, the annual fighting game convention and tournament, packs an underground punch this year with nine games in the Indie Showcase, bringing in four new titles and five returning champs. The four new games are Towerfall, Treachery in Beatdown City, Samurai Gunn and Super Space ____ (pronounced "Super Space Blank"), and the repeat offenders are SpyParty, BariBariBall, Nidhogg, Aztez and Super Comboman. Towerfall caught our eye on the Ouya, Aztez has been creating buzz around conventions local and otherwise, and SpyParty has a special connection with EVO – its current No. 1 player first saw it at last year's convention. The EVO 2013 Indie Showcase is organized by Nathan Vella, President of Capy Games (Below, Sword and Sworcery), and the entire show runs from July 12 - 14 in Las Vegas. Aaaaand FIGHT.
The death of Fallen Frontier and Moonshot's mobile resurrection
Downloadable console games were all the rage in 2009, the year that Damián Isla, Rob Stokes and Michel Bastien left Bungie and founded Moonshot Games. Stepping away from the AAA development halo, the trio envisioned a digital game for XBLA and PSN, and in 2010 they received two publishing deals for Fallen Frontier, a co-op platforming shooter with a wicked split-screen mechanic.By 2011, both of these publishing deals were dead."Here's the problem with that situation: When your game gets funded, you start spending a lot of time doing stuff that helps you make the game – lots of infrastructural stuff on the engineering side, lots of tool-building, lots of deep story and design work on the design side – but doesn't necessarily do a lot to help you sell the game," Isla told Joystiq. "So each time a development deal fell apart, it was a whole lot of time lost."Moonshot took Fallen Frontier to PAX East 2011 without a publisher, and players were "really receptive," Isla said. The money, however, had moved on."I would say that our main mistake was one of timing," Isla said. "We arrived at the XBLA/PSN space a year or two too late. If we had been showing the game at PAX 2009 rather than 2011, we would be telling a different story right now. But by 2011 the publishers' appetite for development funding in the console downloadable space had evaporated – probably for pretty good reason – and the only deals we were hearing them sign were distribution deals."
