PowerGrids
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The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Powergrids
Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We at Joystiq believe no one deserves to starve, and many indie developers are entitled to a fridge full of tasty, fulfilling media coverage, right here. This week, Michael Shotter shows us the difference between a fun game and a long-lasting staple in your library with his iOS strategy puzzler, Powergrids. What's your game called and what's it about?Powergrids is a strategy/puzzle game. The basic goal for players is to reveal as many grids as they can as efficiently as possible by balancing the use of a resource -- power -- that is needed to both expose the grid and increase the player's score.Why develop independently, rather than work for an established company?I've worked for many years as a web-application developer and development-team lead for some pretty prestigious, non-gaming-related organizations and I've enjoyed that work in general, but sometimes things happen that push you in a different direction. Last year I was laid off without warning from my full-time job, which, oddly enough, gave me an opportunity to re-consider my career options.I wanted to take some time to get up to speed on mobile development and I've always loved games and deeply respected the craft of creating them. I even ran a gaming-themed website for a number of years, so I decided to make the best of a bad situation and learn Objective-C and the iOS SDK by developing an iOS game.I actually created Powergrids back in 2005 as a Flash-based game to help promote the aforementioned gaming site, so the basic concept was fleshed out and proven, which definitely made the whole development process a bit smoother and allowed me to focus on new features like the Enhanced mode, which is new to the iOS version of the game.In my case, independent development was more of a circumstantial necessity than anything, but as someone who's worked in a lot of different places, I definitely appreciate the creative freedom it allows.
