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Transparent development tales from three indies baring it all online
With crowd-sourced development practices on the rise, indies are taking steps to more deeply entrench their fans in the game-creation process: Transparent development means pulling back the curtain and giving the audience a close look at the minutiae of making a game, including failed ideas, bad choices and awkward conversations – and hopefully some good moves, too. By opening up the development process, indies are molding the way players view the games they play. Game ideas change drastically throughout development; mechanics get cut and evolve; art styles waver; sounds shift from joyful to moody to dark and back to joyful again. Everything changes. Rather than a static, final product, players now have the option to see what a living, in-development game really looks like – and they're lining up around the digital block. Vlambeer, the team behind Ridiculous Fishing and Super Crate Box, draws in 25,000 to 30,000 viewers twice a week with live development streams of its next-gen roguelike-like (roguelove?), Nuclear Throne. Dejobaan shares its live design document for Drop that Beat Like an Ugly Baby, and months into it, random players still pop into the page's chat to ask questions about development. The ex-Zynga team at Proletariat Inc. streams its World Zombination review meetings every Friday and has learned that its audience is interested in some weird stuff. These are three stories of three different approaches to transparent development, from three different indie teams, but the audience, it turns out, is roughly the same: curious, nosy and extremely intrigued.
World Zombination trailer is a crash course in Zombie 101
Being a zombie is fairly simple. You skulk about, moan and gnaw on human flesh. But what if you want to direct that aimless horde at an objective? This World Zombination trailer shows us how.
World Zombination beta early next year, launch in the spring
During a demo session at the PAX Prime Indie Mega Booth, Proletariat CEO Seth Sivak told Joystiq that a beta for World Zombination, the studio's strategy game that pits zombies against humans, is expected early next year, with a full launch planned for sometime in the spring. World Zombination is due first on iPad and Android tablets, with phones to follow, and then PC and Mac. "I think we'll try to target the iPad 2, but we'll certainly do iPad 3, 4 and whatever's coming next," Sivak said. "It'll be playable on the phone, as well. We're building it foremost to be a tablet experience but we'll bring it across platforms. It'll be a universal app and it's a shared world across devices." As for pricing, Sivak said that Proletariat is still working that out, though two initial pricing models seem to be frontrunners. "We've been toying around with two options: One is a premium to purchase the app – because it is kind of like an MMO, some amount of paying for new content like when we release new units and things like that," Sivak said. "The other one is just going like how the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer was, where you have progression and you unlock and buy booster packs. So that would be more of the free-to-play model.We haven't really gotten to the point where we're seriously talking about that, we're just trying to build a game that's like an MMO that feels like you could play it instantaneously and still have the same sort of team guild feel that traditional MMOs have."
Ex-Zynga devs resurrect World Zombination, a horde-based RTS
Zombies aren't dead yet. Proletariat Inc. fully believes in this premise – metaphorically, that is – and is proving it with its first major game, a faction-based RTS called World Zombination, coming to iOS, Android, PC and Mac in early 2014. "Zombie games have become their own genre and setting," Proletariat CEO Seth Sivak tells Joystiq. "They are universal, on par with 'fantasy' or 'sci-fi,' and they give our audience a wide range of tropes that they understand and enjoy. As designers, this is a great starting point for us. I do not think zombies are going anywhere, especially if you look at how they are handled in the film/TV industry." World Zombination has players embody the zombie hordes or groups of survivors, and has an online guild system that allows people to team up and attack cities, or fight each other. Armies can level up their machinery, while zombie factions can mutate at opportune moments and humans can ambush zombies based on the predictable nature of the undead.
Ex-Zynga Boston team starts new iOS studio
Zynga closed its Boston studio late last year, and some of its former developers have created a new company called Proletariat Inc. The group is set to release its first iPhone game next week, called Letter Rush. The folks at Proletariat, Inc. aren't new to the startup game. They were originally called Conduit Labs, which Zynga acquired in 2010. We can only assume that their return to independence helped the group kick out a new title so quickly. Letter Rush is described as "an innovative arcade-spin on the classic word-find mechanic." We'll look for it on the App Store in a few days. It'll be interesting to see what this group has been up to after going through the Zynga machine. Show full PR text Ex-Zynga Boston Team Starts New Studio Team Behind Adventure World Due to Release First Title Cambridge, MA---February 26, 2013---Proletariat Inc., the new game development studio formed by the original founding group behind Zynga Boston, have officially announced today that they are open for business, and have revealed plans for an upcoming iOS title release. After Zynga unexpectedly closed their Cambridge office in October 2012, five senior members of the Zynga Boston team, creators of 2011's acclaimed Indiana Jones Adventure World, decided to found Proletariat Inc. This was not new territory for most of them, since they were originally part of Conduit Labs, the startup game shop founded in 2007 to develop music-oriented games for the Web, and subsequently acquired by Zynga in 2010. Working with the social publishing giant led to a collaboration between Lucasfilm and Zynga Boston, with the incorporation of the licensed Indiana Jones character into the game play, and the branded re-naming of the game. Indiana Jones Adventure World went on to receive recognition as a highly popular, challenging puzzle adventure game on Facebook, and is widely considered to be one of Zynga's more ambitious development efforts. Proletariat expects to expand on that tradition by creating superior quality game products with a high level of entertainment value, made by a top-tier production team. The founding team is made up of game industry veterans who have worked on everything from Guitar Hero to Lord of the Rings Online. "We have all known each other and worked with one another for so long that we've developed an organic way of making games together," says CEO Seth Sivak. "We all want to make successful games, both creatively and as a business. This team has been on both sides and knows how to find that balance." Sivak adds, "Building games is all about navigating the chaotic process of discovering 'The Fun' and then performing a disciplined march to a polished, final product. That process is important to us." The goal, as stated by Sivak is "to keep teams small and let highly skilled groups of creative people innovate." The team is nearly ready to launch their first game for iOS, Letter Rush. Letter Rush, the first game released by Proletariat Inc., will be available for iPhone and iPad next week. The game provides an innovative arcade-spin on the classic word-find mechanic. Players can play by themselves or together over local multiplayer to complete goals and compete with their friends on leaderboards. Proletariat is already hard at work on their next game, going after a larger challenge in the core tablet market.
Proletariat Inc. rises up from Zynga Boston shutdown
Proletariat Inc. is a new Beantown-based studio formed out of the closure of Zynga Boston. The team of five is currently finishing up an arcade-style word-find game, Letter Rush for iOS, which should be out by next week."We have all known each other and worked with one another for so long that we've developed an organic way of making games together," said CEO Seth Sivak. Prior to Zynga Boston, members of the team had worked at Harmonix, Turbine and Insomniac. "We all want to make successful games, both creatively and as a business. This team has been on both sides and knows how to find that balance."The team of five had worked on Indiana Jones Adventure World for Zynga, but were originally part of Conduit Labs, which was acquired by Zynga in 2010. The social media giant is currently picking itself up from the storm drain following a multi-year bender.
