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The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Smuggle Truck
Being a giant, beloved video game site has its downsides. For example, we sometimes neglect to give independent developers our coverage love (or loverage, if you will) as we get caught up in AAA, AAAA or the rare quintuple-A titles. To remedy that, we're giving indies the chance to create their own loverage and sell you, the fans, on their studios and products. This week we talk with Alex Schwartz, founder of Owlchemy Labs about his driving game, Smuggle Truck. What's your game about? We're working on a game called Smuggle Truck. It's an over the top physics-based driving game for iOS, Mac and PC, which was created to poke fun at the woefully inadequate legal immigration system in place in the United States. You can choose to wait 19 years for your visa in the "Legal Immigration Mode," or you can take the truck and try to deliver all passengers safely over the border. The main gameplay involves stunt driving, tilting, rocketing, catching babies, and collecting medals to unlock future levels. Who's the greatest smuggler of all time? It's gotta be Han Solo, right? Han Solo is high up in my list, but the greatest smuggler(s) of all time would go to the Greek delivery crew who dropped off the Trojan Horse. Pushing the Trojan Horse; that's a win in my book.
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."
Indie title 'SpringFling' falls on iPhone in October
Indie developer GT Productions may have a simple idea with iPhone's SpringFling. But, they're putting some advanced features into the game, like Facebook and Twitter integration. Even the controls are a bit more complex than you might expect.Developer Alex Schwartz told us, "The touch input for SpringFling functions just like you would expect if you wanted to compress a spring and send it flying: just drag downward anywhere on the screen to compress and let go to launch. Any diagonal motion while compressing will cause the spring to fly off to the side, allowing the player to precisely aim and plan their trajectory, unlike similar games where jumping just 'happens.'"The game will release sometime in October at a very reasonable $1 for the first week; after that it springs up a massive 100 percent to $2. This title will likely keep commuters busy, as the "special thanks" section of SpringFling's website recognizes "city of Boston green line riders for beta testing."%Gallery-73465%
