joystiq-indie-pitch
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The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Hector: Badge of Carnage
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 Richard Morss, Straandlooper's co-founder, and development leads Dean Burke and Kevin Beimers about their ribald adventure game, Hector: Badge of Carnage. How did your company get started? Richard: Straandlooper was started by two "veterans," Alastair (Ali) McIlwain and Richard Morss, and a founding team who had been involved with the kid's series Lifeboat Luke: Tim Bryans, Dean Burke, Kevin Beimers, Ciaran Oakes and Colin McCusker -- all of whom have been or will be involved with the production of the Hector games. The mission was to look realistically at the global animation market place and then do what we wanted to do anyway! At a time of niches and no license fees for anything anywhere, content creators may as well be truly independent and see where they get to. Having secured development funding we set about creating a raft of new stuff, including Dean Burke's Hector.
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Munchies' Lunch
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 Vlado Jokic, co-founder and El Presidente of Footloose Games about his puzzle game, Munchies' Lunch. Who are you and what do you do at Footloose Games? I'm Vlado and I'm the president and co-founder of Footloose Games. I'm a part of a small team of very talented people and I was the producer on our recently-released puzzle game Munchies' Lunch. Why did you want to make games in the first place? I would say my uncontrollable need to create, coupled with unexplored potential in the gaming medium. What's your game called, and what's it about? The game is called Munchies' Lunch and it's a unique puzzle-adventure game. While it's very simple to learn, Munchies' Lunch will take skill and patience to master. You play as Mrs. Munchie, the mother of a family that's been uprooted from their forest home. Your goal is to collect food for your kids while avoiding monsters in a grid-like field. The gameplay is focused on finding the best solution at your own pace, while taking advantage of foods with special abilities to gain an edge over your opponents.%Gallery-122329%
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.
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Ghost Runner
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 Danny Perski of mguniverse about his strategy arcade release Ghost Runner. Hello! Hi there, Joystiq! Who might you be? I'm Danny. I'm 17 years old and I make iOS apps. How did you or your company get started? About a year ago I started learning iOS programming and eventually went ahead and bought a license so I could sell apps on the App Store. I'm not exactly a company and I don't really have a name for my company, but I go by mguniverse on Twitter and other networks so it's sorta become a label.
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Interstellar Force
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 David Molnar and find out why his Interstellar Force is the fulfillment of a dream three decades in the making. How did you get started in all of this? I guess I've always wanted to get involved in game development. I'm an engineer by day so I already have a programming background. As for video games, I've been playing them since the late 70s (think Space Invaders) and have loved them ever since. Back in school my friends and I spent many hours at our local arcade -- we would only leave after we exhausted our supply of quarters. Flash forward to last year when I got my first iPhone and saw the games that were on it and thought -- I could do this!
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Guns of Icarus
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 Howard Tsao, Founder of MuseGames, about his steampunk airship title Guns of Icarus. How did you or your company get started? We started exploring the virtual world and 3D chat spaces for a different company, and we became an early adopter of the Unity engine. Along the way, we saw avatars wearing less and less, and decided that we didn't have it in ourselves to push the boundary further in that direction. So we took what we learned with Unity to start making 3D games for the web and other platforms, which is what we are really passionate about. Why did you want to make games? It really is just passion and the belief that we can add something new to the world of gaming, whether that something is game play, visuals, etc.
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Paper Rocket
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 delightful 64-year-old game developer/aircraft-spare-part-retailer Kristina Pettersson about her first iPhone game Paper Rocket. Hi! Hello, Joystiq! Who are you and what do you do? My name is Kristina and I am part aircraft-spare-part-retailer, part game developer! Say what? It's a long story. I've been in the aviation industry all my life -- a couple of years ago I decided I needed to learn something new and here we are!
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Surveillant
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 Martin Wheeler, creator of Surveillant, about his deadly game of hide-and-seek. How did you or your company get started? I've been making games for over twenty years, almost since the arrival of home computers back in the early '80s. I was still at school when my first game was published by Virgin Games. The school welcomed the publicity when the press came knocking, and then did an about-face after it was revealed their star pupil was languishing in lower math and had never been in the computer studies class. (I never did make it into that mysterious room full of BBC micros, even after my second game Sorcery became the top-selling title on the Amstrad CPC.) As a parting shot my careers advisor pushed a games magazine review back across her desk and told me with absolute superiority, "Computer games are a fad -- not a career, young man." I haven't looked back since.
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: BOH
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 Simone Bevilacqua, creator of BOH, about his game and why he'll always love his Amiga. How did you or your company get started? I run no company: I'm just an old-fashioned bedroom coder. When it comes to games, I've been a bedroom coder for my whole life. The machine that had to chew my first inexpert lines of code was a C64, which I stuck to for years both because I loved it and because I lived in small town where I was totally isolated; ignorant of how the world of computers was growing -- just think that when my first C64 died, instead of getting another one (as I did), I could have passed to the Amiga 500, but I didn't consider that possibility because I didn't even know that the Amiga existed! Several years had to pass before my second C64 was replaced by another machine, which I instantaneously fell in love with: an Amiga 1200.
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Auralux
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 E McNeill about his trimmed-down RTS: Auralux. How did you get started? If you want to go waaaay back, I started out by playtesting educational games for my mom, a teacher who wanted to use games in the classroom. JumpStart and Mecc games turned out to be the perfect gateway drugs to Command & Conquer and Starcraft. It's been a slippery slope from there, and I've been making games ever since my first programming course in high school.
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: The Journey Down: Over the Edge
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 creator Theodor Waern about his adventure game The Journey Down. First of all, who is your daddy and what does he do? Contrary to common belief, my daddy is not Arnold Schwarzenegger. My daddy is most definitely my ego. It owns me and controls me in a way only a proud, loving, demanding, worried parent can do. He pushes me to the very edge of my capabilities, watches me balance on the precipice and then laughs manically as he sees me tumble and fall to my doom. Then lovingly he picks me up in his fatherly arms and places me back on safe ground again, pats me on the head, and convinces me to do it all over again. (On a less metaphorical note however, my father is a landscape architect and quite the entrepreneur, I owe much of my own ambitions to his, and my mother's personal undertakings.) To get serious: what's your game called and what's it about? The full title of the first chapter in my story is titled: The Journey Down: Over the Edge. "Over the Edge" follows our brave pilot hero Bwana and his sidekick Kito as they, while trying to scrape up some cash to pay their debts, end up getting thrown into a twisting plot of corruption and adventure.
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Sequence
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 former DS Fanboy blogger and Iridium Studios head Jason Wishnov, about his rhythm RPG Sequence. How did you or your company get started? This is a boring question. I am going to replace your questions with interesting questions instead. What? But that's not how- Hello, Jason! You are handsome and talented. Can you please explain the trailer to me? Of course, Justin! The trailer shows off some of the core gameplay of Sequence, which is a fusion of RPG and rhythm mechanics. You see three streams of notes falling down from the top of the screen; each corresponds to a different action. You can rotate between them freely, but you can hit only one stream at a time. The stream in red is where you play defense; if you hit a note, no damage is done, but if you miss, you lose some HP. The stream in green is where you cast spells (found at the bottom of the screen, in the Spell Ring); you need to hit every note of a spell for it to actually activate. There are damage spells, healing spells, barriers, and so forth. And finally, the stream in blue is where you regain mana to cast more spells.
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: OverDose
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 Gavin Stevens, lead designer of Team Blur Games. How did you or your company get started? Back in the Quake 2/3 modding scene, I created a high resolution replacement pack for Quake 2 which (in those days at least) bumped up the detail of the stock enemy textures quite a lot. Another regular I used to chat with saw it and said "Well wouldn't it be just awesome if somebody made the entire game that way?" That other person was Nicolas, Team Blur Games' best (and only, at the moment) coder. Together, we hit upon the idea of Quake II Evolved: OverDose. It would be a single player and multi player game based on the Quake 2 universe, and ... and that's where it got complicated, because again we would be dealing with somebody else's IP, and it would never really be our own baby. So, we went away to think. Many beers were downed. Many pizzas consumed ... and thus, Team Blur Games' "OverDose" was born.
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Fleck
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 Seppo Helava, co-founder of Self Aware Games about the developer's new social gaming project, Fleck. What's your game called, and what's it about? The thing we're working on right now is Fleck. You can check it out right now at http://www.fleck.com. The simple description? WoW + Facebook + The Sims + Google Maps = Fleck. It's an MMO where you can do all sorts of things, from creating an amazing garden to slaying the zombie hordes -- but it's all done on a map of the real world. But it's not just a map -- it's your neighborhood. Your favorite restaurants, pulled from Yelp. Your local weather. When you fight zombies, you fight them on streets you're familiar with. In Fleck, you interact with people. Real people in real time. You can work together to create a garden by your house. You can complete scavenger hunts or quests together. Play with friends -- in your neighborhood. There's something incredibly more satisfying about hanging out in a familiar place than in yet another orc-filled fantasy or bald space marine-filled sci-fi realm.
The Joystiq Indie Pitch - Totally Tiny Arcade
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 Joe Lesko of Flea Circus Games about his new scaled-down arcade game collection, Totally Tiny Arcade. How did you get started? I grew up in the era of the Commodore 64, with favorites like M.U.L.E., Archon and Modem Wars. While I spent most of that time playing games, I dabbled with programming text games in BASIC, and learned how to do pixel art using Garry Kitchen's GameMaker. I didn't really learn proper game development until many years later, when I started making games in BlitzBasic as a hobby. After completing about a dozen small freeware games, I saw that a few developers were having some financial success with downloadable titles, so I thought I'd give that a try. This was around 2006, right before the current indie and casual game movements gained traction, so it was a bit riskier than it might seem nowadays.
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Wispin
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 Chris Graham of Grumpy Face Studios about his iPhone action puzzler Wispin. What's your game called, and what's it about? It's a quirky little affair for the iPhone/iPod Touch called Wispin. We describe it as an arcade experience with a unique twist: The addition of "color-matching" gameplay elements. Players can change our spunky hero's color on the fly by utilizing the on-screen "Color Wheel," which can be tapped or swiped much like a joystick. Gameplay involves a constant balancing of offensive and evasive maneuvers, as changing your color determines which enemies you can dispatch (those that match your color) and which will do you harm (those that don't match). A number of additional features and mechanisms are also present to keep things interesting, such as "color streak combos", performance-based point multiplying, online leaderboards, and an overall game progression that advances from calm to deliciously chaotic. We also tried to inject a healthy dose of wackiness (such as a usable cheese powerup), because we're weird like that.
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Gang Garrison 2
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 Sam Goldberg, Simeon Maxein and Shawn Fraser. Sam and Simeon are the two founders of Gang Garrison and Shawn is a senior developer who was directly responsible for the major updates colloquially known as Gang Garrison 2.0 and 2.1. How did you or your company get started? Sam: Back in 2008 the TIGSource.com forums' design competition theme was "Bootleg Demakes," asking developers to take a modern game and remake it as though it were a bootlegged game created in generations past. I had just discovered Team Fortress 2 that summer and was playing obsessively, so it seemed almost intuitive to try and do a TF2 demake. I posted my ideas on a thread in the forum for hooking up with collaborators, and Simeon, our programmer extraordinaire, responded. We quickly got to work prototyping, and by the end of the competition we had a rather impressive little multiplayer demake that garnered us a lot of players and attention. We came in second place and our success, as well as our following of dedicated fans, encouraged us to set up our own website and faux-company, so we could continue developing and perfecting the game.
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: A.R.E.S.
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 Nenin Ananbanchachai, managing director of Extend Interactive, whose Dream.Build.Play first place winner A.R.E.S.: Extinction Agenda launches today on Direct2Drive and Gamersgate. How did you or your company get started? Almost everyone in Extend Studio knew each other from university. We have participated and won many game contests in Thailand. After our graduation, we set up our own game company and started working on A.R.E.S. as our first title. Why did you want to make games? We'd played many games when we were young, and some of them really inspired us. We want to make something unique, fun and different in our game. %Gallery-110564%
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Ash
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 SRRN Games co-founder Aujang Abadi about his company's recently released iOS RPG, Ash. How did you or your company get started? I went to grad school to (theoretically) go work for a big video game company. I'd written a bit about the gaming industry -- particularly the philosophy of game design --and was talking to a few of my professors about it one day when co-founder Tyler Carbone overheard me. I sent him what I wrote, and he came back the next day and said he wanted to be a part of it. Up until that point these were just thoughts floating around in my head, but Tyler really wanted to start a company and thought this was as good a reason to try as any. We brought in Nathaniel Givens, one of my closest childhood friends, after we realized we desperately needed some technical expertise. Soon after, we started recruiting developers. Coincidentally, basically everyone involved in the day-to-day affairs of the company was or is still a student of the University of Virginia. We didn't plan it that way, but that's how it worked out. %Gallery-109461%
Joystiq Indie Pitch: Scarlett and the Spark of Life
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 Tim Knauf and Tristan Clark of Launching Pad Games about their royal adventure, Scarlett and the Spark of Life. What's your game called, and what's it about? Tim Knauf: Scarlett and the Spark of Life is a bona fide, designed-for-iPhone adventure game, in the tradition of classics like Monkey Island but with a modern streamlined interface. It's the first episode in a series of four games: The Scarlett Adventures. Tristan Clark: Scarlett's a princess - the kind with a crowbar and a penchant for rescuing herself when kidnapped. The first episode sees her stranded in a remote alpine village, with her only chance of escape being a grumpy, egotistical mechanical horse. Hilarious hijinks ensue.
