nine-dots
Latest
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Brand
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 believe they deserve a wider audience with the Joystiq Indie Pitch: This week, Guillaume Boucher-Vidal, founder and CEO of Nine Dots Studio, talks the craft of customization, XBLIG sales and launching near Diablo 3, with Brand. What's your game called and what's it about?The game is called Brand and it's about building a sword fit for a king. The game is in 3D, but the gameplay is in 2D. It features three large explorable levels, in a somewhat similar fashion to games of the Metroidvania genre, although a little simpler.How do you support yourselves, working full-time at Nine Dots with no salary? Is it worth it?I had saved up about $25,000 before starting the business, and I started doing a few consulting jobs to fill in my pockets a little whenever I can. Some guys work on the side, while others get support from their parents. It's not an ideal situation for anyone, but we try to make the most of it.We're all young and it's the right time to make these sacrifices. I think it's definitely worth it. The experience is unique, and even if Nine Dots was to fail, we'd still have a very strong portfolio piece, a unique background and we'd be of the very few developers who could proudly say: "We made the game we wanted to make, the way we wanted to do it." Some people have been in the industry for 15 years and can't say that.%Gallery-169115%
XBLIG's Brand looks to be a cut above
We know it's hard out there for Xbox Live Indie Game developers, so we like to do our part by highlighting the grains of wheat in a proverbial sea of chaff. In that spirit, we're slicing off a first look at the 2.5D sword-centric action of Brand, coming to XBLIG from Nine Dots.
