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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%
Brand swings on to Xbox Live Indie Games
Brand caught our eye all the way back in August of last year, and we've just gotten word that the game is available now on Xbox Live Indie Games, yours for the low price of just 240 Microsoft points ($3). You can see a release trailer above, and all of those swords you see in there are custom-made, because the game allows you to create your own.We're also told that you can play as your own Xbox Live avatar, and that there's about five hours of nonlinear exploration gameplay across three big areas. Looks good -- if you give it a download, let us know what you think.
