Proletariat
Latest
Blizzard support studio workers drop union bid (updated)
Workers at a Blizzard support studio have dropped their bid to unionize, allegedly due to pressure tactics.
Workers at Blizzard support studio Proletariat aim to unionize
Proletariat is the third Activision Blizzard studio to announce a union drive in 2022, but where past campaigns involved QA staff, the effort at Proletariat includes all non-management workers.
Blizzard intends to buy 'Spellbreak' studio Proletariat to speed up 'WoW' development
The team will likely be working on the 'Dragonflight' expansion that's due later this year.
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 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.
Daily iPhone App: Letter Rush puts a new spin on spelling games
Word games are probably my least favorite genre on the App Store at this point -- I think they're overused, and many companies these days are just kicking out half-baked spelling games in the hopes of reaching a large casual audience. But Letter Rush, put together by a former Zynga studio, is different enough that it's worth mentioning: It's a word game that will probably make you better at word games. Most word games give you a set of tiles and ask you to spell words with them, and Letter Rush does that as well. But this game also gives you the words to spell, as they move across the top of the screen towards the left. That makes it a much different game than usual -- it's more about learning to spot words than actually spell them. And it could even teach you to be better at word games, to look for ways to spell certain words that might not be readily apparent at first. The goal is to spell all the words on screen before they hit the left side, but you do have a few extra powerups helping you out. Occasionally, words will have blanks in them, and in that case, you can use any letter in that spot (though that sometimes backfires, as it appears the word still needs to be legit, so there may be only one letter that fits in that space). And sometimes you'll get a bomb letter tile, which, when used, will clear the entire board for you. The game is essentially endless, but when words reach the far side of the screen, it's game over. Letter Rush is an interesting take on the oft-visited word game genre, and it's different enough that it's worth a look even if you're bored of spelling games on the iPhone. Letter Rush is available as a free download right now.
