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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 trailer is a crash course in Zombie 101
Being a zombie is fairly simple. You skulk about, moan and gnaw on human flesh. But what if you want to direct that aimless horde at an objective? This World Zombination trailer shows us how.
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.
