Posts filed under: Games
In Charlie Murder, the whole band gets Windows Phones on the fictional t2f (short for ta2fön) network. There’s a bunch of stuff you can use your phone for, like email (some of it rote, some of it interesting), camera phone, and squid-themed microblogging site squ.iddl.us. I thought it was a fun way to give your characters a bit of an info hub, and I’ve been a big fan of Windows Phone ever since my Samsung Focus and its marvelous bulging battery bomb (that’s another story). Also, we have a game on Windows Phone, and we definitely make a buck or two whenever someone buys it, so that’s cool. Yet still, I felt the need to tweet this:
In the comments in Joystiq’s rad Charlie Murder preview write up, there were a few begrudging Microsoft for what was (erroneously) interpreted as some sort of paid off order from up high to include the phone in the game. This is obviously entirely untrue; if anyone’s guilty of some sort of slimy promotion, I guess that would be me, as I’d like to get more people interested in a pretty solid other alternative to iPhone (and, again, we’ve got Z0MB1ES on dat ph0ne!!!1)
But I think this illuminates an underlying issue, namely that of Microsoft’s misunderstood role as indie games publisher, and how that ties to the trending media narrative on Microsoft being “bad for indies.” Where do we stand on all this? Read on:
(more…)
March 29, 2013
Although we know our teaser site must have left everyone in a state of suspense and confusion because no one could have possibly guessed what our secret surprise was, you may now exhale as we reveal to you Z0MB1ES (on teh ph0ne)!
(more…)
June 6, 2011
Well, not quite that exciting.
But thing are moving along pretty well, albeit a little delayed (I think I’m 2 weeks off schedule currently, but who’s counting?)
One interesting little bit of fun is localization. The Dishwasher is coming out in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Chinese. Since I drew my own font, I had to add all sorts of special characters to the graphic. For Japanese and Chinese I had to change the way the game handled fonts so that it could draw some using my font and others using a SpriteFont (the alternative would be hand drawing a couple thousand Asian glyphs). It took a couple of days to get everything working right with all of that, but the big hassle comes with adding changes.
(more…)
October 10, 2008
So, here we are: Braid‘s on XBLA for 1200 points, and now Castle Crashers has hit XBLA for another 1200 points. They’re two excellent games (I unsurprisingly gravitated toward the latter, going as far as to dub yesterday “Castle Crashers Day”) and they both embody much of what the indie games industry can do right. Also, they’re both taking some of the most ridiculous flak I’ve ever heard over their price.
Such gems include:
“$15 for 5 hours of single player?”
“I could get [insert old game name here] for $5 less at Gamestop!”
“If it were $10, I’d pay, but at $15 it’s just too much.”
Probably my first reaction should be to not listen to anything morons say online.
However, assuming I failed to do the first part, here’s my second reaction: (more…)
August 28, 2008
No, not that Oblivion.
I have to wonder how “marketing” efforts from 100 years ago would have stood up to today’s. People made things they thought people would like, they marketed them in ways they thought would appeal, and everyone went on their merry way. Today, we have focus groups, market research, and all sorts of other data aimed squarely at allowing us to craft the most precise, effective marketing campaigns ever. Market research is an iterative process–each generation of marketing is more effective than the previous. But wait–this isn’t an anti-capitalist rant! It’s an anti-people rant. Bear with me…
(more…)
July 24, 2008
Previous page
