Utah Indie Games Night - July 2007
We had a really fun night Indie Games Night last night. I counted around 25 people, which is down a bit from last time (July's a hard month with so much going on), but still a good turnout. As usual, there was lots of food, fun, and good discussions about game development and marketing.
Russell Carroll was in town and came to our meeting. It was good to see him at these events again. We got into some good discussions with him about portals and how a developer can leverage their traffic from them, and some other good marketing ideas. He also mentioned that he's working on a game project of his own, so I'll be interested to see what he comes up with.
There were six games shown last night. Here's a quick rundown:
DROD/RPG prototype
Mike Rimmer and Adam Peterson showed off a prototype of a DROD series game that has strategy and RPG elements. It looks real promising. You not only have to solve the immediate puzzle of the room, but you also have to make choices that affect your character and other challenges later. So you have to think more holistically and strategicaly.
Link Realms
Herb Flower and Paul Witte of Mythyn Interactive showed off some changes to Link Realms. In addition to new characters and monsters, there are now fences and gates that can help one protect their turf. I believe they said that the dungeons have been greatly expanded too.
Soccer Like Game
Victor Chelaru showed off a new game demo made with his Flat Red Ball engine. I believe he said the demo only took him an hour or two to put together, which shows the power of his engine. Graphically the demo was very retro; just vector graphic circles and lines. There were four circles (one for each player), one smaller circle for the ball, a box with goal at each side and a score for each team at the top. It was played with four XBox controllers
Band of Bugs
Steve Taylor setup their newly released (on XBox Live Arcade) tactical game "Band of Bugs", for us to play. The game is excellent in every way. The graphics are beautiful, and the game is fairly easy to pickup. Kudos to Ninjabee for releasing another fine game on XBLA.
Fish School
John Olsen showed off his updated version his Fish School puzzle game (using XNA). Unfortunately I was unable to view this one in detail, but from afar it looks like he was making some progress with it.
AntiBody (code name)
Lastly, I showed off my shooter that is set inside the body. (Thanks Vic for letting me use your laptop for a while!) It's still very much in it's early stages. I have switched engines from TGB to BlitzMax. After encountering "brickwall" after "brickwall" (for me at least), the switch to BlitzMax was a good change. The game is just an infinite loop right now with random enemies spawned, but it was apparently interesting enough to keep one of the kids in attendance (I think he was around 8 years old), for quite a while. At some point he said, "Hey, this just goes on forever!", and then lost interest. Yep it has a long way to go yet.
Again I applaud all of you that are working on an Indie project, you are making it happen! As usual, this event has inspired me to continue in my own Indie efforts. Good Luck to all of you, and thanks for helping make our Indie Night AWESOME!
Viva La Indie!
P.S. Jay Barson also has a write up of the event here in his blog.
Russell Carroll was in town and came to our meeting. It was good to see him at these events again. We got into some good discussions with him about portals and how a developer can leverage their traffic from them, and some other good marketing ideas. He also mentioned that he's working on a game project of his own, so I'll be interested to see what he comes up with.
There were six games shown last night. Here's a quick rundown:
DROD/RPG prototype
Mike Rimmer and Adam Peterson showed off a prototype of a DROD series game that has strategy and RPG elements. It looks real promising. You not only have to solve the immediate puzzle of the room, but you also have to make choices that affect your character and other challenges later. So you have to think more holistically and strategicaly.
Link Realms
Herb Flower and Paul Witte of Mythyn Interactive showed off some changes to Link Realms. In addition to new characters and monsters, there are now fences and gates that can help one protect their turf. I believe they said that the dungeons have been greatly expanded too.
Soccer Like Game
Victor Chelaru showed off a new game demo made with his Flat Red Ball engine. I believe he said the demo only took him an hour or two to put together, which shows the power of his engine. Graphically the demo was very retro; just vector graphic circles and lines. There were four circles (one for each player), one smaller circle for the ball, a box with goal at each side and a score for each team at the top. It was played with four XBox controllers
Band of Bugs
Steve Taylor setup their newly released (on XBox Live Arcade) tactical game "Band of Bugs", for us to play. The game is excellent in every way. The graphics are beautiful, and the game is fairly easy to pickup. Kudos to Ninjabee for releasing another fine game on XBLA.
Fish School
John Olsen showed off his updated version his Fish School puzzle game (using XNA). Unfortunately I was unable to view this one in detail, but from afar it looks like he was making some progress with it.
AntiBody (code name)
Lastly, I showed off my shooter that is set inside the body. (Thanks Vic for letting me use your laptop for a while!) It's still very much in it's early stages. I have switched engines from TGB to BlitzMax. After encountering "brickwall" after "brickwall" (for me at least), the switch to BlitzMax was a good change. The game is just an infinite loop right now with random enemies spawned, but it was apparently interesting enough to keep one of the kids in attendance (I think he was around 8 years old), for quite a while. At some point he said, "Hey, this just goes on forever!", and then lost interest. Yep it has a long way to go yet.
Again I applaud all of you that are working on an Indie project, you are making it happen! As usual, this event has inspired me to continue in my own Indie efforts. Good Luck to all of you, and thanks for helping make our Indie Night AWESOME!
Viva La Indie!
P.S. Jay Barson also has a write up of the event here in his blog.
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