The Humble Indie Bundle was an experiment that allowed people to pay whatever they wanted for 5 great indie games; specifically: World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, and Penumbra Overture. The deal has been extended by 4 days, so it is still available here. In the process over $1 Million dollars was raised by over 100,000 contributors, 4 of those games went open source, and we had lessons on game piracy and the importance of being cross-platform. So here’s a little snip from the Humble Indie Bundle website:
“The Humble Indie Bundle experiment has been a massive success beyond our craziest expectations. So far, in just over 7 days, 118,959 generous contributors have put down an incredible $1,082,698. Of this, contributors chose to allocate 30.95% to charity: $335,148 for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child’s Play Charity. I have made a page for the full breakdown including credit card fees in a JSON format here (json).
“Now it’s our turn to give back. As of 5/11/10, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, and Penumbra Overture pledge to go open source. We are preparing the sources right now and will be releasing them ASAP. We spent last night preparing Lugaru and it is available now. The code is still a little rough (no Visual Studio project yet, for instance) but hopefully with the help of the community we can rapidly make it more accessible to everyone.
“Note, the games will be “free as in ‘free speech’, not as in ‘free beer’”: see each license for the full, finalized details as they come out very hopefully this week — stay tuned. It is the underlying code that will be made available to everyone.
“Feel free to continue donating to charity, to the developers, or any combination thereof below. We will still be distributing humble bundles to anyone who contributes.”
Here’s a few more essential links:
The open source goodness – UPDATED 6/3/10:
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var randomThought:int = Math.floor(Math.random() * thoughtsInHead);
I recently rewrote the random level generation code for my current game project, Hell Invades Mars. In addition to the levels being generated much faster, they now feel a lot more random. In my last Flash game project, I had to write a separate application to do level design. While designing a level editor was fun, it was also a good bit of extra work. Thinking about the differences in the development experiences between my current and previous project, I remembered this blog post by Adam “Atomic” Saltsman.
Long story short: a little bit of randomness in your games can be a good thing for the developer (less work) and the player (more variety and replayability).
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If you’re an indie game developer you’re probably a pretty damn creative person. So why do you need inspiration? You need inspiration because ideas don’t exist in a vacuum. Whether you’re inspired by real-life or media, the style, content, and execution of your work must be inspired by something. Maybe you already have a good idea, but looking at what other people have done can help you make your idea better.
Retro Game Links
- Hardcore Gaming 101 – Hardcore Gaming provides a definitive look at many retro classics, forgotten treasures, and epic series.
- Racket Boy – A nice little site with some good lists to get you in the know on some retro classics.
- The Old Computer – I won’t get into a discussion about the legality of roms and emulators in your part of the world. I personally feel the best way to experience any game is on the original hardware, but that simply isn’t always possible. Roms and emulators are an import way to preserve the history of gaming.
- RogueBasin – Sometimes you want to recreate a forgotten treasure of a game. Well, apparently no one forgot about Rogue. Rogue is an early dungeon crawling game that has proved so popular it has spawned it’s own genre: the roguelike. This site details many of the intricacies in creating a roguelike game.
- Tetris Wiki – Tetris is one of those games that many developers want to cut their teeth on. Tetris Wiki will help you learn everything you ever wanted to know about Pong, Tetris. Yes, you too can know the differenct between the Akira rotation system and the DTET rotation system.
- Significant Bits – A nice little article about what made those old 2D platformer games so great.
- Atari Age – The Atari 2600 was one of the first systems to really bring the videogame into the home. Almost anything and everything Atari related can be found here.
- 20 Atari Games – A great look a Atari’s games and a bit of history.
- Retro Gamer – Retro Gamer is the only magazine I read and I read it cover to cover. It’s a British magazine so it costs an arm, two legs, and a first born child every month, but it’s worth every penny. They have two collected editions of the magazine available on CD-rom for an affordable price.
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For about a year and a half now, I have been working on my Masters of the Arts thesis for the M.I.M.E. program. I recently finished the writing portion and will be defending it in front of my graduate committee this Friday (Nov. 20). So what is it about and why would a game developer care about it?
I created a design document for a simple platformer game. I then built the game using Adobe Flex and Torque Game Builder (formerly Torque 2D, now once again renamed Torque 2D). The thesis documents my experience using each game engine and compares and contrasts the development experience as well as the finished games.
You can read my thesis, play the games and check out the source code on my thesis page.
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