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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Run, Humanoid, Run! is a short prototype game created with Flixel. The game is set on a space station that is about to explode. You must find keys to unlock the electrified doors and escape the bombs, blazing guns, and evil robots – all while completely unarmed. Run for your life, humanoid. Run!
There is no sound, but the game is otherwise complete. Be warned: the game is HARD, retro throw your NES controller across the room hard!
Play Run, Humanoid, Run! Online!
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Gunpei Mania is a simple space shooter game that I built to learn Flixel. The graphics are meant to invoke the impression of of the greenish grays of the original Gameboy screen. Technically twice as many colors were used in Gunpei Mania than were available to a real Gameboy, but hey it’s artistic license. The gameplay is inspired by the Atari 2600 classic Megamania which is of course inspired by Space Invaders.
I spent less than a week developing this in my spare time, so it’s not terribly polished. This is the second game where I used FlashDevelop as my IDE and the first game I have built using Flixel.
Play Gunpei Mania online!
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An important factor to consider when choosing a game engine is the platforms that the engine supports because this will determine which platforms your game will support. Net Applications reports that Microsoft Windows is run on over 90% of computer desktops, Macs make up less than 5%, and Linux less than 1%.
Other sources place Macs closer to 10% market-share. These numbers are frequently cited by independent game developers as a reason to not support Mac and Linux users. Developers question why they should put in a great deal of additional work into making their game available on additional platforms to increase their potential sales by what they believe will be maybe 10%. However, this logic is flawed for two reasons.
First, many game engines including Flash/Flex offer a way to write a game once and deploy on multiple operating systems and platforms. Flash/Flex creates a .swf file that will run on any platform that has a version of Adobe Flashplayer 9 or later, including Windows, Mac, and Linux. Flash/Flex can also produce native binary executables for each of these platforms. Many other game engines offer similar “write once, run anywhere” functionality allowing developers to release games for multiple platforms with minimal additional effort or cost.
Second, Net Application and other operating system market-share metrics are largely meaningless to independent game developers because these statistics deal with the number of people accessing the internet from specific operating systems. Beyond accessing the internet, there is no indication of who is using a computer for any specific purpose. A better metric for independent game developers is to look at the sales data of other independent games, particularly those released cross-platform. Sales data varies greatly depending on the target audience of a game, the marketing a developer does or does not do, and many other factors; but in general it tends to indicate that supporting multiple platforms is beneficial for increasing sales of games made by independent developers.
For example, the game Tribal Trouble reports a sales breakdown of 31% Windows, 47% Mac, 11% Linux and 11% not specified. Wolfire Games reports 45% Windows, 50% Mac, and 5% Linux sales percentages for Lugaru. Koonsolo reports their game Mystic Mine had sales of 23.3% Windows, 42.72% Mac, and 33.98% Linux. Each of these sales breakdowns indicate that supporting the Mac roughly doubled the developer’s audience and sales, and Linux support was also more worthwhile than the <1% market-share indicated by Net Applications.
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