Category: Biznizz

  • Going Indie with Sarah Northway

    Hardcore Droid invited me to write an article about my rise as an indie game developer for their series on game jobs. In it I talk about education, travel, and my experiences as an indie so far.

    I’m an independent game developer. Independent from publishers, independent from bosses, from 9 to 5 work schedules and commutes and possessions and national boundaries. Since I went indie in 2011 I’ve lived in 15 countries and released five games, including the post-apocalyptic strategy series Rebuild.

    I know my experience isn’t the norm but if you’re keen to do the same I can tell you the steps I took to get where I am now.

    Step 1: Love Games

    In 1988 I was 8 years old and saving up for my first big purchase: a NES with a light gun, Duck Hunt and Super Mario Brothers. One afternoon of smushing goombas and I was hooked for a lifetime. Forget TV and books (or God help me, sports or makeup). Give me my video games! In my awkward teens I got deep into the vast open worlds of pc games like Sim City, Civilization, the Elder Scrolls and Might and Magic. Through them I learned how to navigate DOS, connect soundcard drivers and write batch scripts. I loved computers because they were full of little puzzles and let me play games but I knew the games industry was a very exclusive club of brilliant and hard working people. I believed if I was ever lucky enough to become a game developer, that video games would lose their magic and the last thing you’d want to do after working on games all day would be to play one.

    I was wrong…

    …read the rest on Hardcore Droid

  • Incredipede and Steam Greenlight

    Colin and I released Incredipede one month ago on October 25th. It’s available for sale from our website (via the Humble Store) and also on Good Old Games. There’s a Flash demo version now making its rounds on the internet, which is apparently quite popular in China and Spain. We’ve had great press in Rock Paper Shotgun, Gamasutra, Indie Game Magazine, Verge, PC Gamer and Edge Magazine. People love Thomas’s beautiful art and the game’s quirky original mechanics.

    The Incredipede Gatekeeper
    One of the gatekeepers in Incredipede.
    Vote for us on Steam Greenlight.

    But it feels to me that most of the world is still waiting to discover Incredipede, because it’s yet to appear on the One True PC Distribution Platform: Steam. There’s no doubt about it: they won. Even I (Sarah) use their store to find new games, and often buy games through Steam rather than directly from developers. The most common question we get from people looking to buy Incredipede is “will I get a Steam key when the game is released there?”. The answer is yes. When!

    As you’ve probably heard, Valve recently changed the way they accept indie games like Incredipede onto their Steam store. It used to be you’d email them directly and hear back yay or nay or (more often) nothing. It was obviously an understaffed and un-ideal system, and to Valve’s credit they’re trying to improve it. Incredipede has been one of the first games to use their new submission system Steam Greenlight. On Greenlight, games are voted for by the general public and the top 10 are accepted onto Steam every month. Being a relatively unheard of unreleased game, Incredipede had little chance of getting enough votes in time to launch with Steam. The onus is on the developer to bring players in to vote for their game, a challenge that IMO makes the controversy over Greenlight’s $100 fee seem downright silly.

    Incredipede flew up the ranks after release and is hovering at #20, which means it’ll likely be accepted in a couple months. Colin’s planning some improvements for the Steam release and we may push it back to February or March to avoid the post-Holiday hole. We’re both quite confident that this is going to happen, but it’s been demoralizing to have to wait, checking that number every week to see if it’s moved.

    So if you haven’t yet, please go vote for Incredipede on Steam Greenlight. And yes, if you’d like to buy it now, we’ll give you a Steam key as soon as it’s on there.

  • Rebuild: Sales abound as winter’s come early

    Rebuild mobile’s on sale for 99 cents as part of the indie #superstrategysale. If you’re looking for real mobile strategy games, now’s the time to get Rebuild, Hunters, Call of Cthulhu, and Tactical Soldier – Undead Rising for a fraction of their usual prices.

    Rebuild’s been on sale quite a bit lately. October marked the one-year anniversary of Rebuild 2 (Oct 6th to be exact, with the mobile version on Nov 17th). To celebrate I did my first big content update for Rebuild, and ran a 99 cent sale for most of the month. The main new addition was seasons – now you could start the game in winter and play with an extra challenge: farms produce no food (no, not even winter melons!).

    Of course, although it’s possible to get through by just tightening your belts and doing daily scavenging trips to food-marts, that wouldn’t be as exciting as, say, eating human flesh. For example. So I made that an option: if it comes down to it you can eat your fallen comrades. Of course, once you try the other-other white meat it’s hard to be satisfied with anything else, and cannibalism has a tendency to escalate to much darker places. You’ve been warned!

    Another advantage to this winter mode is that it comes up naturally if you start a fort in spring and make it to day 200 or so, well past the point that the game gives you interesting content. So you can now try to save up enough food to feed your 100-person fort until spring (hint: you’ll need 100 * 30 * 3 = 900 day’s rations). Or, you know, just see what happens. Winter might be a good time to get in that helicopter and get the hell outta Dodge.

    The October sale and new content afforded Rebuild a round of press mentions and a New & Noteworthy feature on iTunes. It surprisingly didn’t make it into any Halloween-themed features which was what I was aiming for with my brazen new pumpkin icon. Downloads slowly petered off after the initial spike, and the curve didn’t seem to change when I put the price back from $0.99 to $2.99. In all the event doubled my expected profit for October. Probably it was worth the trouble, although the iPhone5 release and some Google Play bugs made it far more stressful and time consuming than it should have been. Not to mention that month I had to finish Incredipede with Colin!

    By happenstance Rebuild also got rolled into Google Play’s 25 cent sale in September which was rather interesting (55k downloads in one day whaaaow). It seemed to have no effect whatsoever on my iOS sales, but Android sales appeared to triple because of it. It was interesting to see them try such a daring “Steam sale”, but I hope to hell players don’t get used to it and start waiting for 99 cent apps to “go on sale”.

  • Rebuild’s on sale. Why? #BecauseWeMay

    Rebuild 99 cent saleThis weekend I and a host of other indie developers put our games on sale #BecauseWeMay. Last week Amazon had the same idea and put Rebuild on sale for 99 cents, and although I’m personally fine with whatever they do and it did make me money, I didn’t have the option to say no. Other platforms do the opposite: they set a price in stone and don’t let developers put their own games on sale. So #BecauseWeMay is an acknowledgement of those platforms (like the Apple App Store, Google Play, and Steam) that let developers choose their own prices. Super Office Stress took the message to heart and actually raised their price to 99 bucks.

    In other Rebuild news, I’ve done a few more interviews recently, and wrote a postmortem where I describe the ups and downs of writing Flash games. All this keeps getting me thinking about a sequel…

    But mostly I’ve been beavering away with Colin at Incredipede. I hope he’ll want to post something soon because it’s looking great!

    EDIT: Amazon’s decided to feature/discount Rebuild again this weekend, so you can go get Rebuild for your Kindle Fire. How much will it cost? Only Amazon knows!

  • Rebuild now available for Android phones & tablets

    Yes, you can now get Rebuild for your Droid Nexus Galaxy Razr Epic Maxx, or whatever you call that thing! But first, an update:

    Rebuild in the PlayBook top games
    Rebuild in the PlayBook top games
    Rebuild’s doing way better than expected on the BlackBerry PlayBook. This week it’s featured and in their top paid games – up there with three versions of Angry Birds (or is it 4 now?). It’s gotten mentions on crackberry.com, blackberrycool.com, and playbookdaily.com.

    All of this is so awesome, because the port took zero effort… and I’m rather fond of my new PlayBook.

    Rebuild's PlayBook Sales
    Rebuild's PlayBook Sales
    But even with all this extravaganza, my sales there are just barely matching the current iPad/iPhone sales (where Rebuild is #500 in games, #50 in strategy with a super-minor feature in iTunes – bet you can’t find it). So being a relative nobody on iOS == stardom on the PlayBook? Bummer for RiM, but I’m just so happy to be loved that I’d rather not dwell on that.

    Up next: the terrifying Android marketplace. I’d been avoiding Android because of my instinctive fear of all those different devices. Despite all my laboring over the iOS version, Rebuild is still a little sluggish and crashy on the iPad 1 and iPhone 3GS. There are much less powerful Android phones out there and no easy way to target only the ones with enough RAM and CPU/GPU power to run Rebuild smoothly (although I’ve tried using compatible-screens). So it is with trepidation that I announce Rebuild on Google Play.

    But apparently that’s not enough. I knew the hardware base was fractured, but I didn’t realize the app market itself was also fractured. There must be 100 different sites that sell Android apps, and each one wants me to upload my binary to them along with screenshots and promo art in different arbitrary dimensions. Many of the Android “review” sites either require you to sell through their store, or charge $200 for a review. Am I really seeing this right?

    I’ve submitted to Amazon so I can get it on the Kindle Fire (although for $200 the PlayBook is a massively better hardware deal). But I’m not sure I have the stomach for all these other stores. Have I been naive to only buy apps through Google? Android users – where do you get your games?