Wednesday, June 8, 2011

End of the Line

Here's a really useful post from Jackson Pope over at Reiver Games, where he details his experience running a small independent publishing company and his strategies, decisions, and problems that led to the company's closing down last year. Sad stuff, and a good cautionary tale for people starting down the road that he did.

Thanks to Jackson for writing about his experiences; I think he might be a little too hard on himself, since he also has the global economic collapse as a backdrop for starting his company, but it's really useful to hear what he did and why, and why it didn't always work out.

Monday, June 6, 2011

Good playtesting advice

Tom Gurganus interviewed Chad Ellis of Your Move Games, and Chad has some really good advice for getting useful playtests and also thinking realistically about how good your designs are.  Very good stuff. The company looks like it was founded in kind of the way I'm trying - some designers wanting to publish but not wanting to put up with all the trouble and crushed dreams of getting published by others.

Read it here.  There's an earlier part of the interview too, but this second part has the more interesting stuff design-wise.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Follow through...

Now that classes and end-of-year reports and such are finished, I've made some progress on the puzzle game project I mentioned back in March.  I've been working with CraftyJS, a pretty neat-o game engine for javascript games.  I'm still in the baby-steps stages of javascript coding and of using Crafty, but I do have something working - see the demo page here.

I'm hoping to turn this into a puzzle game, and I've got the game part mostly thought out, but I'm still working hard on the programming mechanics.  Visually, my quick-and-dirty demo art looks OK, although because I'm using simple rotation of 2D art, the lighting is all wrong on the tiles in the demo.