Recently I wrote about how Kongregate is an indie game publisher that is doing some really great things with developer relations. Another publisher, Manifesto Games -- is also doing some things right. They claim that developers get a majority of the profit, and that they want to focus on innovation and not clones. This is great to see more publishers being dev-friendly. I’d like to know a bit about whether or not they let the developers have access to their end customers.

Their Information for Developers page allows for blog-style comments on the bottom. It’s a bit curious, since it’s more of a permanent informational page rather than a blog-style post page or a Q&A forum. But I decided to post a comment to it with a question:

Cool page. One question, when a game is published through Manifesto, do you allow the game developer to retain no-manifesto URLs, company names, websites, and promotion of other games, or does all that need to get stripped out before publishing?

But here is it five days later and Manifesto, nor anyone, has managed to post a reply. In fact there’s another comment on the page from over a month ago that has no public answer. Frankly, that doesn’t look very good. If they’re not going to be able to answer comments posted to that page, they should just disable it. It’s not like comments are expected on a page like that. I think Manifesto shows some promise, but it looks like they need to improve their communications.

You can see the comments I’m talking about at the bottom of their Developer’s page.

UPDATE: A couple weeks after I posted the question, a rep from Manifesto answered my questions, and some others. Check it out.

If there’s two things I learned in 2006, I’d sum it up by saying:

• Santa and laser whips don’t mix
• If a video game has a location called Smuggler’s Cove, there better be more than 30 gold coins there

I’m talking about Oblivion (not regarding the laser whip, that was in The Polar Express). I really enjoyed Oblivion, and I’m actually still in the process of enjoying it. But the first cracks I ever saw in it’s otherwise perfect armor was when I finally jimmied the five-pin (hard) lock on the entrance to Smuggler’s Cove. Now that Bethesda has announced the Shivering Isles expansion pack for it, I’ll take some time to talk about the minor complaints I hope the fix, and why it was a problem.

Read the rest of this entry

Rabidlab has released a downloadable, buyable, ownable version of Dodge That Anvil, a very sweet cartoon-inspired game that’s got both a Shockwave version and a full download version . I saw it at GDC last year (are you going this year?) in the IGF competition, where it won the AdultSwim.com award.

Congrats to Rabidlab! Now, go check the game out!

I just updated my Wii and the new Wii News Channel was available.

The pros

• Resizable text. It uses an animated word wrapping system that makes the iPhone jealous, no less.
• Interactive Globe UI that shows news stories by location. Not sure how useful it is, but it’s got an element of coolness to it.
• Once it’s loaded there’s zero wait.

The cons

• Man, does it take forever to load
• The articles occasionally feature URLs, but they’re not clickable.
• Pretty much just standard associated press articles with the occasional photo sprinkled in. It didn’t appear to have anything in-depth.
• Did I mention it was slow to load?

Overall it’s a cool little piece of technology, a great working demonstration of what the Wii can do outside of gaming, and it may appeal to the non-gamer that Nintendo has been chasing with the Wii. But with the exception of their interactive globe, the Internet is a faster and more interactive way to get the same news, hands down. I hope Nintendo isn’t putting effort into these types of channels at the expensive of games. The news channel is not going to convert anyone.

UPDATE: subsequent uses of it have been pretty peppy, and it seems to occasionally download news even when the unit is off, which enables its speed.

I guess I didn’t really “get it” when I first checked out the new game site Kongregate. I kind of saw it as a YouTube for games. But even though I’m an indie game developer, I didn’t see what really is important about their site. So I’m going to discuss it. I’m loving their point-driven system, which is not unlike the Xbox points that I talked about earlier. but the the real important thing Kongregate is doing is on the developer side.

Developer Friendly Game Publisher

Taking a closer look at Kongregate, I realized that it has potential to be a very disruptive game publisher, following practices that I had wished other publishers would do for a while now. And when I say “game publisher”, I mean indie publishers like Big Fish, Real Arcade, Popcap, Oberon, and Reflexive. Read the rest of this entry

I purchased my pass for this year’s Game Developer’s Conference, being held in San Francisco March 5-9. If you purchase tickets before the end of January, you get a substantial discount. And if you can’t afford a pass, you can probably volunteer and get a free Giga pass (they’ve done that previous years). Check their website for details.

I find the GDC a real creative energizer for me, and I look forward to it every year. If you read my blog and you’ll be going to GDC, drop me a line. I’m always looking to meet up with fellow gamers (indie or otherwise) and old friends. Hope to see you there.

On Sunday I woke up at 7:45 to get a Wii. My plan was to head over to Best Buy (which opens at 11:00) because they advertised having at least twenty in stock. On the drive over I decided to stop in and see if Target had any in stock because they open at 8:00. When I pulled into the parking lot, I was pretty shocked to see there was a huge line. They had eighty Wiis, and gave out vouchers to eighty people, I was told.

I figured if Target had eighty, then Best Buy must have hundreds. I was wrong. When I got there, there was one person in line, but there were signs saying they had already handed out vouchers for their twenty units. Defeated, I headed on home, but stopped by Gamestop just in case. I saw a small group of people outside, and decided to park the car and head on over. Read the rest of this entry

[Read part 1] This is the second and final part of my interview with Gene Endrody, the one-man-team responsible for the free MMO Sherwood Dungeon. This time, we continue to talk about the technical aspects of programming an MMO with Director, as well as discuss the marketing aspects of getting the game out and into the hands of the public. Be sure to also check out part 1 of the interview.

Sherwood Dungeon’s stats are impressive, and despite that I’m a huge fan of Director frankly it’s beyond what I thought Shockwave could handle. How did you go about doing an MMORPG in Director? Did you ever stop and think “this might now be possible”? Read the rest of this entry

There is a new blog carnival about game development that has been launched by Juuso over at gameproducer.net. What’s it called? Why it’s appropriately called the Carnival of Game Production, and there’s a good variety of articles in it, including one from me.

One of my favorite articles in this edition is the 10 reasons why you’ll never finish your game. Here’s a snippet:

Blogs – Writing them or reading them. Sure they are fun, interesting and quirky. But you will learn a lot more by experimenting with a tool or writing some code then you could reading about it in a blog.

And with that, it’s back to work for me, but have fun reading the Carnival of Game Production!

Here’s a random smattering of the blogs that have recently been keeping me entertained. Check them out!

• Lost Garden —Hardcore video game mechanics and theory. Doesn’t post too often, but there’s a rich backlog of stuff there.
• HR Pufnstuf—Crazy art and animation blog giving semi-random peeps into the creation of a new HR Pufnstuf cartoon.
• Arkiva Tropika— An endless stream of vintage Polynesian artwork from the vaults of an avid collector.
• John Nack—Art links and musings from the Product Manager for Photoshop, who seems to never sleep!
• Giant Monster— Documenting the creation of a comic book completely with SketchUp, believe it or not.
• gameproducer.net— Interesting articles on a variety of game related subjects. Updated frequently.