Action of the indiegamepod.com site interviewed Billy Garretsen at Austin GDC focusing on the release of Bumble Tales. Hear more at the link listed above.
09
Nov
09
Indie Gamepod Interview: AGDC
03
Nov
09
Deserts of Mars Flyer 14
29
Oct
09
Box Macabre Teaser Trailer 2!!!
15
Oct
09
Box Macabre at Austin GDC 2009
AUSTIN, Texas — Perfect Dork Studios displayed a new demo of Box Macabre in the GarageGames booth at this year’s Austin GDC. The conference provided an opportunity for the team to fine tune their work before the demo is submitted to the IGF and the Indie Game Challenge later this month, sponsored by GameStop and the Guildhall at SMU.
President Billy Garretsen said, “Everyone wants to win, but right now it’s more important to us to build buzz, gain legitimacy, and get people interested. This demo is important to us because it will be the first time the game is released outside of our small development circle.”
The demo contained work from some of the newest members of the Box Macabre team, including Jeff Arthur and Spencer Neal. In addition, the team was able to network with other promising new talent. “This is our final demo,” said Garretsen. “From here on out, it’s all about development on the final product. The conference felt a little like the calm before the storm.”
Local NBC affiliate KXAN covered the conference, and included a story in their prime time newscast.
Box Macabre utilizes the TorqueX 3D Engine from GarageGames. For more information on Box Macabre, visit www.boxmacabre.com.
06
Aug
09
Box Macabre Takes Shape!
AUSTIN, Texas — Perfect Dork Studios announces the start of its company-wide, Biggest Loser style contest. For the duration of Box Macabre’s development, the guys at PDS will compete with each other to see who can get in the best of shape.
The rules are simple. Success is based on how much body fat is lost over the course of nine months, and contestants are able to use any non-surgical methods available. The competition ends in Spring 2010, just in time for GDC, and the winner receives a cash prize of $1000. “I think the hard work it takes to improve your health and image is analogous to the hard work it takes to succeed in development,” PDS president Billy Garretsen says. “We want to show how a small company can come up with creative ways to motivate its team members, and to equate healthy living with healthy game development.”
“I’m excited… if I had the time to do it!” lead programmer Charles Speer sarcastically adds. “I’m interested to see how it all plays out with everyone’s responsibilities.” Says composer Andy Sigler, “I’ll be running… that’s all I’ve got so far. If we are doing this until the game is done, then I’ll have run a 5-miler and a 10K between now and then.”
“Hopefully we will look as good as our game does,” says Garretsen.
Box Macabre utilizes the TorqueX 3D Engine from GarageGames. For more information on Box Macabre, visit www.boxmacabre.com.
19
Jul
09
Introducing Jeff Arthur
AUSTIN, Texas — Perfect Dork Studios is proud to announce the addition of Lead 3D Artist Jeff Arthur to the Box Macabre team. An industry veteran for almost ten years, Jeff has worked with a diverse assortment of companies, including Factor 5, Edge of Reality, and Terminal Reality. Jeff’s work has been featured in BloodRayne (character artist), Lair (environment artist), Hulk (environment artist), and Hunter: The Reckoning (character artist).
Jeff was drawn to the Box Macabre project based on the game’s creative and colorful dark fantasy style. “The game gives you a lot of room for creativity and imagination,” Jeff says. “I’m very passionate about this project and am having a great time with it!”
PDS president Billy Garretsen says of Jeff, “It’s very flattering when someone with this level of expertise and this type of talent wants to work on the project.”
To see more of Jeff’s work, visit www.jeffarthur.net.
Box Macabre utilizes the TorqueX 3D Engine from GarageGames. For more information on Box Macabre, visit www.boxmacabre.com.
09
May
09
Perfect Dork Studios at GDC 2009
Perfect Dork Studios at GDC 2009
By Brit Baker – Lead Game Designer
Prologue
In 1776, Spanish missionaries established a small settlement and fort on a bay in western North America which would eventually come to be known in modern times as the city of San Francisco. This is fairly well known to historians, but what is not as widely known is that these early settlers came to this area seeking video games. Finding none, the stubborn Spaniards decided that if they stuck around long enough, surely video games would eventually appear if they maintained proper faith.
233 years later, Perfect Dork Studios made their way to the 2009 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to show the new demo of their upcoming game Box Macabre. A hearty “gracias!” is owed to the missionaries of long ago who made it all possible.
Day One – Another mission in the making
The 2009 Game Developers Conference was held from March 23rd to March 27th. Perfect Dork Studios flew out on Tuesday the 24th to get settled in to our hotel and prepare for our presence at the Garage Games booth during the 3 day exposition at GDC that ran Wednesday through Friday. I know I was very excited, and I’m pretty sure all of us were.
(left) Me, Alan and Billy on Day 1- looking forward to the show.
(right) A box of boxes! This was only a fraction of the total we brought.
Our luggage was packed with nifty foam pieces with cutouts that could be assembled into a little Box Macabre. This was a marked improvement over the paper cutouts that we brought to Austin GDC (although those still proved memorable and really got people interested in our game). These were sturdier and easy to assemble. We had a thousand of these, which took up a lot of room, so we brought our largest suitcases to accommodate them. If we look a little rough in some of these pictures, my only defense is that the foam giveaways took up enough space to prevent us from bringing our usual supply of beautification products.
In addition, we had some awesome T-shirts to bring along, some to act as our show “uniform” and some to give away as additional swag. One T-shirt had the Perfect Dork Studios logo on the front, and the other had the face of Box himself.
(left) The Garage Games booth under construction – unaware of the impending chaos. We were between the booths for America’s Army and Scottish Development International, which in the site map was abbreviated SDI and prompted me to ask “The Strategic Defense Initiative makes video games????”
(right) Charles could have sworn that was working correctly just minutes ago!
We arrived in San Francisco and checked into our hotel. After a lunch of Thai food it was time to get the lay of the land and do last minute coding and testing back at the room. Billy held the exhibitor pass, so he took a quick excursion to Moscone South Hall to find the Garage Games booth and learn where we would be setting up our demo. Thankfully the booth was very close to the restrooms, just in case our excitement reached bladder-threatening proportions.
Our demo for this show was entirely different from the demo we had brought to Austin GDC where we met the Garage Games people, learned how terrific they were, and established the relationship with them that led to their invitation to be part of their GDC booth this time around. We put together a different sequence of rooms to show off all of Box’s abilities (including some new ones) as well as an example of a boss battle that also showcased our intention to include some much larger, more open areas for Box to explore. We felt we had something special, so I’m not sure any of us slept very soundly due to anticipation of getting to put it in front of people and let them play it.
Day Two – The Expo begins
(left) The booth early on Day 1 of the Expo – already packed with party people. A pile of foam Box Macabres is on the table up front.
(right) Box Macabre being played on the show floor – we had two machines dedicated to it; I’m watching a second person play it on the other side.
I really can’t say enough about Garage Games and the job they did in making their booth one of the busiest at the show. They absolutely nailed it down it terms of working with developers to make sure their booth was about the games that were being created with their engines. In hard economic times when many large developers had pulled out of the show to avoid costs, Garage Games was there as a presence that illustrated the smaller indie developers were taking the stage. I had so many discussions with people who expressed interest in TorqueX 3D – the engine we were using, but there was interest in the other Torque engines in equal amounts. Nearly every engine had a polished and working example of a game created with it, and live demo slots set aside for each one. During the rare moments when I wasn’t showing or talking about Box Macabre, I got to see the impressive amount of people checking out the other games.
From my standpoint as a designer, it was such a rush to stand and watch people play Box Macabre, especially when they reacted to a specific moment with a smile or an involuntary noise of satisfaction. I also got to see where some people experienced frustration when we expected them to accomplish something a little too complex for just starting out. This too was very educational – even though the demo was simply intended to show a lot of things in a short play time, I still learned some important things about flow of difficulty that is already helping me in the design process for the full product. This was made possible through the generosity and hospitality of Garage Games.
(left) Billy G. doing the live developer interview with Michael Perry of Garage Games.
(right) The same interview as people at home (possibly in their underwear) would see it, via webcast.
Another feather in the Garage Games cap is their strong dedication to their community. Nearly the entire show at the booth was transmitted via live webcast for their customers and users to view if they couldn’t make the trip to be there in person. This included live interviews with many Torque developers, including our own fearless leader of Perfect Dork Studios, Billy G! I assume he’s fearless at least – I have never asked him how he feels about spiders. If you missed the webcast and would like to revel in his rich baritone voice, click the link here:
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1298031
Billy appears at around the 6:30 mark, but all the live interviews from all 3 expo days are worth a look.
The first day on the show floor was so much fun that I really never wanted to tear myself away from the booth to check out any of the other exhibitors. As fun as it was, the next day would be the day of our live demo of Box Macabre, presented on the big screen. Another sleepless night lay ahead – which if you must know included some partying at karaoke bars. But who needs sleep really? As the saying goes “I’ll sleep when I’m dead unless my soul is trapped in a box.”
(left) The escalators leading down to the expo hall in Moscone South – I like to imagine this speeded up with Phillip Glass music in the background.
(right) This was the stack of foam boxes we had left after day one. It looks like a lot, but at this point we already could tell we would easily run out before the conference was through.
Day Three – Live Demo Day!
(left) Is everybody in? Is everybody in? The live demo is about to begin.
(right) Here we see our composer Andrew Sigler sharing his views on music, and NOT the white spandex clad women working the N-Gage booth.
Day three was the second full day of the GDC Expo, and in many ways went a lot like the first. The booth was every bit as crowded, if not more so, and we got to meet and talk to a lot more great people and share our game. The main difference was having the opportunity to present the demo live on the big screen to an audience. We had been making sure to tell people to come back to see the live demo, even if they’d stopped by and played it themselves already. This is not merely because the live demo represented, in my opinion, the “official” unveiling of Box Macabre. There was another reason we wanted people to be there.
The one element missing from the demo as it ran at our designated stations was audio. Even if speakers had been provided, the show floor is a very noisy bustling place and the audio of the demo would get lost in the shuffle. We have been blessed to have the services of Andrew Sigler as our composer, and the experience of Box Macabre is not complete unless you can hear the music he has added to it. At Austin GDC, Billy and I attended a seminar that stressed the value of adding audio to the development process as early as possible, and not treat the music as an afterthought. We took this to heart and have not regretted it at all. As a designer, Andy’s music has fed my design decisions as much as he has used our design to inform his musical choices. I met several composers at GDC, and when I told them that we embraced this philosophy of sound as integral to early design, their eyes always lit up from having their value reinforced in this way.
Billy handled the demo brilliantly, as I knew he would. Billy is very passionate about Perfect Dork Studios, and the games we want to make, and it shows in the way he talks about what we do. When you are in a discussion with him, you will be swept along by this passion and clarity of intention. But as much as he enjoys talking about Box Macabre, he knew that the best live demo would involve letting the game speak for itself. There was time to talk about the Torque engine (a duty he shared with our main engine programmer Alan), but the entire last part of the demo was devoted to a complete playthrough, audio and all. This is where all our hard work came together.
You can see the entire presentation (with our gameplay programmer Charles manning the controller) here:
During the demo, I was moving around the booth, taking pictures of the assembled crowd and feeling the high. To see our game on that big screen, with the music turned up loud, was indescribable. When the bird boss made his entrance, I could not stop the grin from stretching my face. Our animator Tony Salvaggio was responsible for all the bird’s animations, and they looked fantastic on the screen. Every move of the bird contributed to a real feeling of battle taking place with our little boxy hero fighting for his soul. When the final credits screen came on, if you’d been standing near me I probably would have tried to kiss you. Strictly platonic, you understand. All that was left to do was hand out the T-shirts (which were already in high demand) to the crowd.
As Billy said at the end – it was only a taste of things to come. As enjoyable as it was, the feeling of accomplishment was fleeting. Now it was time to deliver on the promise of the demo and roll up our sleeves and start the real work.
Day Four – Bumbling through to the end.
(left) Aaron Murray of Tandem Games and Alan. I believe this is called “giddiness”.
(right) Bumble Tales, a collaboration of Tandem Games and Perfect Dork Studios, coming out May 2009. Shout out to Aaron, Troupe, Drew and Fernando!
The final expo day is nearly lost in sleep deprived fog, much like the fog that rolls in off San Francisco Bay, except this fog forces you to use clichéd metaphors a month or so later. However, at noon that day there was another live demo of note for the Perfect Dorks. Tandem Games showed their addictive match 3 game “Bumble Tales”, made with the Torque Game Builder (TGB). Billy and I met Aaron, the founder of Tandem, at the Austin Independent Gaming Conference back in November. That meeting led to Perfect Dork’s involvement in the project, contributing the art to this fun and colorful game. We spent a lot of time with the Tandem guys in San Francisco, and it was thrilling to see the reception Bumble Tales got. This game is a standout, with a great whimsical style. It is impossible to play it and not smile. Keep an eye out for it – as you read this, it may already be available at a digital distribution portal near you!
It was a shorter day than the others, with a definite sense of winding down. All our foam boxes had been given away; our luggage would be considerably lighter, as well as certain wallets. Before we knew it, the show was coming to an end. We made our last rounds of the expo, collecting freebies and saying goodbyes. If you would like to get the authentic feeling of the very final moments of the GDC 2009 Expo, have someone begin tearing the carpeting up from your floor while you read these closing paragraphs.
I hope everyone will keep following this space for updates on Box Macabre. I would love to tell you some of the interested parties we talked to about possible release portals and platforms, but I’m afraid that will just have to stay under wraps for now. I can tell you some of the minor “celebrities” in the gaming world we spotted during our time there – Industry Analyst Michael Pachter, IGN’s Jessica Chobot, Giant Bomb’s Jeff Gerstmann (who is not only a personal hero of mine, but apparently a ninja), and coolest of all Cliff Bleszinski and Mike Capps of Epic Games, who actually took a little time out of their busy day to see Box Macabre in action.
Many thanks and best wishes to all the people we met, and another extra special thanks to Garage Games for making it all possible. Let’s do it all again in 2010!
Brit Baker, Lead Designer –Perfect Dork Studios
(left) Garage Games’ Deborah Marshall says “Peace, out!”
(right) And so do we at Perfect Dork– Charles Speer, Brit Baker, Alan Uthoff and Billy Garretsen.
- Blade of Betrayal iPhone Menu
FOREWARD
With Blade of Betrayal about to come out on iPhone, I wanted to take this time and write down my history with the title. It is a game that has seen many changes and platforms over the years and is now finally going to have its definitive release. Very few creators get a chance to revisit their old efforts and enhance them with all of their new experience, but that is exactly what I was able to do with Blade of Betrayal. It was a long road to get it to this point and I hope everyone who plays it enjoys the game and appreciates the amount of love and work that went into it.
Blade of Betrayal Game Comparison
INTRODUCTION
Blade of Betrayal began as a small three-month development in 2002. I was contacted by some friends that had recently opened up a game development studio in Houston, Texas by the name of HPT Interactive. They really wanted to make a very epic space-exploration game but felt that the scope of that project was beyond their current capabilities so instead they decided to start small and make a quick turnaround title for the PocketPC.
When I was contacted by HPT, they initially wanted someone to come in and help create some concept art and simple game design. I did some sci-fi creatures based on their space game as a warm-up to see how working with the team would be. They liked what they saw and asked what else I could come up with for their first game release.
N00B DESIGN – THE COLLEGE YEARS
I was nineteen years old at this time, and a total child of the NES era. Some of my favorite games include Castlevania, Mega Man and Metroid. Seeing the door wide open to my input, I began pitching them an action side-scroller similar to the Castlevania games but brought to the modern era.
Basically I got down and designed the game I always dreamed of playing. Every level offered a completely unique set of art & enemies and were full of hidden items that would entice the player to return to find them all. Every chapter of the game was rich with content and ended in a boss fight that put your skills to the test.
The game’s design was completely derivative of the influential titles I loved, but it had enough of its own identity. I pitched this ambitious platformer to HPT, along with a full script and sketches for all the enemies and bosses. It was a lot bigger of a game than they had wanted but my enthusiasm and road map convinced them to give it the thumbs up. At that point I was basically tasked with being responsible for the art and direction of the game.
Blade of Betrayal Original Boss Concept Art
As a teenager in college I was juggling 8+ hours of classes and projects during the day and at least 6 hours of production work every night. This basically killed my social life as I was working nonstop. We still wanted to make the game in 3-6 months and I very naively believed that I would have a finished game in that time. With the amount of art and animation, along with all of the level maps Blade of Betrayal was easily on par with some full sized SNES games. We had the first level up and running around the 4-month mark. Despite our goals for a quick turnaround, we pressed on and proceeded to build the rest of the game.
Working on this game forced me to learn the foundations of skills I still use today. I drew my character sprites in MSPaint, colored them in Photoshop, and learned how to create tile-based maps using Tile Studio. I had to teach myself digital illustration and animation since those were not things being taught in the university. I had to learn the hard way that good planning can save you weeks of fixing mistakes – so I had to become a better producer and stay organized. I think because of all the hats I had to wear I was able to grow at a much faster rate and momentum on the project picked up.
Blade of Betrayal Main Menu Comparison
The summer of ’03 rolled around and we crunched hard to get the game completed and on sale by August. We did it! Finish Line. Time to take a breath, right?
Right?
Well now I learned about the other aspect of making games and that is marketing and promotions. We just figured gamers would find our game on their own so we hardly did any marketing for it. No interviews, no post mortems, no magazine ads, nothing. Maybe just some web banners and a poorly created website, but nothing effective. This was another hard lesson to learn: no matter how great your product is, nobody will buy it if they don’t know it exists.
GREAT REVIEWS DO NOT EQUAL GREAT SALES
It wasn’t as if nobody bought or played the game. Plenty of review sites played it through and most gave it an 80% or higher. We were even awarded PocketPC Action Game of 2003 from one publication. The game was praised for its art and design for which I took much pride in since those were among my direct contributions. I think we believed the good reviews would generate more sales so there was no additional push to market the game. Everyone was tired and wanted a break, so we released the title and just kind of rested hoping things would work themselves out.
I still had plenty to do. I was entering my senior year of college so it wasn’t hard to redirect my attention on that. Sure I was a little disappointed by the sales but my goal with the game was not to get rich. I just wanted to make a game like the ones I loved and grew up with and share it with others like me. It was a dream job regardless and the end result was a rough-around-the-edges yet complete action game that was fun to play. I was content.
DIRECTOR’S CUT 1 – ZODIAC.
About six months after the release of Blade of Betrayal, HPT (with one less programmer) got back in touch with me to do a port of the game for a new system called the Tapwave Zodiac. The system was a Palm-based handheld that was designed to be a competitor for the Gameboy Advance and PSP. The system was very well designed and was definitely optimized for video games, while still being able to double up as a PDA.
One thing we felt hurt the sales of the PocketPC Blade of Betrayal was the market saturation for the device. Since anybody could make applications for the device without barriers like licensing and certification the market was just full of applications. It was very hard to sort out the good from the bad and because of this we know Blade of Betrayal was somewhat lost in the shuffle.
The Zodiac was a second chance for us since the game library was tiny and there were absolutely no platformers for it. We would have zero competition and we knew that would help with the success of the game. It did not take much to convince me to put in the legwork to reformat all of the games graphics from 240×240 on the Pocket PC to 480×320 on the Zodiac.
Anybody who has done porting should know it is far easier to scale down than to scale up and some art had to be recreated completely from scratch, including almost 30 cutscene illustrations. The work of taking all of the existing art and making it work on the new device was enough of a challenge but that did not stop me from wanting to slip in a few new enhancements to the game.
Blade of Betrayal Cutscene Comparison 1
THE PRESSURE TO ADD CONTENT
By this time we had started calling the game Blade of Betrayal: Special Edition. The game was coming out shortly enough after the initial PocketPC release that we felt we needed to distinguish between the two. I started feeling the need to add more content.
The game went from 1 playable character, 15 levels and 4 music tracks to 2 playable characters, 22 levels and 25 music tracks. On top of this, the second player had an entirely different gameplay style. Where the original felt like Castlevania, the new character’s levels were more like Contra. THANK YOU KONAMI.
I know now that this was a very foolish move, easily adding another six months to the project to get all the new content implemented and tested. Nobody sat me down and said “No, Billy, we shouldn’t do that”. We just went along with it and hoped for the best.
A MISSED OPPORTUNITY
Every month that went by after the Zodiac launch was time that we were not capitalizing on its fairly small selection of games. Tapwave continued to promote their system and eventually managed to get stores to start carrying them. We kept crunching.
Eventually a second generation Zodiac was announced with even more features. Last I remember, there was a chance that we could be the pack-in game for the system when it released. When we heard that we doubled our efforts to complete the game in time.
That time never came. Soon after, Tapwave announced they were no longer going to support the Zodiac and that all retailers were to liquidate their units and cut off future sale. It is hard to compete with a giant like Nintendo and Sony and at the end of the day they just ran out of money.
This was like pulling the rug out from underneath us. We had no guarantees with Tapwave and all of our production expenses were out of pocket. Our game was being designed for the Zodiac only and could not be played on any other device. We had put all of our eggs into this basket and the basket broke.
- Blade of Betrayal Cutscene Comparison 2
Needless to say we all got hit hard. I was hit especially hard because I had created a superior product with an enhanced story and better art and music. These were all things I wished I could have done on the PocketPC version after the fact. I had learned a lot about game design and graphic design since the original production so I saw it as an opportunity to put out the definitive vision of the game.
Not one person ever got to play that game. We shut down production at about the 75% mark. Defeated, everyone parted ways and over the years communication faded. Blade of Betrayal was a bittersweet memory of unfulfilled potential.
4 YEARS OF MATURITY
I had graduated college by this time and started working for casino-gaming company Multimedia Games in Austin, Texas. My experience with Blade of Betrayal prepared me for the projects at my new job and I was luckily able to continue to refine my production and design skills and even learn some new ones like marketing and communication design (thank you Michael Conway). My work became less rough-around-the-edges and my eyes were opened up to better game design philosophies. More importantly, I learned about production schedules and deadlines!
I still always retained a soft spot for independent development and continued to brainstorm new game ideas. Most were not feasible or marketable so I kept a lot of that on the backburner. My attention focused more on freelance projects doing logo design, web layouts or animation. No labor of love, but it was still a way to earn some extra money on the side and keep busy.
Eventually my bug to make indie games caught up with me and I formed Perfect Dork Studios in 2007 as both an independent game studio and media outsource company. I have formed a great internal development team and have an extended network of developers I can contract as well. In a relatively short amount of time, the company has grown as has the project scopes. In 2009, our name will be attached to at least five released products which is a nice number for any indie studio.
CHRISTMAS SURPRISE
Over the 2008 Christmas break I was in Houston visiting friends and family. My last night there, I met up with a group of my school friends that I had not seen in years. Among them was my friend, Robert Shoemate, who was the one who initially introduced me to HPT back in 2002. He had just been laid off from his programming position (economy woes!) and was hoping to get into iPhone development as a way to work and make a living. He and another original HPT programmer, Eric Duhon, were forming a new company, Conjured Realms. Their focus would be iPhone and mobile games.
I had just finished my first iPhone co-development, Aim For the Brain! so I showed that game to Robert and he was impressed with the polish. I very nonchalantly said, “Man can you imagine Blade of Betrayal on iPhone?” We both kind of looked at eachother and it was like a light switch turned on. Of course we could imagine it on the device. In fact, all of the assets were already created at the proper resolution. Half of the development had already been done. It didn’t take much for either of us to commit to the project.
Blade of Betrayal Cutscene Comparison 3
DIRECTOR’S CUT 2. KEY WORD = CUT
Either thanks to my very full schedule, or my growth, I took a hard look at the Zodiac Blade of Betrayal and decided that there was a lot of the game that just was not all that good. From clunky boss battles to ugly levels, there was a whole lot of content that did not meet my current standards anymore.
The first thing I did was dissect the entire game and focused on all of the elements that made it fun. I then basically cut out the rest. Yes, this means the iPhone version will have even fewer levels than the original release, but every level is good and well crafted. I kept the basic plot of the original but condensed it into a much more personal story that only centers on the key characters rather than secondary characters that serve no real purpose.
I was able to finally accept that the game did not need a billion levels if they were not enjoyable. Enough time had gone by that I was able to let go of content and features in a way that I couldn’t when I was so fresh and new to the process. Because of these cuts, we were able to add in other fun and practical features that extended the replay value such as medals you can earn for completing various level challenges.
One big production hurdle was getting the game to control well on the iPhone. Others have tried to do platforming games with mixed results. The common complaint is that the device has no physical buttons so it is hard to get tactile response from them. We did a lot of research and play testing and the team and I came up with a few cool ideas to enhance the controls to feel very responsive and accurate. We believe control will be one of the key factors between those who love the game and those that don’t.
Once the original engine was ported to the iPhone we were able to pick up where we left off. At the time of writing this, we are a week away from submission to the App Store. It is a truly exciting time for me and the team at Conjured Realms. There is no guarantee that the game will be a huge success but at least it has a better chance than it ever did. At the very least, we are able to put up a game that is very personal to us and hopefully enjoyable to the player. There is a huge audience for retro-style games and I think they will appreciate the conscious nods to the classics from the 80s and 90s. It is not a perfect game but it certainly has style and charm which give it a flavor of its own.
MORE BETRAYAL TO COME. THANK YOU APPLE.
The iPhone platform is exploding like wildfire right now and so many developers are jumping on board. The nature of indie development is changing and we are starting to look at games as these organic things that have expansions and updates and are much more iterative. The speed at which you move is much faster with fewer barriers to put your product up. You can pretty much bet that we are not going to miss a beat and follow Blade of Betrayal up with some sort of sequel (whether spiritual or direct) in the near future.
The story has come full circle. Whether Blade of Betrayal becomes a recognized name among gamers or is simply a fun diversion for short breaks, I am completely satisfied with the end result. For the longest time Blade of Betrayal left a hole, incomplete and unfulfilled. Now I have closure with the title. And it feels damn good:)
Billy Garretsen
-President, Perfect Dork Studios LLC.
Thank you
HPT INTERACTIVE: Eric Duhon, Matthew Shoemate, David Harms
CONJURED REALMS: Eric Duhon, Robert Shoemate
APPENDIX A: Legal Tips For N00Bz
If you are in a position that I was in when I first signed up to do indie games, be sure to READ YOUR CONTRACT! It may feel weird, but handling the business side of things is super important and should not be put off until the end of production. If you cannot get cash, ask for royalty on the return on sales. If you are an artist or writer and are not getting the dollar-compensation you wish, then leverage that into owning the intellectual rights to the characters and story. This was my experience and it has turned out to be a pretty good (if uneducated) decision. Since I own the rights to Blade of Betrayal, I can freely go and start doing comics or whatever else I want. I control the IP. That is as good as money in many cases.
APPENDIX B: 2D Artists. Build Vector If You Can
This is just general advice to future-proof your game art. We live in a world of multiple devices and formats and resolutions. If you have the ability, I encourage you to do all or most of your art in vectors. It will speed your production up, allowing easy editability and SCALABILITY! Being able to take a character portrait and blow it up to billboard size without losing quality is what you want. It means print advertisement will also not suffer from low resolution pixilation or dithering when using in-game assets.
APPENDIX C: When In Doubt Don’t Be In Doubt
Morale and motivation are fuel for your production. A lack of either can slow the train to a halt and in many cases kill all chances of finishing your product. Finishing is one of the hardest things to do. Set goals and focus on them. If you don’t believe in your product then the quality will suffer and nobody will want to play it.
APPENDIX D: Like The Work
Hopefully you like the actual work involved when making a game. Sometimes it is a thankless endeavor and that is all you have. In my experience with Blade of Betrayal I had very few reasons to try as hard as I did and no prospect of selling through the roof. I liked making the game and enjoyed the whole process. When it did not sell well initially, I did not beat myself up because I had a great time just making the product.
Aim For The Brain!, is now ready to purchase for iPhone and iPod touch. Presented as a co-development between Westlake Interactive and Perfect Dork Studios, AFTB is a zombie whack-em game that features dozens of enemies and 3 unique environments to interact with. Neutralize enemies with precision to multiply your score and eliminate the competition. Can you survive the zombie onslaught!?
CLICK HERE TO SEE PRODUCT PAGE
Here is the official game ad:
And here is me purchasing my own game:
16
Dec
08
Austin IGC 2008 Pictures
I got some time to upload some images from the recent IGC event in Austin.
Jason Hughes, founder and president of Steel Penny Games, was present showing of his first game for WiiWare – “Bruiser & Scratch” – NOW ON SALE.
Joshua “Yoshi” Seaver can be seen promoting GameSalad, Gendai Games’ new easy-to-use engine for iPhone and web applications.
Aaron Murray got a lot of attention for his browser-based rpg – “Domain of Heroes”. Aaron and I spent a lot of time at the conference brainstorming ideas for co-developments between his company, Tandem Games, and Perfect Dork Studios.
For more info on IGC check the earlier post.
Thanks,
BillyG
