Little Worlds Interactive Founder Jenna Hoffstein speaks about user interface design and usability in the “Introduction to Game Design” class, part of the EdTech X series from the MIT Education Arcade.
David Evans (Hybrid Mind Studios) and Michael Carriere (Zapdot) were part of a four-person panel on freelance game development that took place at the Microsoft NERD center in Cambridge, MA. David worked with Rohit Crasta (of Playcrafting Boston) to put the panel together.
Topics of discussion included:
– How to find contract work
– How to keep/manage contract work
– Basic business tips (negotiation, pricing, etc.)
– Basic legal tips (have a contract! where you can get basic contracts, how to avoid bad NDAs or NCAs, etc.)
– Possible types of contract work (advergames, serious games, education games, commercial games, etc.)
– Possible types of work terms (fixed price, hourly payment, revenue share, etc)
– How to recognize bad contract jobs/clients and fire them/move on.
– Negative side of being freelancer (no insurance, work from home/coworking space, different distraction like tax preparation, no stability, working on weekends) and how to minimize them.
– How to stay true to your indie dreams while contracting (ie, making time for your own projects)
The panel also included Boston locals Nina Klymenko (a 2D artist freelancer) and Caleb Garner (founder of Part 12 Studios.)
The IGC is well-represented this week in the Humble Bundle, with three games across two of the current bundles! Pay what you want while supporting charities like the Maker Education Initiative, Worldreader, the Mozilla Foundation and CodeNow.
The Humble Mozilla Bundle includes nine big name indie titles that can be played right in the browser. This bundle includes two IGC titles:
AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for the Awesome
Aaaaa! took place in an alternate 2011, where BASE jumpers leapt from the skies and executed stunts around the floating buildings of Upper Boston. This semi-sequel picks up six years later — the sport’s been outlawed, and you’re jumping as a form of protest. High in Earth’s stratosphere, you’ll thread a path through the rotating blades of enormous wind turbines. Elsewhere in the solar system, you’ll dodge asteroids above seas of lava, spray graffiti onto lunar government offices, and flip off Ganymede colonists — all in the name of peaceful protest.
A tree killed his granny and now he is out for revenge. Meet Jack Lumber, the supernatural lumberjack who hates trees, loves animals, and hates trees. Did we say that twice? The guy really hates trees, and boy does he have an axe to grind.
Use the supernatural powers of Jack Lumber to massacre the forest in this time-warping, line-drawing, log-slicing, pun-filled lumberjacking mashup! Bust out your flannel to muster the strength and burliness to solve the skill and logic puzzles (flannel not actually required).
The “Get Your Learn On” Humble Weekly Bundle is all about the power of knowledge and features seven fun educational games. This bundle includes one IGC title:
Get ready for magic, monsters, and math with The Counting Kingdom!
From writing simple spells to brewing bubbly potions, yesterday was just another day in your life as the Wizard’s Apprentice. Today, a horde of angry monsters is attacking The Counting Kingdom, and only you can defend the castle towers! Using your spells, potions, and the mighty power of mathematics, you must banish the monsters and save the kingdom!
Take up your tome of spells and save the castle in this tactical puzzler, featuring strategic tower defense gameplay across an expansive world map.
For the past few years, the IGC has participated in the MassDIGI Summer Internship Program by supporting the student teams in various ways as they move through a rigorous program to design and develop a game over the course of 10 weeks. We have given talks and provided feedback at the students jumped into game development head first.
http://www.massdigi.org/programs-services/summer-innovation-program/
As is too often the case, non-technical people think that they can’t create games in the Unity game development engine because they lack coding expertise. Elliott Mitchell, co-founder of Vermont Digital Arts and the Boston Unity User Group, debunked this myth in his Unite 2014 talk: Empowering Artists, Designers and Non-Technical Types to Make Games in Unity.
During his talk Elliott discussed:
Watch the video of Elliott Mitchell’s Unite 2014 talk: Empowering Artists, Designers and Non-Technical Types to Make Games in Unity, here, if the embedded video above does not work.
We spent some time around PAX to make a short video with Alienware, and a bunch of other indies. Check it out!
A bunch of us kept super busy at this years Unite 2013 event. Check out the talks given by Popcannibal, Disco Pixel, Owlchemy Labs and Vermont Digital Arts!
Postmortem: Girls Like Robots. Or: How I Accidentally an Adult Swim Game.
Ziba Scott, Luigi Guatieri – Popcannibal
Runtime Remix: Dynamic Audio in Real Time
Trevor Stricker – Disco Pixel
Console to Mobile: Bringing an AAA Console Title to Mobile with Almost Zero Asset Modification
Alex Schwartz, Devin Reimer – Owlchemy Labs
Successfully Avoiding Common Pathways to Heartbreak and Disasters in Your Art Pipeline
Elliott Mitchell – Vermont Digital Arts
IGC is no stranger to BigSushi — John Lindvay and crew have been putting an absolutely fantastic set of content online since their inception. We hope that these episodes continue to add to that!
Elicia Basoli took some time to sit down with me and talk about the Indie Game Collective. Read the full article on VentureFizz.
Yamauchi understood that you need to make awesome without the overhead. When his plastic coated cards took off, he realized that a small change could make a huge difference. The Game & Watches were commodity calculators with a different LCD. The black and white, blocky pixels of the Gameboy played Tetris. Nobody knew what played on fancy color screens and networking equipped Atari Lynx and Sega Game Gear. Everybody is familiar with the Wii. While a snarky game press complained that it was merely two gamecubes duct-taped together, Nintendo couldn’t produce enough to meet demand for three years. You can use the fancy Japanese term 枯れた技術の水平思考 if you want to sound as wise as Miyagi-san revealing deep truths to Daniel.
Yamauchi understood that you made great video games by empowering creators. The nerd canon has revered places for the likes of Gunpei Yokoi, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Satoshi Tajiri. Yokoi was plucked off of the assembly line to make the Ultra Hand. Miyamoto was asked to make what became Donkey Kong, and was enabled to make sequels. That culture of enabling creators supported Tajiri for six years making Pokemon. At the dawn of video games Atari thought of the industry as gorgeous high-tech boxes to make your TV blink, the games themselves being shovelware. 30 years after ET the game was cranked out in time for Christmas, we know which philosophy has stood the test of time.
Yamauchi understood that failure is as natural a part of the creative process as getting up in the morning. They found success with toys only after they built a portfolio of failures from love hotels to instant rice. If you made a list of Nintendo’s world beating successes, from Mario to the DS, it would be long. However if you made a list of Nintendo’s huge public failures, from the virtual boy to even the Wii U, it would also be long. Few large companies are as fearless as Nintendo, and is a direct result of Yamauchi’s grasping search for success outside of playing cards.
Yamauchi was a great man. The world is a better place thanks to him. He will be missed.