Vlambeer is asked to do some public speaking every now and then. Although we might form the duo that is most likely to disagree during a talk, we listed all our talk-related posts underneath.
We were invited to speak at Spilbar #8 in Copenhagen & since the Global Game Jam happened the day after, we decided to attend the Copenhagen edition – better known as the biggest Global Game Jam location in the world: the Nordic Game Jam. For those of you who’ve never heard of a Game Jam, it’s basically an event in which small teams of developers try to create a game based on some theme in an extremely limited amount of time – in the case of the Global Game Jam, that’s two days of no sleep, lots of caffeinated drinks and lots of development – but more importantly, it’s a chance for meeting old friends and new friends alike. Some parties and Infinite S.W.A.T. reaching the finals of the event concluded a great weekend over in Copenhagen.
Infinite S.W.A.T. is available for free download after the jump. continue reading… »
Some pretty busy weeks have passed lately, with the Super Crate Box iOS updates taking up most of the time that wasn’t invested in Ridiculous Fishing or GUN GODZ. One thing we’ve been working on behind the scenes was a talk about Game Cloning that we wanted to give over at the Game Developers Conference.
After being through quite an episode with Radical Fishing being cloned, we believe the industry is approaching the topic from the wrong angle – one that is focused on what we cannot do about the problem – and we want to offer an alternative and reignite the discussion from a more constructive perspective. It was just confirmed that we’re actually giving the talk and we’re thankful that we’ve been offered this chance to speak at the Independent Games Summit, an amazing venue to kickstart this new discussion.
In 2010, Vlambeer created Radical Fishing, released it as a sponsored Flash game and began work on an iOS version. As we were working, a third party suddenly released a game – which, down to the upgrades, was almost identical to Radical Fishing’s design. This resulted in a lot of thinking about defining cloning, the dangers it poses to upcoming indie developers and the variety of strong opinions that keep the issue from being debated in a useful manner.
Vlambeer will talk about the practical dangers of clones to our industry and what we CAN do, instead of discussing only what we cannot do. We want to pick up the discussion at its impasse and provide a starting point for a new, more practical conversation about cloning.
Further details and the exact timing of the talk will be announced over at the GDC Schedule Builder.
Unrelated: we’re hoping to push the Super Crate Box iOS update this week & will be attending the Nordic Gamejam in Copenhagen. It’s a busy week, but it’s going to be fun!
One episode that included Jan Willem running through Philadelphia airport with his shoes in his hands later, we arrived in Austin for Fantastic Arcade. At Fantastic Arcade, we’ve been finally showing off Serious Sam: The Random Encounter to a larger audience, which has been something we’ve been looking forward to for quite a while now. We’ve also talked about the game and the process behind creating the game on Friday, although in our slightly jetlagged state that did turn out rather interesting.
Something that’s also really cool is that Radical Fishing is playable on this amazing arcade cabinet courtesy of the event & we talked about the game a bit during our Developers’ Commentary panel on Saturday. It was fun finally getting to explain how much effort went into something as seemingly crude as Radical Fishing, getting all of it to feel & be just right. We continued to talk a bit about how cloning is different from iteration & how clones endanger creative, novel games – potentially stopping them from being made at all. Finally, we explained that in the wake of the cloning thing, people told us that we should make ‘less simple games’ to avoid cloning and not ‘show our ideas’. We proceeded to show two simple prototypes we have that we might work on some more later on called FFFLOOD & Yeti Hunter because you know, screw ‘em.
The most fun thing about Fantastic Fest is meeting up with fans and fellow developers, but the Super Crate Box Versus tournament we kicked off with an opening match of titans between JW and me comes in at a pretty good second place. I’ll have to admit that JW won in a stroke of luck (I did manage to beat JW in the Bit Pilot tournament on Saturday so that evens things out – although JW would say it doesn’t). Brandon Strong took away the first place in the Super Crate Box tournament and earned himself eternal fame and a crate filled with goodies.
Speaking of Super Crate Box, Halfbot and us have decided that Super Crate Box iOS just needs a bit more time. It’s definitely getting there – the controls are tight, the gameplay is solid & we can pretty consistently have players score close to their desktop scores. We’re just going to tweak the weapons a bit more so they feel right on iOS. We believe that’ll upgrade the game from being a direct port of the PC/Mac version to being a real Super Crate Box iOS. We’re really sorry for the delay there for all of those waiting for the game, but trust us when we say we think it’ll be worth the wait.
So now to the most important part of this post, because those of you looking forward to shooting hordes of enemies in their turnbased face, you won’t have to wait for long. Serious Sam: The Random Encounter will release on Steam and other digital distribution platforms for $4.99 in mid-October. That’s right, only a few more weeks left!
On April 28th and 29th, we visited the Festival of Games conference in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Festival of Games is arguably the largest annual game industry event in this little country and this year was no different, the event attracting both ‘big’ speakers as Al Lowe and Ian Livingstone and smaller ones like, well, us. If you don’t care about all that and happen to be interested in LUFTRAUSER, a Flash game we created in our spare time, scroll down all the way.
Since we were asked to do a little talk as well, we came up with the idea of throwing an idea into the fray, something we started thinking about during the ‘press storm’ after we released KARATE a few weeks ago. How could a game as tiny as that gather so much press coverage? What we concluded – not through statistics but through a gut feeling – is that game companies with a ‘average’ scope are disappearing. We don’t have the numbers, we can’t tell you what constitutes a small or a big company – we feel that as a game company, your scope is either big or small, or you’re sucked into the emptiness in between where you fight an uphill battle just to survive and do what you love.
Leading this process, we think, are digital distribution, tech and audience expectations.
Back in the days (but not too far back), you had big companies with enough money to dominate the spaces in the gaming isle and the average-scoped companies that had less money but still got a spot somewhere in the back corner. Nowadays, the small companies can be flexible and cost-effective and the big companies all but own the shelves in retail.
New hard- and software allows big companies to create the most amazing of game experiences with almost insane capabilities. Expensive and continiously advancing engines and middleware allow the big companies to allocate and use every last bit of processing- and graphical power from the increasingly powerful hardware. On the other hand, game creation has been made increasingly simple for beginners and small companies with tools like Unity, Game Maker and FlashPunk or Flixel, allowing them to rival medium-scoped companies in capabilities.
However, the biggest problem for the average-scoped companies we believe to be the audience expectations. AAA games are expected to have high production values and usually, reasonably safe design choices. An indie game is measured with a different measuring tape and whether you like it or not, will usually be compared to its peers on terms of originality & concept.
What does this leave for the average-scope company? They can’t compete with the indie developers, as indies can work far more cost-efficiently and be more flexible. They can’t compete with AAA because the audience expectations are too high in terms of production value – things they can’t afford and the AAA studios can.
We also stressed that big and small are mutually exclusive. A small-scoped company should never aim to make a AAA game, nor the other way around. These are different worlds that require different approaches and different types of skills and experience.
While in the old days, companies grew slowly and steadily, we feel nowadays the jump from small to big – if that’s something you aspire – should be made in one leap. If your company fits in a ship container, you’ll be fine – if your company can own the ship, you’ll be fine too. Anything in between and we feel you might be in for a world of trouble.
Also, we wanted to make a quick mention of LUFTRAUSER, a game Jan Willem and I created outside of Vlambeer in cooperation with Paul Veer and Kozilek in the past few days. It’s a Flash airplane combat game we created to fight some stress, which turned out really good in its first prototype – so we pushed through with it. At this point, we’re looking for any interested sponsors. If you know someone who might be interested in the game or if you happen to be that someone, drop us a quick e-mail at rami@vlambeer.com.
Man, we haven’t been this busy for a while. It’s not yet finishing-Super-Crate-Box-busy, but it’s definitely getting close to finishing-Radical-Fishing-busy. We’ve been doing so many things that it’s hard to remember what those things actually were. I mean, we had another succesful indie meetup, we gave a talk at the Utrecht School of Arts on getting nominated for IGF (answer: no idea) and we designed and cancelled something called MUSCLE RPG, but most of all we’ve been working on two projects.
One of them has been going for a long time, and is finally shaping up into our second Vlambeer light release. We can’t say much about it, but this is the pitch document we sent around two months ago.
The game has probably changed a bit over time, but expect to be able to play this on a nice place on the internet sometime in the future!
The second thing we’ve been busy with is Serious Sam: The Random Encounter. The game is looking quite nice already, and after days of testing I’m still enjoying trying to beat the battles with the limited features we’ve implemented so far. In an attempt to be interesting, here are some stone-cold features for the game:
More then 8 damned fine parallax layers per battle!
Underwater battles!
Bosses so big you can only see their feet!
Sweet, sweet loot!
We’ve been getting nice feedback and a ton of enthousiasm so far, thanks everyone! We’ll work had and will definitely try not to disappoint Sam.
Finally, the awesome Ciro Continisio interviewed us. If you know his awesome interviews, we are sure you will check it out here right now. The website is Italian but the interview is in english.
Rami on februari 1, 2012 |
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Rami Ismail
Jan Willem Nijman