Wolfire Games has hardly missed a beat with their steady stream of blog posts over the past few years, covering everything from the development of Overgrowth, their latest game, to the Humble Indie Bundles, to topics like DRM, software piracy, and iPhone clones. They’ve even created a number of helpful tutorials about stuff like art and linear algebra. Pretty inspiring lads, they are.
I thought this new Photoshop painting tutorial, by Wolfire artist Aubrey Serr, was worth posting on the front page. It’s not the first timelapse painting session they’ve put up on their YouTube page, but it’s certainly the most in-depth, with Aubrey discussing his process and giving tips as the video plays out for 23 minutes. Apparently there’s a Blender tutorial planned at some point, too – I’ll be sure to post it on TIGSource when it comes out!
For more tutorials, check out our Tutorials subforum. For a recent Overgrowth alpha video that I think is cool, hit the jump:
Alec Holowka, whom I worked with on Aquaria, has written an article about the new direction of Marian, his current project, including his decision to switch from 3d models to 2d sprite art. Alec, as always, is very honest about the challenges he’s faced as a game creator, and explains in depth what has happened with Marian these past two years. It’s a heart-wrenching and inspiring read.
At long last, a new TIGCompo approaches…
Many of the participants of last year’s TIGJam were treated to some late-night brawls between eager combatants in Paul Hubans’ MADHOUSE and Mark Essen’s NIDHOGG (as well as sporadic skirmishes in Street Fighter III: Third Strike and Super Street Fighter IV). At GAMMA IV, we engaged in the tragicomical four-player mayhem that is B.U.T.T.O.N. Truly, these battles instilled in us not only the warrior spirit and the joy of friendly competition, but also the sadistic pleasure that comes from watching other people pit themselves in mortal kcombat.
For the TIGSource Versus Compo, the rules are simple: make a game that pits at least one human player versus another human player. The rest is up to you!
Deadline: February 27th, Midnight
Merry Chrimbus, everyone! To coincide with the opening of his new website, here’s a gift for you from Gryzor87, the musician behind Locomalito‘s Hydorah and L’Abbaye des Morts: a full-color, 95-page manual on how to use Pixel’s free PXTone program to make your own game music. But the word “manual” doesn’t quite do the project justice – Gryzor87 not only walks you through the app’s features, he also provides a lot of excellent advice and examples on how to make music that sounds good and fits the theme of your game. The download comes with pxtone and plenty of sample songs, voices, and other examples, too.
In short, it’s a one-stop source for anyone looking to get into making their own game music, and a work of art in its own right. I’m definitely going to be using this. Thanks, man!
Octodad is a quick little game, full of charm, put together by a team from DePaul University. Taking control of an octopus attempting to keep his cephalopod nature a secret from his human wife and children, the player must perform a to-do list of chores around the house. Sounds easy enough, right? But then you get to the controls, which are a perfect balance between ‘impossible to use’ and ‘insanely fun,’ and you begin your day in the life of Octodad.
Having played the game myself, and having enjoyed it thoroughly. I sat down to talk with some members the team behind the project. The interview is after the jump, but if you’ve never played Octodad yourself, then check out the trailer and then go grab a download for yourself.
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The entrants for the Independent Games Festival 2011 have been announced! This year there are a whopping 391 entries. As a fun reference, the number of entries for 2010-2007 were 306, 224, 173, and 143, respectively. Exciting stuff.
Jump straight to the list here.
A long-awaited new version of the 3d game creation tool Unity was just released. Unity 3 has a lot of new features, including Android support, a unified editor for all platforms, source-level debugging, and many other improvements to its editor, graphics engine, and assets. Check out the full list of changes here.
The regular version of Unity is free, with the Pro version going for $1500.
A Korean indie game fan brought an unfortunate situation to light on Reddit yesterday: apparently the South Korean Game Rating Board (GRB) has forced a Korean RPG Maker website to remove all of its games, due to the owner’s inability to pay for the ratings which are mandatory for ALL games. This includes freeware games that are distributed online, as was the case here. According to the poster, a 105 MB indie RPG might cost $71 to get rated in South Korea.
Similarly, Steam might be blocked by South Korea until they pay the fees to have their games rated, according to this post on TeamLiquid.net. This follows another unresolved incident between the GRB and Google involving games on Android, from March of this year. The South Korean government has threatened to ban Android Market if it does not comply with the ratings.
The GRB is a government-owned institution that, according to Wikipedia, was created out of a controversy wherein the Korea Media Rating Board (KMRB) rated a gambling game “suitable for everyone”, allegedly due to a bribe. Now the GRB is South Korea’s only game rating organization, and unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be much better than the KMRB. On TIGForums, Mrkwang of the Korean indie gaming site Pig-Min has cited a case where less than half of one percent of available Flash games were rated by the GRB during an inspection in 2007.
Obviously, this is a terrible situation, not just for fans and developers in Korea, but for every hot-blooded, freedom-loving game enthusiast. Ways to help are currently being discussed in this TIGForums thread and on Reddit.
Hey, everyone! The dates for TIGJam 3 have been set. We be jammin’ over Halloween weekend, so feel free to dress up as your favorite Cave Story character (best costume wins a date with Jeff Lindsay). This year the jam will be held at the palatial Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, California… just a hop, skip, and double jump from San Francisco. Like previous years, the cover charge is $50 and goes into a secret slush fund that is used to bribe IGF judges and also feed and clothe you while you make cool stuff and enjoy the love of your fellow indie developers.
For more information, keep an eye on the TIGJam forum.
The IGF 2011, also known perhaps as the cactus IGF, is now open for entries. Here’s the news post about it by Simon Carless, and here’s a letter from the new IGF chairman Brandon Boyer about the changes.
Instead of rating games with scores in each category, they’re going with juries, debate, and a nominations system, similar to how the Nuovo award finalists were chosen in IGF 2010. It’ll be interesting to see the results of this new process in the form of the finalists and winners chosen by it.
They also are now allowing mobile games into the main competition: previously iPhone games (etc.) were ineligible for the grand prize. And they are increasing the total number of finalists for the Nuovo award from five to eight.