"Dawn of Play is an independent game development studio and a team of gamers since childhood.
We believe in gameplay before bling, skill before luck, fun before patience."
— dawnofplay.com
Our tumblr blog is a mix of our own games and features of other developers that inspire us.
Notes on Steam Early Access from the talk by developer of The Long Dark
This is a summary of today’s GDC talk on Community-Informed Development from Hinterland Studio founder and creative director Raphael van Lierop.
The Long Dark is an exploration/survival game that was Kickstarted for about $200.000 in October 2013. It was released on Steam Early Access one year later in September 2014. In January 2015 they surpassed 250k sold copies, which at the price of $19.99 brings their Steam revenues to whooping 97% of the total, compared to 3% from Kickstarter and other sources (and that $200k wasn’t bad to begin with).
A couple of points about Steam:
The reviews players post for games are often presented as truth instead of opinion and it’s hard to have a dialog about it. Negative reviews get upvoted more than positive ones and there is a prominent hate directed towards Early Access, if players have been burned before by investing in titles that didn’t reach completion or live up to the expectations.
Steam Sales are critical to success and 70% of copies were sold during that time.
You should interact with the community on Steam on their forums and not try to migrate player over to other communities (forums, social networks). Most people are not likely to do that.
Reading the very vocal negative users can be emotionally taxing, so it’s best, if you can, to create some sort of buffer between the development and interaction with them. (A dedicated person on the team could handle it and make sure to always respond without grief.)
Players on YouTube & Twitch have a bigger influence on sales than press these days.
It’s important to stick to your vision and deliver on the promises that got people invested to support the game during Early Access. Ask players for feedback (guidance) and not what to do (direction). As PC Gamer quotes:
“The community doesn’t belong in the driver seat,” van Lierop said. “[The community] is a tool, a data point, a voice to listen to, but they haven’t spent years of their lives doing this job. I know it’s an unpopular way of approaching it, but my opinion is that if you do [allow the community in the driver seat], you’re not going to have as strong an expression of your creative vision. We’re getting a lot of benefit from the community and we’re not about ignoring the community, you just incorporate the ideas.
“It’s not our job to make the game the community wants. It is our job to make our community want what we have made.”
The final note would be to strategically consider the launch when game comes out of Early Access. If the game is exactly the same on release as it was the day before it, there could be a lack of hype around it. For The Long Dark they will release the story-driven game mode whereas the Early Access only has the sandbox (survival) mode.
Reblogging what needs to be reblogged, our friend and composer of many tracks in Dream of Pixels, Mr. Leemajik himself, has pretty much beaten everyone on our team in. Respect!
Brazilian YouTuber Lully de Verdade (lullylucky here on tumblr) has made a Let's Play video about Dream of Pixels. If you're wondering, yes, it's in Portuguese.
Seeing video reviews/playthroughs still feels so surreal — watching someone else presenting a work you've created is just beyond this world. Thanks Lully, this was a great surprise.
Indie Game: The Movie is something we dearly enjoyed watching at the office. It's a documentary positioned in the aftermath of Jon Blow's Braid, Team Meat's on-screen releasing of Meat Boy, and the final stages of developing and promoting Polytron's FEZ. Maybe you've even heard of this lovely movie already. :)
The authors, Lisanne and James, have been following a lot more stories though. That's where the Special Edition comes in. On July 24th they'll be releasing a 300+ minute anthology of new short films, epilogues, deleted scenes, commentaries and much much more.
We've preordered the boxed set years ago (literally, haha) but if you haven't got your copy yet, the Special Edition will be available as DLC on Steam, where Indie Game: The Movie debuted as the first full-length film release.
Why should you get the version from Steam? The documentary is on sale right now, 70% off for $2.99. You'd be crazy not to get it. And you're all set to buy the special edition DLC in a week.
OUYA, the open gaming console, is launching in retail stores today. We were early backers on Kickstarters and are getting one shipped right now. In the mean time, look at the video above and tell us this isn't the most indie and retro gaming friendly console of them all! We're looking forward to playing our friends' games on there (and one day our own!).
This is a prototype following the Experimental Gameplay Project guidelines (7 days, 1 person, 1 theme), made in a couple of nights and finished at TIGSource's TIGJam game jam jam jam.
It's an artist accuracy training (puzzle?) game idea something. It's just a stupid prototype and not really fun, but maybe you can test how good you are and improve in your drawing-from-reference skills. If you get straight A's, you could pretty much use this skill to pick up a real pencil, get a reference image and draw it very very well. It's a game where, if you get good at it, it has real life consequences. Give it a go!
Play in Chrome (with Native Client, enable in chrome://flags): http://dawnofplay.com/drawing/Drawing_nacl.html
Play in other browsers (with Unity Plugin): http://dawnofplay.com/drawing/Drawing.html
Need a pirate adventure game that is not Monkey Island to play this weekend?
A long time ago we had fun with a freeware title called Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy! You could try that or ... an unreleased sequel called Nelly Cootalot: The Fowl Fleet. It's up on Kickstarter and it comes with a short demo for you to dip your peg legs into as you relax into the end of the week.
Download the full first game at www.nellycootalot.com or see the delightful Kickstarter video for the new one below:
At first look these might seem like 3D renders from a government space exploration program (run by the Exoplanetary Research Institute in fact). They're actually scenes from a game called Extrasolar. We got a demo today at TIGJam and it's a very very clever space exploration game. You issue commands to your rover that drives around an alien planet and it sends back these gorgeous photos of the environment that you're discovering. Keep an eye out for this one!
We're at TIGJam, a 4 day long game development meetup, organized by TIGSource in the Silicon Valley. We've finally infiltrated Retronator into the area so he can join things like this. Expect updates on the prototype he's developing and we're sure by Sunday you'll be able to play it as well.
Very intrigued by Die Gute Fabrik's new game Mutazione, just showed at Venus Patrol's Horizon event.
Lovely illustration style, but also an interesting backstory about Kay, who has a motorbike accident and wakes up in a strange world where she discovers the town Mutazione and its friendly, strange mutant inhabitants.
