The Ladder Drop

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The Best Resource for Marketing Your Indie Game

Pixel Prospector is still probably the best resource if you're an indie game developer looking for marketing information. Specifically, check out their Marketing Guide for Game Developers.

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Developers & press both have the same goal: to bring great games to as many people as possible - after all, a good game is worth nothing if no-one plays it. For the press, finding out about a game but not having access to information & media for the game means that they can't write about it. Of course, developers want to spend their valuable time making games instead of press pages.

Created by Rami Ismail of Vlambeer, presskit() is the solution.

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Bernard De Koven on "The Play Community".

The need for community holds true whether we are players or spectators. As a spectator, I want to be able to scream for my team. If the spectator sitting next to me wants to scream for her team, and if she insists that I also scream for her team, the likelihood is that we will wind up screaming at each other. We have to spend more of our time resisting each other than enjoying the game. I want the game to be important. She wants the game to be important. But we both lose our opportunity to relish this importance when the game becomes more important to us than we are to each other.

When mother and child play together, regardless of what they are playing, they are establishing a community in which both people operate under the convention that they take precedence over the fun. When the child cries, the mother stops playing.

When children play together, in the street or the back lot, they too establish a Play Community. When someone gets hurt, the game stops. When there’s a little kid around, you watch out for him, you play softer when you’re near him, you give the kid a break. At all times there is an acceptance of a shared responsibility for the safety of those with whom you play.

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Eric Zimmerman's bold Manifesto for a Ludic Century has been the source of some great discussion.

Ian Bogost, on the manifesto.

Zimmerman's follow-up.

And Abe Stein's contribution via Kill Screen Daily.

You can just Google ludic century manifesto for more.

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Eric Zimmerman helps students get their head around what a game is and what it means to be a designer.

Games are not one thing – they are many things. Games are not interactive stories; they are not formal systems of rules; they are not the personal expression of the designer – they are all of these things simultaneously and many more. A challenge for game designers is to appreciate that games are math, psychology, culture, aesthetics, narrative, politics, and any number of other things – all at the same time. Every frame we might put around games is useful at some moment in the design process. Designers need to learn when a particular frame of understanding can help them solve a problem and when it can be a problem.

He defines "design fundamentalism" as "the notion that there is a single, valid approach to creating or understanding games", and is very much against the idea.

Anytime someone tries to convince you that games are just one thing, be skeptical. No one would say that literature consists solely of the history of the printing press, or the politics of gender representation, or the evolution of plot structures. Depending on why you are studying or creating literature, one or more of these approaches might be useful to you. But to say that one of them is THE single, valid approach to literature cheapens the enterprise of literature as a whole.

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The Peter Molydeux Institute is a probably-not-real school for game design.

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On a personal level, I will always be grateful to Blitz for giving me my start in the games industry, for nurturing my talent, for shaving off (most) of the egotistical corners I have, and then for setting me off with Thomas Was Alone. There's a bittersweet realisation that right now, in pubs across Leamington Spa, small groups of people are wondering if grabbing a Unity license and making something of their own might be viable. I'm expecting a few phoenixes.

Mike Bithell on the closing of Blitz and the importance of having a great company to work for when you're starting out.

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I think if you conceptualize what you do as an exercise in mechanics, in pattern manipulation, in goals and solutions, it's very very hard to break out of the traditional powering-up model.

What I think we share with Frictional, and people like That Game Company as well, is that we see games as being fundamentally architectures for an emotional experience, and mechanics are purely there to serve that process. That opens up new design areas. It's not always right, or better of course, and I don't think a power fantasy driven game is in essence a lesser game at all. It's just different, and it lets you do different things, and it's great to explore that and see other people exploring it too.

Dan Pinchbeck in an interview about his games (Dear Esther, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs), the kind of games he enjoys, and what a game is.

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Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be ... was a mountain. A distant mountain. My goal. And I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain I would be all right. And when I truly was not sure what to do, I could stop, and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain.

Ethan Levy on becoming a game designer.

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The truth is, right now, Android sucks for indies.

The PA Report recently published an insightful article by an Anonymous source on why indie developers gravitate to iOS and shy away from Android.

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Samurai Gunn has maybe the best trailer you'll ever see. Movie, videogame, or otherwise.

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Something important about “experimenting” with prices: it’s really easy to get into a really sociopathic mindset where you’re trying to tune one number to maximise another number, and you lose sight of the fact that you’re experimenting on actual human beings.

Michael Brough on price-hacking his way into a well-deserved iOS success with 868-HACK.

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I was fascinated with how people were interacting with the game. People would try seemingly random behaviors I had never thought of. I was constantly asking people why they did what they did. I know that annoyed some people because they think you should just stand back and let them get on with it when playtesting a game. But I really needed to understand what was making people do these strange things.

Alexander Bruce on the making of Antichamber, and the place of feedback and iteration in the design process.

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Johann Sebastian Joust, Douglas Wilson's fantastic game without graphics, takes over Chicago.

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Small games need attention. They are important to the larger gaming ecosystem. Enter The Indie Megabooth.

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I had a couple of ideas about games, and I have this strong vision about making something emotional, and trying to expand the medium. I know I sound like David Cage when I say that, but it's more about at least trying to... it might sound weird, but try to appeal to myself again.

Massimo Guarini on the appeal of going indie.

Good advice: make something you want to play.

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I’m an independent game developer. Independent from publishers, independent from bosses, from 9 to 5 work schedules and commutes and possessions and national boundaries. Since I went indie in 2011 I’ve lived in 15 countries and released five games, including the post-apocalyptic strategy series Rebuild.

Sarah Northway tells you the steps she took to get where she is now.