Links For June 6, 2015

closing Game Oven: numbers and struggles

We believe that a large part of our game sales (but also our other incomes) are due to features by Apple and the game developer community. Making truly unique games leads to invitations to conferences, festivals and award shows, that lead to making more friends in the games industry, that leads to more friends taking you along to private parties with distribution platforms, that lead to more prominent features in app stores.


A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

In choosing to make our game with pixel art, we have accidentally taken on a war on two fronts. My job was to make Auro’s art polished, inviting, and clear to the audience, not to also educate the audience that pixel art is a deliberate style. It’s not their problem that they don’t know what pixel art is, and it’s not their fault.... This is all because we failed to embrace the medium.


'Big indie' Kickstarters are killing actual indies

Most game devs can tell you at a glance that campaigns like Yooka-Laylee, Mighty No. 9, Bloodstained and others are heavily deflating the costs of their development cycle, sometimes not-so-secretly planning to search for the bulk of their actual funding elsewhere or hoping to be massively overfunded. The amount asked for initially has nothing to do with the real cost of making the game.


Eve Online: how a virtual world went to the edge of apocalypse and back

When the code word went out, the spy network was poised to strike. Mirial’s prize ship was destroyed, along with her escape pod and, finally, her vacuum-frozen body was delivered to the Guiding Hand Social Club’s client. Shogaatsu’s spies looted the company’s hangars and vaults. The combined cost of the ambush and theft totalled more than 30bn ISK, an estimated £10,600 of assets lost through robbery or destruction. It was, at the time, the largest theft of virtual assets in any video game. While the ensuing news reports brought Eve to the attention of players around the world, some feared it might destroy the universe too.


Some deep analysis of one-line music programs.