Indie Games, Prepare to be Spooned!

If you happened to read my About page, you will know that last Fall, my friend Jesse and I created a puzzle game for an Xbox Live XNA contest. We had planned to release the game when Microsoft launched their Community Games service last November. At launch, developers were unsure about the viability of their games. MS had not done a great job promoting the service, resulting in little interest for the games outside development circle. We decided to take the wait and see approach before releasing our game. When sales data first started leaking out this last Spring, it seemed like the only games making money were a handful being heavily caned my Microsoft. This further discouraged us from getting around to finishing our game.

Then yesterday, Jesse showed me a postmortem Nick Gravelyn wrote on his lasted game, Pixel Man. Nick had also released the game Bloc back when the CG service launched. Since those early days, Microsoft has taken some much needed strides toward making Community Games feasible, and in turn profitable. First, they rebranded Community Games as Indie Games, giving the service a faux re-launch. They also now provide 50 free download codes when you submit an Indie Game. These codes can be given away to help promote your game. Avatars as now supported in Indie Games, narrowing the gap between them and regular Xbox Live games. And possibly most important, the minimum price you can charge for your game has been reduced from 160 to 80 MS Points, allowing you to sell your game for approximately $1.00 (US).

The new price point is one of the things that Nick hit on in his postmortem. It is also one of the things that got us interested in picking our game back up. As Nick pointed as, at $1.00 you can make a down and dirty game. It doesn’t need to be long or have a lot of replay value. It just needs to leave the user feeling like they got their dollar’s worth. We agreed that with little work, our game would be both finished and well worth the asking price of one dollar. At this price point, we make $.6776 per downlod, the rest staying with Microsoft. If we are able to push around 60 paid downloads, we will recoup the $39.99 cost of activating an XNA Premium Membership account (needed to submit our game) for four months. This seemed like an attainable goal.

And with that, I am pleased to announce that Spoony Bard Games is back up and running. We plan to have our game finished and ready for release in the next few weeks. Nick mentioned that he promoted Pixel Man almost entirely through Twitter. Being morally opposed to the little blue bird, Spoony Bard will need to rely on my ability to sell our game to you. With that in mind, here is the outline:

The goal of our game is get your character to the exit of each puzzle by ‘tilting’ the game world. You use Left, Right, Up and Down on the game pad to slide all objects in the puzzle, including your character, the corresponding direction. Object can be used to fill in pits, or as blockers to get your character around obstacles. When trying to envision this Mona Lisa of gaming, think Super Monkey Ball; if it was 2-D, top-down, fixed screen and sported 1/3 less monkey. You’re feeling it now, right? The game will be comprised of 50 puzzles. When you complete a puzzle, your progress is automatically saved. You will always start the game on the first puzzle, but may skip ahead to the first uncompleted puzzle. All puzzles will display both the lowest number of moves known to complete it and the number of moves you used to complete it. This creates a little replay value, as players find alternate ways to solve puzzles using fewer moves. Most importantly, early play testing has shown that the game is truly life changing. The world looks clearer, food tastes better and music sounds richer after only a few minutes with our game*.

* These statements refer to the beta version. Increases to vision, taste, hearing and quality of life will not be present in final release.

If you are wondering if I truly neglected to mention the name of our game thus far, you are correct…you sly boots. When we entered the Dream Build Play contest, our game was titled “Tessera Woods.” The name was part of a back story involving a wayward child, his dog, an evil witch and a delicious pie. To steam line the game for release, we have removed the story; turning it into a straightforward puzzler. In doing so, the name is no longer relevant. So this will be the first way you can win a free download code. In the next week or so, I will put up some screen shots and start a Name the Game Contest. You will be invited to post name ideas in the comments area. The submitter of the best name will have their mental prowess rewarded with a download code worth a whopping $1.00 and useable for our yet to be named game only.

So, put on your thinking cap and keep an eye out for the Name the Game Contest!

Cheers!
Kevin