Z0MB1ES (on teh ph0ne)

Although we know our teaser site must have left everyone in a state of suspense and confusion because no one could have possibly guessed what our secret surprise was, you may now exhale as we reveal to you Z0MB1ES (on teh ph0ne)!
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16 Comments June 6, 2011

Status Update with the Ferocity of a Thousand Status Updates (recursively)

Well, not quite that exciting.

But thing are moving along pretty well, albeit a little delayed (I think I’m 2 weeks off schedule currently, but who’s counting?)

One interesting little bit of fun is localization.  The Dishwasher is coming out in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Chinese.  Since I drew my own font, I had to add all sorts of special characters to the graphic.  For Japanese and Chinese I had to change the way the game handled fonts so that it could draw some using my font and others using a SpriteFont (the alternative would be hand drawing a couple thousand Asian glyphs).  It took a couple of days to get everything working right with all of that, but the big hassle comes with adding changes.

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5 Comments October 10, 2008

On those crazy XBLA price tags…

So, here we are: Braid‘s on XBLA for 1200 points, and now Castle Crashers has hit XBLA for another 1200 points.  They’re two excellent games (I unsurprisingly gravitated toward the latter, going as far as to dub yesterday “Castle Crashers Day”) and they both embody much of what the indie games industry can do right.  Also, they’re both taking some of the most ridiculous flak I’ve ever heard over their price.

Such gems include:

“$15 for 5 hours of single player?”

“I could get [insert old game name here] for $5 less at Gamestop!”

“If it were $10, I’d pay, but at $15 it’s just too much.”

Probably my first reaction should be to not listen to anything morons say online.

However, assuming I failed to do the first part, here’s my second reaction: (more…)

8 Comments August 28, 2008

Focus Groups are Driving us into Oblivion

No, not that Oblivion.

I have to wonder how “marketing” efforts from 100 years ago would have stood up to today’s. People made things they thought people would like, they marketed them in ways they thought would appeal, and everyone went on their merry way. Today, we have focus groups, market research, and all sorts of other data aimed squarely at allowing us to craft the most precise, effective marketing campaigns ever. Market research is an iterative process–each generation of marketing is more effective than the previous. But wait–this isn’t an anti-capitalist rant! It’s an anti-people rant. Bear with me…

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1 Comment July 24, 2008

About All of Those Ninja Gaiden 2 Reviews…

By now you probably know that I’m a Ninja Gaiden fan. If you’ve read any reviews, you probably also know that the biggest complaint leveled at Ninja Gaiden 2 is that the camera is broken–nay, adversarial. Here’s my take:

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2 Comments June 11, 2008