Ind13 Issue Three

The Independent Games Development Magazine

Issue Three, Summer 2014

PLUS PAC-MAN is back, and this time he's brought his friends...

RoboPanda: two games artists give us their interpretations of a new games brief Tempest Sky: a result of XD Studios Monday game jam Online Gaming Tricksters

Save the sheep from a horde of wolves by building a fence around them, in this increasingly difficult new puzzler from McPeppergames www.mcpeppergames.com

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EDITORIAL Introduction

we are

Hello and welcome to IND13 (Indie), the magazine

sound effect artistry to retro arcades – we’ll take a

that champions independent game development.

look at anything that grabs our interest.

Maybe you’re a developer, or a hardcore gamer,

We’re a small core team of just six members – so

or someone new to the concept of indie games

we’re always looking for new angles and fresh

wanting to learn more – we’ve got something for

writing. If you think you’ve got something that’ll

you all.

make indie game developers step away from their consoles for a few minutes, get in touch by emailing

Just like the games we love, we’re independent:

us at editorial@ind13.com.

this means no editorial agenda except good, solid reporting on all aspects of indie gaming. From

Enjoy,

veteran developers to crowdfunding campaigns,

ind13

Who we are...

IND13 is a games magazine dedicated to independent games development. The team is made up of voluntary contributors from different areas of independent games development.

placements in the magazine.

We also give pro bono ad placements to the companies the team work for, in exchange for our time spent contributing to the magazine and to keep our employers happy.

We’ve created a magazine which discusses topics we think are important to, and cater to the fans of, independent games development.

We hope you enjoyed the magazine and please do get in touch with questions and comments.

Our aim is to create interesting news, reviews and articles, all focusing on independent games development. The nucleus of our team is based in the UK but we hope to have a team stretching the globe. We aim to have independent gaming news from the UK, US, Europe and Asia, but also from all other gaming territories.

The team behind IND13 are all volunteers, and we are giving up our time because we are passionate about independent games development. The content of the magazine will be made up of articles created by the IND13 team but also by voluntary contributors from the games industry.

The Team: Richard Hoffmann Editor-in-Chief Harry Cole Publisher Lee Smith Creative Director Rokas Butkus Art Editor Sophie Rossetti Copy Editor Website: www.ind13.com Facebook: www.facebook.com/ind13 Twitter: @official_Ind13

Advertising is available in the magazine, at this time all proceeds will go into the development and stability of IND13’s production.

Paying for advertising will also mean we can cover paying clients’ titles with editorial as well as with traditional advertising

For editorial enquires: editorial@ind13.com For advertising enquires: advertising@ind13.com

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Pac-Man is back Pages 20 - 23

Regional Report: Argentina Pages 32 - 34

Tempest Sky Review Page 48

Online Gaming Tricksters Pages 62 - 63

The RoboPanda Art Challenge Pages 64 - 67 4 ind13.com

Q&A with the IND13 team

Regional Report: UK Piracy

Page 6 What the IND13 team think is the future of gaming as they see it

Pages 44 - 45 We report on how online piracy is being deciminalised in the UK

LizzE – And the Light of Dreams

XD Studios Game Jams

Pages 8 - 11 A look at LizzE with Daniel Wiedemann, the founder of the one-man indie game studio Fiery Things

Pages 46 - 47 XD Studios explain the thinking about their unique Monday game jams...

Tempest Sky Review McPeppergames: Pages 12 - 19 A husband and wife two-man indie game and publishing studio

Page 48 A review of Tempest Sky, a result of an XD Studios game jam

London GameCraft 2014 Pac-Man is Back!

Pages 20 - 23 And this time he has brought his friends for a new launch in October

Pages 50 - 51 We spent some time at the London GameCraft 2014 game jam

Meerkatz Challenge Games of Glory Pages 24 - 27 A new and innovative MOBA crossover

Pages 52 - 55 We talk to Travian Games about their game studio and about Meerkatz Challenge in particular

Games of Glory Review Page 28 We get up close and personal with Games of Glory

Life on Mars on a Stick

E3 Expo

Pages 56 - 57 What is life like as a small indie start-up?

We catch up with Martyn Bramall from Mars on a Stick to find out

Pages 30 - 31 Richard Hoffman shares his pictures from his gaming event travels

Experience permadeath with Ascendant...

Regional Report: Argentina Pages 32 - 34 A look into life of Nastycloud, a games studio in Buenos Aires

Pages 58 - 60 We talk to Happa Games, the makers of Ascendant, a new and unforgiving beat 'em up.

Online Gaming Tricksters Piracy Special Pages 36 - 43 We look at the problems facing online piracy for small studios, and what can be done about the problem

Pages 62 - 63 Ophelia investigates the online gaming sites, and their paid membership schemes

The RoboPanda art challenge Pages 28 - 31 We challenged two games artists to give us their interpretations of a new games brief which we invented

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EDITORIAL Q&A with the ind13 team

What do you see as the future of gaming?

HARRY

GARY

ROKAS

Gary

RICHARD

LEE

Ferro: Robot on the Run).

I believe the future of gaming will consist of all gamers linked to a mainframe, whereby they will interact at a hub, then, similar to star trek

With the mobile market becoming increasingly popular it is easy to focus

go into a VR chamber to play their game. I think their will be very little to

on that but there is excitement also in the console market, with the Oculus

compair gaming to as its all gonna be VR.. I'm not sure if I'm making sense

Rift and Sony's Project Morpheus showing massive potential and the

here. Gaming will be socialising and visa versa.

release of both highly anticipated.

So, even when your not gaming, your still in a VR environment

I think it is hard to predict where we will be, gaming rise, in ten years time.

Ten years ago, though, I am sure most people would have mentioned VR as

Rokas

a possibility and something that surely would have be realised by now, and

When I think about the future of gaming, I see multiple directions it will go.

it seems that we are almost there.

One being social gaming, targeted by companies like Nintendo (Wii U and

Harry

Mii and Everyone 64) who focus on simple fun games that you can all play

I think gaming has taken many forms and it is now just part of the fabric of

around 1 TV with your friends and family. Possibly more in the direction of

society. VR will be huge for PC gaming and console. I see mobile becoming

board games, given their second screen ideas.

the staple of all types of gamers, children, adults, male and female. I think communication is now a huge part of gaming and as connectivity

Then I see the film 'Gamer' unfolding, where your whole room turns into a

increases, this will be a major factor in gaming.

command centre of virtual reality wonder and you are taken into a world of hardcore gaming and adventures with full body immersion.

Also, we are becoming a world completely based on data and this will be reflected in new games that master this data in magical and exciting ways.

Finally I think outdoor gaming will kick off. Like laser tag or geo-caching, but so much cooler with awesome augmented reality, changing the

Richard

familiar environment around you into a mega playground of adventures.

With having looked into VR development for quite a while now, and being one of the first to have bought the first iteration of the Oculus Rift's

Lee

development kit (way before Facebook got its hands on it), I can claim that

Over the last few years gaming has gone in directions and into areas that

virtual reality is quite easily the future of gaming. With the technology

were probably not foreseen. Most notably with the rise of smartphones

having come on in leaps and bounds over the last few years, and with

and games that are capturing the non-gamers market, such as Candy

Sony's Project Morpheus having joined the race, it is certainly going to be

Crush, the housewife's (or husbands) favourite.

an interesting virtual journey into reality.

So where next?

Having used the Morpheus too, it certainly feels more of a finished product than the Oculus Rift, although Morepheus's 90-degree field of vision does

Well hopefully I think we will see a rise in the quality of the games and less

lose out to Oculus's 110 degrees... but this is hardly noticeable, and is likely

cheap clones and cash-ins. We are over saturated with games that lack

to change come the final product. Having played space simulator Eve:

imagination (see the amount of Temple Run type games there are in the

Valkyrie on Morpheus and Strike Suit Zero on the rift, the games are looking

stores), and the good ones don't get seen (see Ludobit's hugely addictive

really great, so it is all about who gets those right on launch.

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Bundle Mania Indie Games for Charity Get cool games in a bundle and support charities in needs.

Road Rush 66

Man Alive

Drive down the Route 66!

Quirky & immortal platform fun!

Julian Campbell Foundation

Get your Game Bundle now!

Support a selected Charity to make a difference for kids and teenagers!

Scan QR Code to go straight to the site!

www.bundle-mania.com 7

@Indie Game developers: Contact us if you want to get your games on future bundles! ind13.com

FEATURE Fiery Things

Daniel Wiedemann Daniel is the founder of the one-man indie game studio FIERY THINGS. Recently he started doing PhD research on the interrelationship of game design and new generation interface tech in digital games.

...and the thing between gameplay and technology How fast a game can morph from a to-the-point experience to an interface technology demo and the important relationship between game play and interaction methods.

I created “LizzE – And the Light of Dreams” as my final Master project (www.lizze.eu). It is a 3D hack and slay game, which adapts its experience to the users performance and tries to immerse him in its fantastic storyline. The player is able to switch between the two main characters at all times. Furthermore to its singleplayer mode the game features also a multiplayer cooperation mode over two game instances.

The storyline of the game includes a little orphan girl called Lizze (short for Elizabeth), with a yet unknown background history and an almost psychopathic habit for knifes. The second playable protagonist is a beast called Ezzil.

Ezzil (spells “Lizze” backwards) from the beast world was send out

by Bethara, an old mighty sorceress and ruler of this parallel world.

Like many others, he was ordered to collect the Light of Dreams, a magical kind of energy source, which gets fueled with varying powers by dreaming humans. Harvesting the Light of Dreams is the reason why humans sometimes cannot remember what they have been dreaming.

Though this time as Ezzil feels the immense power of Lizze’s Light of Dreams, he refuses to collect the light. Bethara gets so furious about this, that she casts a mighty spell on him. But the spell has a side effect. Lizze gets sucked into the world in between and somehow merged with Ezzil into one being. Confused about what happened, the two try to rip themselves apart from each other, but the magical bond is just too strong. As they have no other choice, they decide to work together, to find a way to split themselves again.

That’s were their journey begins, which will lead them through creepy adventures and terrifying battles.

Bethara is not amused... maybe because she feels there isa yet unknown connection between her and Lizze...

From a technological point of view the game was planned to be playable on desktop computer platforms and the iPad. This was only possible via different input modes, which included the keyboard, a common game controller, the Leap Motion controller and touch/tilting on the iPad.

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FEATURE Fiery Things

“...it seems questionable that just porting an existing game to an I/O technology like the Oculus Rift will create a good gaming experience...”

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FEATURE Fiery Things

To manage these very different input technologies I created an abstraction layer to the game, which included all possible actions the player could perform (e.g. movement, character switch, meleeand special attacks). On top of that I created different software interfaces for the different input modes, which would be feeding the abstraction layer. As a programmer this seemed to be a really good way to implement all the different modes while not needing to redevelop the wheel for each one of them and to some degree this worked alright.

Through using Unity3D as the development environment, compatibility for keyboard and game controllers or joysticks was already given.

To implement the Leap Motion controller I created a kind of emulated game controller. The user was able to use his left hand to control movement (via position and rotation of the hand) and the character switch (via a stop sign gesture). With the index finger of his right hand the user could perform horizontal, vertical and diagonal swipes and a circle gesture to perform the different possible attacks. Even though it was theoretically possible to control the game like this, tests showed that users had only very little control and were mostly uncomfortable with this mode compared to the more conventional ones.

Another problem was that players experienced fatigue in their arms very quickly. By only having a limited amount of time till the hand in of this project I introduced an optional mild auto aim feature and a sensitivity configuration slider for the Leap mode. This helped quite a lot to play the game, though some problems still persisted till the end. For example during tests I verbally told users to rest their elbows on the table while holding their hands over the device, to decrease muscle fatigue.

Though I had a graphical sheet explaining the rather complex motion sensed interactions, in hindsight an interactive tutorial sequence, guiding the user through the different actions step by step, would have been needed. But more importantly a really reliable way of controlling the game, maybe via using more automation and less

direct input, might have solved a lot of issues.

On the iPad the challenge was similar, but there were already some solutions to various interaction aspects shown by other games. To control the movement of the character the user could use a touch analogue stick or optionally device tilting. This worked rather well after just a small amount of adaption time. Even though, to get a simple thing as the touch analogue stick working really well (which I am not claiming to have entirely accomplished) is a very time consuming task.

As a designer I also wanted to create a GUI that was not completely cluttering the screen, so I tried to compress the various possible actions onto as little GUI elements as possible.

This might let the game look more focused on the actual 3D scenery but on the other hand increased the adaptation time of users. To preform the different attacks for example, I didn’t want to use touch buttons, as with four different attacks, again the screen would have been cluttered very quickly. So I used swipes and the double tap to perform these actions and visually indicated them with particle traces. This might look rather nice when performing the swipe over a certain distance, but in reality users wanted to hold the device steady in both of their hands, so I very much decreased the minimum distance for a gesture, that users could perform with a thumb while still having a proper grip with both hands around the iPad. In general it seems questionable to try to pack all these different input modes into one game, while having the exact same amount of control over its actions. To some of the readers this might seem obvious, but it is exceedingly important to make the interactions just right. They should be as specialized to the game as possible or even better the gameplay instead should be hand crafted to the reliable actions an input technology can offer and like that create an enjoyable gaming experience.

A very similar aspect of handling interface technologies became apparent once I tried to include stereoscopic viewing into the desktop version of LizzE. First of all, if this was not planned up

In game screenshots

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FEATURE Fiery Things

front, you very likely need to rethink and rebuild all of the 2D GUI and menu elements of your game. But more importantly, again it seems questionable that just porting an existing game to an I/O technology like the Oculus Rift will create a good gaming experience.

feeling of directly acting as the character and the corresponding focus suddenly splits into two separate entities. You still give orders to the character, but by being able to rotate the camera view you feel much more like a detached god-like entity. This raises a lot of gameplay possibilities, but also a lot of issues on the other hand.

The simpler technology of “just” stereoscopic viewing via a 3D TV or projector was almost easily implemented and worked out really well, but using a head mounted display like the Rift raises totally different issues but also possibilities.

The big virtual reality problem of nausea for example, needs to be handled very delicately, as users are unlikely to continue playing a game that makes them sick. Though this area still seems to hold a lot of groundwork to be done, the gaming industry and myself seem to think that VR will have its break through this time, if it did not already happen.

Though obvious problems, for example with performance (as the game basically needs to be rendered twice) can be handled with conventional approaches, it is again the question if it would not be better to implement the technology also on the gameplay level.

Especially in a third person game, being able to control the virtual camera with your own head, which before looked at the character only, immediately creates a completely different perception. The

Concluding, I think we have an exciting future of new generation interface controlled games ahead of us, but we need to carefully construct them around their technology’s advantages and try to avoid their disadvantages, to create truly amazing gaming experiences. «

LizzE on the Oculus Rift

Playing LizzE with the Leap Motion controller

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INTERVIEW McPeppergames

Daniela Mach McPeppergames

McPeppergames: A husband and wife two-man team*

*just like Imangi only without the huge success of Temple Run 13 ind13.com

INTERVIEW McPeppergames

Could you tell us your name/names and your role/s at McPeppergames?

I first want to let you know McPeppergames is an independent mobile games startup. The company was founded by me and my husband Chris Noeth. My name is Daniela Mach and before McPeppergames I’ve worked as an educator. So McPeppergames started as a husband and wife two-man team, just like Imangi only without the huge success of Temple Run. Ha ha!

My role in the company moved from development to marketing, PR, freelancer communication and office work. I’m still coding a little bit and doing some art but this is now mainly the part of my husband Chris who has studied Computer Science and has worked as a Lead Artist and Art Director in the game and comic industry for the last 15 years.

What are your game development career histories? How did you get into games development?

I started working on mobile apps for kids in 2012 after Chris told me to look into coding. I always had the plan to publish some books for children and as I started to make this plans become reality Chris pushed me in the direction to look into digital publishing and all the new possibilities the new mobile devices created. So my plan was to publish a children’s book digitally.

You have to know I started my career as an educator and wasn’t a tech person before 2012. After looking into the new possibilities using new technology to create something creative for kids I was intrigued and fascinated by the idea to reach so many people by using the App Store as a launch platform. While learning to code I switched from doing the children’s book to programming a puzzle app for kids named ‘Amazing Animal Puzzle’ because of all the great interactive features you can use. This app was released in May 2012 and the starting point for my game developer career.

In May 2013 Chris quit his job in the game industry and together we founded our own mobile game developer studio McPeppergames in April 2013.

And what does McPeppergames do now? Can you tell us about SheepOrama and how it differs from previous titles?

With my first apps aimed for kids McPeppergames started Publishing apps for kids gave us a small portfolio which made it easier for us as an independent studio to work on bigger game projects. We started developing a lot of prototypes, including a very ambitious tower defense game. The prototype of this game was really nice to play and had a lot of potential but with our kind of manpower at this time we realized it would take us at least 6 to 8 months to finish the project. That’s why we pulled the plug and started to work on other projects instead. It was to risky to spend so much time working on just one title.

Our first game which is aimed for kids and adults alike is ‘SheepOrama’, a flock-protecting puzzler where you have to draw a fence around sheep to save them from wolves. What sounds very easy will become an increasing strategic challenge from level to level. The game can be played in different modes, so it is appealing to casual players and hardcore puzzle fans alike. Our goal with this game was to use a very simple, easy to understand game play and combine it with beautiful graphics and addictive, challenging levels.

How does the dynamic of the team work, what is your creative process?

Chris has a total different background. He is one of those computer kids of the eighties who grew up with a Commodore C64 and an Amiga computer. He programmed his first game ‘The Thing’ for a Commodore C128 in 1986 which later was published in a Commodore magazine in 1989. His interests always included computers and entertainment art, so later he studied Computer Science and worked as a Comic Book Artist and Game Artist. As a Comic Book Artist he is known for his work on US-Comics like ‘Tales From The Crypt’ and the comic sequel to the classic Ray Harryhausen monster movie ‘It Came From Beneath The Sea’.

Because we are a wife and husband core team we are not the typical team a startup normally is built with and that’s why we have developed our own dynamics regarding game development.

In the beginning we worked as a two-man team with Chris working full-time and me part-time. We now are working with a lot of freelancers on new games, so we can optimize our workflow by concentrating on the important stuff first.

Because we are still a small studio all decisions are made by ourselves. So the typical process for developing our games starts with a brainstorming of game ideas.

While studying Computer Science Chris worked for a small game developer studio in Germany developing 2D and 3D art for PC games. After getting his diploma he worked as a Lead Artist for the German developer ‘Handygames’ on over thirty mobile games, including their successful ‘Townsmen’ series. He later became a partner at ‘Rough-Sea-Games’ working on a browsergame for the German company ‘Gameforge’. From there he moved to German developer ‘Flaregames’ where he was involved with the creation of a lot of mobile games. The most known title he has been involved with is the successful mobile game ‘Royal Revolt’.

We talk about ideas all the time and the things that stand out from the list are the ones we look into a little deeper. We compare the ideas to the actual market and if we agree this game idea has a chance to reach and excite enough people we develop it further which in most cases is the time we start working on a first prototype after doing a quick design document. When the prototype is finished we are doing tests to see if we’ve reached all the goals we wanted to reach and to see if the game is as much fun to play we thought it should be.

If a prototype get’s the green light we are starting to create the

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INTERVIEW McPeppergames

the final design document and then start developing final graphic assets and create a clean coded version of the game.

What is the ethos of the team, what sort of games to you strive to create?

Our first priority here at McPeppergames is to create great high quality mobile games you can enjoy with your family and friends. We started with games for kids and will continue creating games for both kids and adults alike, always keeping an eye on a great game experience and quality.

We are listening to feedback from our players. With ‘SheepOrama’ for example we first released a version where the player couldn’t move from a solved puzzle directly to the next one.

He had to choose from the level menu which level he wanted to play first. We thought this would give players the chance to decide to move to higher levels more quickly, but in the end it was more important for the majority of players to move directly to the next lower levels of the same category and after realizing this we instantly did an update where players can do this.

before. People just love their apps and especially games. What makes mobile games so exciting is you can play them everywhere, from waiting of the bus, traveling with the train, in bed or while using the toilet. With players being online all the time people are able to buy games from wherever they are which also is an important point for mobile development.

As a business person you have to think about what mobile really means. What does it mean? It means you can access everything every time everywhere! And that means you have people using their mobile devices to pay for stuff. So in the end it means you have people, playing your games on their new wallets. T his is something we didn’t have some years ago and it’s very exciting for developers. You don’t need a publisher anymore and everyone who likes your game can buy it instantly from wherever he is. That’s what makes mobile a trend which will continue into the far future I think.

We just have finished update 2.0 for ‘SheepOrama’ where we’ve included a lot of new features and suggestions from the people playing so far. And it really is a much better game now. Always listen to players! This really helps a lot pushing the quality up.

Regarding game genres we are open for everything. Of course we both have our favorite game genres but we try to keep an open mind, so we can develop the games nearly everyone loves to play. We also try to stay away from doing something the big companies already have done. Staying away from big publisher titles is important for independent studios I think, because the big names have a lot of financial power to push their games to the top.

The power small studios have instead is to develop innovative fun to play games. You can’t ‘fight’ the big names out there. You will always loose. This is no David against Goliath... it’s more like a sheep trying to fight a lion. We always try to add something new and different to our games. We care about good usability, great graphics and gameplay. We don’t want to just copy existing games, instead we are looking for niches to fill and creating games which are easy to understand and fun to play.

You build games for mobile, is this a trend in development that you see continuing into the future?

I can’t look into the future and the tech biz is changing every day, but regarding mobile games I think we can be sure this is a trend which will reach it’s peak in the next two to three years. What comes next? I don’t know. But mobile games are happening now and they will not disappear in the years to come. With HTML 5 everyone was sure mobile apps will disappear very fast. Instead we now have more apps like ever

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“Publishing apps for kids gave us a small portfolio which made it easier for us as an independent studio to work on bigger game projects...”

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INTERVIEW McPeppergames

What advice would you give to aspiring games makers, in Europe and Germany?

I only can talk about mobile games. When starting with mobile app development you should be aware there is no ‘Gold rush’ in mobile. I know I just talked about people using their wallets to play and we all have heard the insane success stories of games, like ‘Angry Birds’ or the German game ‘Tiny Wings’ from developer Andreas Illiger. This kind of success is very rare. It is still possible, as ‘Flappy Bird’ has proven, but when looking into this kind of success story you can see this success was based on 99% luck.

‘Flappy Bird’ became successful because a very well known video blogger talked about the game online. ‘Tiny Wings’ only because Toucharcade talked about it. You can’t influence this kind of success. Those stories are the reason there is a flood of new developers just looking to make a quick buck and the App Stores are swamped with bad games or clones of easy to create ones, like we can see with all the ‘2048’ clones right now. Everybody and his grandma are trying to hit the jackpot by creating apps today.

This kind of hobby developers don’t look at the big picture, which is to see app development as a business like every other business.

You should only put your best products in the store and aiming for a longtime success. Otherwise it is more likely to win the lottery. So if your goal is to make bad games and make big money with them better buy a lottery ticked instead.

games for the whole family, like some quiz- and brain-twister games. I can’t get into details yet, but this kind of games is what we will do next. Our new game is named “Kitty Day” and it should be out when this interview gets published.

What do you see as the future of development for your studio?

Our main goal, besides creating high-quality games, is to make McPeppergames a worldwide known name, respected for it’s highquality and fun to play mobile games for both kids and adults alike.

To reach this goal we are very interested in working and collaborating with people like ourselves, who love games and who want to create quality games.

McPeppergames just made it’s first baby steps as an independent developer and now it’s time to start walking, making some first jumps and hopefully fly as a well known name someday. « Everyone who is interested in looking at our games, working with us, or doing some biz together can contact us via our website www.McPeppergames.com

If you don’t have any experience with creating games at all and you want to work in games you should consider doing an internship at a game developer studio first. This is the fastest way to learn about all the things that are important for creating a game from start to finish. BTW: McPeppergames just has started to work with interns. It really is a great experience for both the interns and us.

What is coming in the future from McPeppergames?

That you can discuss.

We have more ideas for games than we ever could finish in our lifetimes. That’s the fun part, but also the frustrating part of this job. You always have to look which of those game-ideas are the ones who will appeal to the most players and you have to think about monetizing the games in ways which aren’t offending but will bring in enough money to keep your company alive.

One wrong decision can be the end for your company if you are independent and don’t have an investor.

With our next games we want to get away from creating games for kids. The time for puzzle apps in the app stores is over. Instead we started working on

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INTERVIEW McPeppergames

The Retro Computer Museum in Leicestershire, UK The Retro Computer Museum is a registered charity dedicated to the benefit of the public for the preservation, display and public experience of computer and console systems from the 1960's onwards. Our charity registration no. is 1146912.

Our main focus is on systems that were in use in the home and schools rather than big computer systems and mainframes of early computer development. We have systems ranging from the early Pong consoles through to the Sega and Nintendo console wars and the home computers of the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64s and Amigas.

Our aim is to provide Retro Gaming and Computing events. We also offer educational visit / tours for Year 6 students upwards - these visits comprise of a talk about the history and the massive rise and fall of home computing mixed in with hands on use of the very early 8 bit systems and eventually up to the ‘newer’ 32 bit systems.

We can tailor these visits to suit the individual needs of your school - these can be held at your school or at our HQ in Leicester - please do get in touch with your exact requirements.

We also offer Retro Gaming Birthday Parties for any age group - young or old!

The Retro Computer Museum has held many Retro Gaming events of its own to date, including partnership events with Snibston Discovery Museum.

The Museum has also made appearances at the 2010 Vintage Computer Festival at Bletchley Park, at Abbey Pumping Station Hobbies and Pastimes Day, at BBC Radio Leicester for the Sparks Childrens Charity, at the 2010 EuroCon event with a line up of British Computers, at Revival 2013 hosting part of the gaming area, at the Silicon Dreams event hosting a small part of the gaming area and more recently at the fantastic SuperByte Festival in Manchester where we hosted the gaming area.

The Retro Computer Museum relies mainly on donations from its members and visitors. We have had over 200 systems donated as part of our collection, along with numerous books, software titles, peripherals, magazines and brochures etc.

We appreciate any and all donations, no matter how small. We also accept broken machines and peripherals as these can be used to repair existing systems.

Please contact us if you feel you have something we may be interested in.

Retro Computer Museum

Unit S1, Troon Way Business Centre, Humberstone Lane, Leicester LE4 9HA T: 07519 816 283 E: info@retrocomputermuseum.co.uk 18 ind13.com

INTERVIEW McPeppergames

What are the benefits of being an indie and what are the draw backs?

Being an indie is very rewarding because you can do projects you decided to do and not because someone else is telling you to work on his game ideas. That’s what independent means and what makes it so exciting for ourselves. And there are other factors, like you have to relocate with your family a lot of times to work in games.

One example from ourselves: Chris had to commute to his last job for three total days a week which meant he wasn’t able to see his family for three complete days every week. Because he worked for a new startup and we just moved in a new home we decided this is what makes sense, before moving with the whole family again and see the new startup not reach it’s goals. So we thought we would do this for about a year and then we all move to the city the company was. ut as things turned out Chris had to commute for 2 years and there wasn’t a time in the end where we all could move safely to the new city. What really was the worst part of this: Our kids couldn’t see his father during that time.

It really was a huge commitment from Chris to the company he has worked for. Of course he has worked on a lot of cool mobile games during that time, which was great experience for him, but all those games were not based on his ideas and a lot of this games never got published which had nothing to do with his work but instead of wrong management decisions or not thoughtthrough gameplay experience for players.

Chris has spend months working on titles which got cancelled. And that’s something he really got angry about in

the end. Investing time and energy in projects which never see the light of day and all under this circumstances can be depressing somehow.

The time he has worked apart from the family is something we all don’t miss.

this dream become real. It isn’t easy but doing the things you love outweighs all the negative things coming with it.

You can be your own boss, but it’s a lot of work. And you don’t now it you will succeed but that shouldn’t stop you from trying. Otherwise you never will know.

Regarding creativity and control nothing outdoes being an indie. But being an indie also means to be responsible for success and every aspect of creating the games. You can’t lay back for a second and have to work twice as hard compared to working as an employee for another company.

With and independent studio you also have to make the right decisions because you don’t have huge amounts of money from investors and you can’t say: “Hey, if these first three games are flops we can still work on the next five titles to create a hit.”. Your games have to be successful from day one.

You not only have to think about creating the games, but you also have things to think about like insurance, health care, tax and more. And as a small team you also have to do the market research and all the things you don’t have to think about when working for someone else.

The day only has 24 hours, and to be honest, most times this is not enough.

Don’t dream about being an indie, instead be realistic and start working to make

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FEATURE PAC-MAN™ and the Ghostly Adventures 2

Harry Cole Co-Founder and Publisher of IND13, who runs his own PR agency specializing in the gaming sector.

PAC-MAN is back... and this time he has brought his friends...

Pac-Man and his friends return to defend Pacopolis with new worlds, new characters and new power-ups.

For those of us of a certain age Pac-Man will always have a warm, fuzzy and nostalgic place in our gaming hearts. From the the sheer amount of hours that were spent pouring our ten pence pieces into arcade machines, to spending every waking hour wanting to play it on the old Atari (being cruelly made to stop playing to do boring things like homework and to go to bed). It was the game that really defined a generation. Yes, we also had Space Invaders to play but you could easily argue that Pac-Man was the worlds first true gaming character.

And despite those heady days of the early eighties being a long time ago now, Pac-Man has never really left us. There have been various ports of the original game on various devices over the years, and his longetivity has spanned generations due to the immense playability factor.

Even today children, who have been bought up in a disposable gaming era, still like the pill shaped yellow guy and have taken a lot of pleasure in playing the orginal games. Then recently came the animated series, “Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures” which started to move Pac-Man further back into the big league again.

Now things have been going so well that Bandai Namco Games UK have announced that Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures 2 is going to be released this year on the Xbox, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Will U, and the 3DS. Basically, Pac-Man is back, and this time he has brought his friends with him.

As in the animated series, it is set in Pacopolis, with the main characters being Pac (obviously), Spiral and Cylindria as they defend PacWorld from the ghoulish army of Lord Betrayus.

You will be able to explore the lands of PacWorld far beyond the bustling streets of Pacopolis and the Netherworld through the depths of the ocean floor and into space.

Although this is a more 3D adverture game than the orginal (times have changed...) in lots of ways it is still the same. Just updated for 2014. You still have to defeat the havoc-causing ghosts, and in order to do that Pac will need to do what he does best… EAT! Chomping down on the various Power Berries will give Pac a much needed boost to fight back against his enemies, although now there are many types of Power Berries from the Tree of Life.

Pac will be able to transform into different versions of himself, such as Fire Pac and Ice Pac and even an epic and gigantic PacZilla. You will also be able to pilot some of the vehicles seen in the show including the Lemon Rocket and Pacerchini. To add a little bit more to the mix though, you will also be able to take control of Cylindria and Spiral in special fast-paced on-rails levels.

Right, so has that got you sutibly excited? Yep, thought so, because it had the very same effect on us, which is why we managed to catch-up with Lee Kirton, who is the Director of Marketing & PR for Bandai Namco Games, for an exclusive interview.

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FEATURE PAC-MAN™ and the Ghostly Adventures 2

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FEATURE PAC-MAN™ and the Ghostly Adventures 2

Can you tell our readers about the latest Pac Man games and what they bring to the table?

We are continuously bringing new PAC-MAN experiences to many different consoles, iOS/Android etc and PAC-MAN and the Ghostly Adventures is a brand new series which separates itself from the classic grid based ‘original PAC-MAN’ and focuses on a cool rebirth for a new generation of kids and parents who have the nostalgia for the character.

The game was released on 3DS, WiiU, PS3 and Xbox 360 at the beginning of the year following the launch of the TV series, toys and other merchandise. We have PAC-MAN and the Ghostly Adventures 2 coming later in the year to continue this growth. It’s a fun platform adventure that follows the TV series, the characters and includes fantastic multiplayer action.

What’s the “Pac is Back” campaign all about, there was some real “stand-out” creative ideas executed?

“PAC IS BACK” is generally just making a statement to those that have grown up with PAC-MAN since 1980. Ultimately to kids he’s not ‘back’ as they may have just been introduced to him.

The cool thing is that PAC-MAN has a 94% brand awareness rate worldwide and has won many Guinness World Records due to his success. He is the world’s most popular character, he is an icon and in the 80’s he pretty much dominated that era.

We worked on a lot of creative execution that followed the TV series and the fun, colourful and good natured theme of the show.

PAC-MAN and his friends are a team, it’s all about friendship, working together and battling evil and we wanted to create a fun campaign that touched on the nostalgia of where PAC-MAN came from,

Lee Kirton, Director of Marketing & PR for Bandai Namco Games

the fun he’s had over the last 34 years, and also showcase some of the brilliant things that general fans have done around the character.

We put together a very fun PR and marketing campaign to introduce PAC-MAN to a younger generation, we created a dance troupe who flash mobbed to ‘Do the Pac-Man’ around the UK, hosted world record stunts in conjunction with Channel 5’s The Gadget Show, hijacked SEGA’s building in Chiswick and projected PAC-MAN late at night, hosted fun events and generally created some brilliant features in national press.

What’s it like to be working with a piece of gaming history?

Personally I am very proud to be working with PAC-MAN. I was given trust by some of PAC-MAN’s closest creators and I feel proud to be associated with history as well as be part of creating history with world record stunts and stand out campaigns with a brilliant team in the UK. It’s epic.

What are your memories of playing Pac Man? When and where did you first play it?

I played PAC-MAN for the first time in a video store near where I lived. I was born in 1977, so played it for the first time very young and I was hooked… I am pretty good and some of the things I’ve learnt over the years are quite important. The A-I of Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde are very different

FEATURE PAC-MAN™ and the Ghostly Adventures 2

and the way they move and their strategy needs to be learnt. Did you know Clyde (orange one) is a bit stupid?

What’s coming up in the future for the Pac Man series?

PAC-MAN and the Ghostly Adventures will continue and it’s growing as a separate license alongside the ‘classic PAC’ which we still work with. There is a lots of fun stuff to come and we are going to have some fun growing this funny and brilliant animation, range of toys and games. You will see a lot more in the future around this.

Will Namco be bringing back any of their other gaming legends?

We have many legends and IP which we continue to work on.

PAC-MAN is our main character and mascot for our company, however we have many classic Namco licenses such as ‘Ace Combat’, ‘Tekken’, Soul Calibur’, Ridge Racer’ etc and we continue to work on all of our IP and introduce something different.

Can we borrow the Pac Man suit?

You can, but it smells a bit. « Pac Man and the Ghostly Adventures 2 is out in October

Channel 5’s The Gadget Show, and the Pac-Man projection on Sega’s offices.

“PAC-MAN and the Ghostly Adventures’ has seen a strong launch in the UK and we are pleased to bring the sequel to the new generation of kids and deliver a game that’s incredibly fun to play for all the family...”

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FEATURE Games of Glory

Anders “Asseraj” Larsson Anders is a entrepreneur with 15 years of experience from starting and managing companies. At Lightbulb Crew, he keeps the vision in constant focus, and deals with all the stuff that others don’t do.

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FEATURE Games of Glory

The reason that we started the studio was that it was felt there were still so many ways to improve the game experience, despite there being so many great games out there. I found Sacha, my co-founder, as I was looking for someone who shared the same ideas.

aspects into the core game play. Games of Glory is exactly like that: a game with core game play that emphasizes skill, but where the focus on clubs and a persistent universe gives lots of opportunity for meaningful social interactions that become key to the experience of the game.

Johan, our CTO, and Sacha, had already worked together in Sweden and started talking in 1997 about starting a video game company. Better late than never!

Games of Glory essentially is a MOBAcrossover set in a persistent science-fiction universe, which we give the players the opportunity to participate in, and create their own environment as well.

Being located a few hours away by flight is mostly problematic from a communications perspective. However it just means it is even more important to communicate well. Fortunately there are now lots of different software that support this, from Skype to Slack to for communication to bug-reporting and sprint-planning tools.

On the positive side, it has forced us to be even more organized in communicating around bugs, sprint stories etc. We have also made sure that we meet up physically from time to time. I personally spend lots of time on the phone with Sweden, and go there regularly as well.

The reason for us starting this is that we want to make games for the mid-core gamers, that also brings in various social

E-sport as an integral part of the game.

We call it a MOBA-crossover because it is a true mix of genres: controls à la Hack & Slash with different exchangeable weapons à la shooters in the arena setting with unique Clones à la MOBAs. And this in a persistent social world à la MMOs. The Games of Glory are the gladiator games of the galactic empire the Synarchy, ruled by the seemingly all-powerful Synarch.

Through the matches in the arena power and influence are gained by the winners, and the factions they support. You come to the arena to gain fame and fortune as a controller of Clones.

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Players can choose to support a faction or not, and can join and create clubs and take on different roles like star player, coach etc.

Witb the artwork we are really proud ourselves of where we have ended up, and truth be told it was an iterative process.

We started out wanting to work with more realistic images (think Mass-effect) as we wanted to create stories that feel real.

In the end the need to identify a Clone in a split second in the arena made us gravitate towards more exaggerated shapes of western comics. Now we find ourselves somewhere in between, and it is a spot we really like!

Central of what we do as developers is our community of players. I am personally as active as I can in our forums to discuss reasons behind design decisions and learn as much as possible from people active in our friends and family Alpha.

We aim to gradually expand the Alpha as we become closer to the full game implementation.

We aim to move into a closed beta stage towards the end of the summer. As to an open beta time-line it is really up to when we and the community feel we are ready.

Right now we want to have as many people as possible participate in our forums, and gradually move them into the Alpha.

There are benefits and drawbacks of being an indie developer and they are really two sides of the same coin: 1) the lack of funding forces us to expose our project quicker to the community much quicker than a project in a large company.

That is risky as we still have an ample supply of bugs and unfinished features, but great as we get feedback on the core game-play that we have developed.

We have the liberty to set our own goals which makes us able to work in a very collaborative way. Most aspects of the game have been developed based on feedback from the whole team. We think this is a huge asset, but at the same time we have to create everything from scratch.

However, first and foremost is that we want to be able to create great and rewarding game experiences. With Games of Glory we want to create a game that lives for a long time, and lets the community discover and shape the stories of the Synarchy. We are looking forward to seeing how the game world will develop…

That is incredibly exciting! «

“We have the liberty to set our own goals which makes us able to work in a very collaborative way. Most aspects of the game have been developed based on feedback from the whole team...”

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REVIEW Games of Glory

Gary Mee Gary, amongst other things, is a avid gamer, and is never happier then when tyring out a new game from an indie studio...

Games of Glory review Games of Glory is a MOBA-crossover, inspired by different video game genres. It borrows its fundamentals from MOBAs and integrates the faster action controls and the flexibility in weapons choice of shooters. The persistent universe and social aspects are inspired by MMOs, and the opportunities for clone customization are drawn from hack & slash games.

It takes place in a science-fiction universe, full of different species, planets and factions, with the player taking the role of a Controller of Clones, battling for the influence of his political faction or club. Based on the wins or losses in the arena, the universe will evolve and the balance of power will change The game is changing the established rhythm of MOBAs as well as some of the basic notions of game play. Innovations like the elimination of auto-attacks with weapons, new types of mechanics like “white damage”, faster movement, and more put the player in the midst of a frenetic battle environment.

Carry, Scout, Assassin, Support. Each team elects a captain who suggests tactics in real time, and organises the team around the different objectives in the game. During each match, each player has the choice of which weapons to choose and how they will evolve. Each Clone has numerous exchangeable pieces of equipment which change its appearance, so the player can create a unique style. With different types of uniforms, team specific skins, and many other alternatives the player can create his own original Clone.

Through their careers, players who play well and behave in a positive manner gain fame and privileges as well as a real influence on the future of the game. Games of Glory wants to develop the positive social aspects of team play to create a truly rewarding game experience. «

Games of Glory is above all a game to be played in teams, built on collaboration between players. Each team has Clones that complement each other with their skills. Clones have similar functions to those in classes traditional in existing MOBAs: Tank,

PLAY-ABILITY

91%

ART/GRAPHICS

92%

MUSIC/SOUND

89%

91

%

OVERALL SCORE

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FEATURE Games of Glory

R

500 MILLION PLAYS WITHIN 3 YEARS WE PUT SOME OF THIS SUCCESS DOWN TO OUR

MINIWORLDGAMES IS A

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GAMES STUDIO 29 ind13.com

POWERED BY

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REGIONAL REPORT Argentina

Lee Smith Lee Smith is a lifelong fan of Bubble Bobble (amongst other games), and the Creative Director of IND13.

Life inside an Argentinian studio...

A regional look into life in a games studio in Buenos Aires

Although it seems like the majority of games that we play either emerge from the US and the UK, that is very far from the truth. Rovio, for instance, are from Sweden, and the Lightbulb Crew (featured on page xxx) are based in France. Ok that is still European, so what about games from South America? Can’t think of any? Well maybe that is about to change.

people as you can and learn from them.”

Nastycloud, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, are out to show that their part of the world are actively making the games that we want to play.

“The benefit is that you’re free to do want you want, nobody is asking you to do something but yourself.

You own your decisions and actions. The drawback is usually that is hard to self-fund. We’re trying to get contracting work to sustain our own work, but it’s hard.”

When we spoke to Guido Villaverde from Nastycloud about life in a studio in South America, he said that “South America is not easy, so be prepared to fight and be disappointed.”

However, “the good part is that there is still a lot to do down here. There is a lot of people here that is consuming north-based culture and that will feel connected to something more local.” he added.

It’s obvious that there are different difficulties faced but some things are the same: “work hard to be good at what you do. Study a lot and compare yourself to that guy/team that is making what you want to make. Also get in touch with as many

And thats the point I suppose really. No matter where in the world you are based in this global age, the essentials are universal. The effort is the same, the tools are the same, and so are the pros and cons of being an indie developer.

Nastycloud are not a big studio, with their team consisting of just five core members. Each working together to make the games that they love, and hope that you will love too.

They have just two programmers, Juan Figueroa (Pravus) and Francisco Tufró, one artist in Juan Novelletto, Rodrigo Caro is their musician and Guido Villaverde is the actual game designer.

The studio was started in the normal way, in the sense that some people came together with a love

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"We believe that to make a living in games you don’t have to sell your soul to what business analysts say is the next big thing in gaming, we’d rather stay true to ourselves and make experiences that we believe in..."

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of games and a desire to get their ideas made. This was Juan Novelletto and Guido Villaverde while they were studying game art and game design respectively.

being shared and having regular games jams to come up with ideas and to just have fun really...

They didn’t have much then apart from some ideas and concepts about videogames which they made into a website, but that was soon to change when back in 2011 they released their first game called “Unlucky Gnome”.

A vertical scroll game, which consists of beating waves of enemies using a stormy cloud and its thunders which constantly followed the main character (an Unlucky Gnome!). The game had a good impact and made it onto www.indiegames.com (IND13 wasn’t around then).

The following year at the Argentina Squarenix American Contest they presented a sequel of the game called “Nubarrón: the adventure of an Unlucky Gnome”, which consisted of a platform game with 21 levels and a final boss.

After that they started to get more noticed, “our studio started to have a name in the local game industry. We grew up to five members, and started to make our living working for other companies, but always focusing on our own IPs” Guido says.

“And after working on a few prototypes, we are finally in the process of going full time on our projects, and shiping our games to PlayStation.”

But what is the aim for Nastycloud? Is it simply to jump on the gaming gravy train and make as much money as possible before the bubble bursts? Not that most games studios make that much money you understand. You do get the occasional flukey hit such as Flappy Bird but the majority are holding down other jobs to pay the bills whilst attempting to keep their studios afloat. For Nastycloud, it is more than that as their “goal is to create games that become meaningful experiences for our players. This may sound recurrent, but we mostly try to make those games we would love to play and still don’t exist.”

They even go as far to say that games are another “form of human culture, and are not only mere entertainment. We are part of a generation that grew up with games, and we all have an artistic and cultural background in our team, so making games is, for us, a natural way to express ourselves.”

Whilst almost sounding idealistic it is actually quite refreshing to hear, and actually not that uncommon in the indie games industry. There seems to be less of the fast-buck mentality as the people striving to work in it are driven by passion not riches. “We believe that to make a living in games you don’t have to sell your soul to what business analysts say is the next big thing in gaming, we’d rather stay true to ourselves and make experiences that we believe in.”

Their process of developing the games is similar too, with ideas

“We are still a very young company, and we haven’t settled on a particular creative process. The games we are developing right now came from ideas and prototypes made by different members in the team. Based on those prototypes we start brainstorming and prototyping new ideas. GDDs are shared documents, and every member makes contributions, comments and corrections. We also arrange game jams for a particular game, and dedicate three or four days in a row to come up with concise pieces of functionality (levels, mechanics, etc.)...”

“An important part of our process is to improve our abilities as developers and artists, so we have two days a week for knowledge transfer, investigation and experimentation. And this takes a big part in our creative process, given that we are not only improving as professionals we are also increasing our intellectual resources.

Creativity is about how you combine things you know in novel ways, the more you know the more you can imagine. Besides this we’re advocates for agile methodologies. We work in an iterative and incremental way.”

However they are unusual in the indie game world as they don’t develop for the mobile market as such. Not because they don’t believe in it, but because “the kind of games that move us are usually not mobile. We are in an era where things are moving faster than we can predict. Facebook games were thought to be the next big thing and they proved not to be. Mobile, on the other hand, is here to stay, but not necessarily in the same way we see and use it today. What you can be really sure is that as a developer you need to be at the top of the wave, because things move fast and if you can’t adapt you’ll be left behind.”

They are currently hard at work, and keeping themselves extremely busy, working on three new prototypes. That sounds like a lot of plates to spin for just a five man team, but Guildo assures us that they are “focusing on Nubarron, the adventures of an unlucky gnome... it’s a puzzle-platformer game based on a novel mechanic that has the player interacting with a stormy cloud that throws lightnings on the character. We’re revamping the game, since there was a previous incarnation of it, created using Construct 2, but it had many flaws and we thought it would be great to apply all the new team’s expertise and create a new redefined experience.

This new incarnation of Nubarron is going to be way more deep and interesting, we are exploring new paths with the cloud mechanic, and also focusing more on a more profound story.

We want it to be a challenging game in which you have to be patient and precise. Its going to have a powerful and polished aesthetic with some retro components tuned up by using current techniques.” « To find out more about Nastycloud and their games, go to www.nastycloud.com

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REGIONAL REPORT Argentina

Making Work Play

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FEATURE Game Piracy

Lee Smith Lee Smith is a lifelong fan of Bubble Bobble (amongst other games), and the Creative Director of IND13.

The problem is not the problem..

The problem is your attitude about the problem...

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FEATURE Game Piracy

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FEATURE Game Piracy

“It is piracy, not overt online music stores, which is our main competitor” Steve Jobs once claimed when talking about Apple’s iTunes market. Music piracy was the hot topic of conversation for many a year, in the days before online streaming services such as Spotify arguably made it pointless to torrent your favourite Metallica albums.

Film piracy, also, has long been a thorn in the side of the rich Hollywood moguls. From the days of watching a barely visable and shakey cinema copy of ET on VHS (or Betamax), to now when you can download any movie that you want in less time than it takes to pop to the shops to get the popcorn, tub of Ben & Jerry’s and family sized bottle of Diet Cola, before settling down to yet another Hollywood remake/cash-in/Marvel comic blockbuster.

Books? Yep, it is also not too difficult to download the tomes of JK Rowling for you to upload to your tablet or Kindle, and enjoy reading about the wizarding advertures of young Harry and co while relaxing on a Mediterranean beach burning your skin to a crispy tinder in an effort to sex yourself up.

So essentially, in most industries, those pesky pirates are riding the waves of the digital seas and sharing the hard work of others to those who choose not to pay for the privilege.

There have been various attempts to curb the internet’s version of Cap’n Jack and his motley crew, some more successful than others, but piracy has never been truly eliminated and, I suspect, it never will be. I, myself, have been prone to bouts of piracy. By that I don’t mean that on occasion I dress up in big boots, wig, silly hat, and a stick on beard whist waving a plastic cutlass shouting choice phrases such as “Avast! She be bilged on her anchor...”.

From recording, onto cassette the indie top 20 countdown from the radio on a Sunday afternoon, to torrenting old albums that I used to own but I have long since lost (with the excuse that I didn’t want to pay for them twice, and as I had bought it once, it wasn’t really piracy was it?). Hell, I have even downloaded the odd film from time to time.

57 percent of UK game developers stated that, yes piracy is a problem for their business.

It’s easy, and I don’t get to go to the cinema as much as I like.

Again, I do have an excuse for this, although it might not be a

terribly good one. The excuse being that the films that I have downloaded are generally films that I would never have paid to see at the cinema or would have bought on DVD, so therefore the film makers are not actually losing out on any money really. I know, as excuses go it is a pretty flimsy one.

Just to clarify, though, so as to exonerate myself ever so slighty, I do enjoy family trips to the cinema to watch whatever ingenious Pixar movie happens to be out at the time. Normally in the VIP seats, so that I can pay that little extra and attempt to rid myself of guilt (and, of course, for that little extra comfort and leg room that it affords...). I also pay for a lot of TV channels, including film channels, which I generally don’t watch.

I also buy boxsets of films that I have seen and love, so that I can enjoy them at my leisure, even though I could just as easily download them for free.

See, things that I really want to watch or see I will quite happily pay for, as we all should. After all a lot of time, creativity, money, effort and, erm, marketing budgets have gone into getting these ‘products’ to you, so the shakermakers should of course be rewarded and reimbursed, at least.

I have Spotify Premium; I have paid thousands into the pockets of bands through going to gigs; I have bought hundreds upon hundreds of albums in my time. I see those lists of the top 100 albums that you should have owned etc and quite often I have owned the majority of them.

And crucially, to get to the crux of this article, I have never pirated a game. Ever. Not one.

Why? Well, I suppose the first reason is that it has always been more difficult to really. Not for any moral reason. Unlike downloading a few Prodigy remix tracks, there are all sorts of technical aspects that you have to face if you want to download a game for your XBox or Playstation.

Secondly, I don’t own a PC, I have a Mac, and even game pirates have, historically, ignored the Mac game market. Ok, you can still get the odd cracked copy of Civilization, but it is quicker and easier to just pay the few quid and buy it. Especially with Steam making life so much easier.

But then there is that young upstart of the gaming world, l’enfant terrible, the mobile gaming market...

You see, especially with Android devices, it is just so easy to download a game and install it on your phone or tablet. There are many sites and apps available from which to download the .apk files, with 4Shared being one of the most prominent, along with the old traditional torrent sites of course. This is despite the fact that so many of them are free anyway? Or, if not free exactly (which is a rather loose term in the free-to-play age) then only

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FEATURE Game Piracy

Devoid Studios Have you personally been affected by game piracy?

Not yet. But I hope when our game hits the web pirates will take notice and spread it around like wild fire. On second thought it will be DRM free so players will do that too I guess :)

income because it was pirated we still ‘win’. If the players like the game they will support us if not we will have less hate mail to deal with.

On what platforms is piracy worst? Mobile (iOS, Android) or PCs? I suppose PC’s still have the monopoly on that front. However, seeing how the mobile market is expanding I wouldn’t be surprised if Android takes the lead soon, iOS is probably a bit less prone to piracy but not by much from what I heard.

Do you think major studios can do more to help the indies in relation to piracy?

I think that the studios should stop wasting money on piracy prevention. Piracy cannot be stopped or even deterred.

Is it possible to stamp it out, or is it something that you just have to live with?

Best way to deal with the issue of loosing potential income from digital media, in my opinion, for big and small companies is to embrace the times we live in and come up with better (different?) distribution methods. Our team chose to go DRM free because if our product reaches the target audience and we loose potential

Do you think pirates are aware that when they steal from small companies (as opposed to majors) they are hurting the indie industry?

I’m certain they do. It’s not easy being an indie but then again we are also a lot more flexible. Perhaps the best way for us ‘survive’ this plague is to evolve.

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FEATURE Game Piracy

costing the price of a pint of beer.

According to a survey of game developers in the UK by Tiga, the trade association representing the UK’s games industry, 57 percent stated that, yes piracy is a problem for their business. However, and this is the interesting bit, only 10 percent of the developers stated that stricter enforcement against piracy was the best option in dealing with the problem, while 87 percent stated that creating new business models was the best option.

Some of the stats that came out of this survey, which is from last year, are interesting, such as 73% disagreeing with people who are sharing or downloading games having their internet connection bottlenecked and/or completely cut off for repeat offenders. With 40% of Tiga’s members stating that it is education that is key, that you more you reach out to the players to inform them that what they are doing is hurting the games business, the less likely they are to download.

I honestly don’t really believe that to be true, although it is a nice idea, as unfortunately most people have a siloed approach to life.

Just as we imagine that most in the music business are multimillionaire rockstars flying around the world snorting the finest white lines off the chests of a collection of supermodels, on their private jet piloted by Bruce Dickinson, and every actor or actress lives the Brangelina lifestyle of Hollywood royalty, with a village of adopted children and their nannies skipping joyfully around them, then we do, too, imagine that all game developers live a cherished life too.

They all work in large colourful buildings full of people going from the massage room to the M&Ms palour on their patented hover boards, with Arcade Fire livening up the entertainment every evening in the private bar, and a life where ideas are discussed, buttons are pressed, and a game gets produced almost by the power of thought (and fast processors).

Of course, the truth is far from that. Just as most musicians are struggling to be able to afford their copy of NME each week, and most actors are just one EastEnders extra’s appearance away from bankruptcy, most game developers, artists and designers are struggling financially. Ok so it might not exactly be the life of

McPepper Games Until a few weeks ago we didn’t have any problems with piracy.

Unfortunately this has changed with the release of our new game “SheepOrama”. The game is for players of all ages and we did send out some promo codes in advance before the official release and those codes then somehow were used to spread a free downloadable version of the game.

Analytics have shown the game is downloaded in the thousands in china without any payment.

I don’t know if major studios can do more to help the indies in relation to piracy. This is a problem the major studios have to deal with and indies have to deal with. I can’t think off anything the major studios could help indies with. We are developing for iOS and Android, so maybe there are options for PC games.

Piracy is a problem we have encountered in a lot of mediums for many years and it’s something you can’t stop. So you have to deal with it.

As a developer you should think about how you

are monetizing your games because paid iOS or Android games which get stolen by pirates can really mean your end. Some months ago you were on the safe side by using in-app purchases in your games. But I think this is something which already can be manipulated also. Maybe ads in games are the answer.

A major studio maybe can deal with piracy somehow, but piracy often means the end for indies. The big problem with piracy is that the people who are downloading the stolen products are not aware they are hurting the indie studios and developers with their actions.

Pirates and downloaders should be aware they will help destroying innovative indie game studios with their actions. Indie developers will stop working on innovative games because of the piracy risks. Is it really to much to pay 99 cent for a cool new indie iOS or Android game? One day we all will wake up, go to the app store and can only choose between “Clash Of Clans” and “Temple Run”. Is this what pirates want? Wake up pirates... you are destroying a good thing here.

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FEATURE Game Piracy

Oliver, but the Artful Dodgers of this world are not helping them either. Quite often they have a ‘day job’ to pay the bills while they work on their games in the evenings or at the weekends, which incidently is what we at IND13 do with our magazine and website.

If they do manage to get a studio together and put a few games out, there really isn’t much money made as the market is somewhat over saturated at the moment with sub-standard, ‘quick buck’ clones of other games. You know, those one’s that normally have ‘flappy’ in the title.

Then, of course, there are the pirates and the growing reluctance to pay for games. So a new way to put games out is needed, new business models needed to be designed, just so that we can keep the small indie studios from going under and depriving us of original game ideas.

“UK developers are taking the initiative to deal with the issue of piracy and are looking for new ways of delivering content and communicating directly with their consumers.”

This is where the games market has moved quicker to curb piracy than either the music or film industries did. Both those industries immediately took the hardline on pirates, issuing lawsuits and shutting down websites. Taking people to court seemed to be the only method they knew, not evolution of their services and delivery models. Even Metallica, the anti-establiment metal/garage band, took Napster to court in the year 2000 seeking a minimum of $10 million in damages.

At first the industries refused to move with the digital age and pursue new ways to share their wares, which they eventually did first with iTunes, and then with streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify for music and the likes of NetFlix for films.

Dr Richard Wilson, the Chief Executive of Tiga, said that “many games businesses continue to find that the most effective response to the problem of piracy is to adopt new business models, such as subscription based services and free-to-play games.”

The game industry, though, is full of ‘out of the box’ thinkers and, by it’s very nature, is always evolving. And it had to, as it isn’t only the small companies or games that get hit.

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FEATURE Game Piracy

The makers of Football Manager, SI Games, reported that there most recent version for Android devices was being pirated 10 times for every legal sale. According to stats on the Google Play store, the game has been purchased between 100,000 and 500,000 times.

That’s at least 1,000,000 illegal copies being played, which is staggering (more importantly, due to the addictive nature of the game, that is a hell of a lot of broken relationships too...).

So we have now had a huge shift away from the paid titles, and more towards to the free-to-play model. Game companies are now attempting to make their money from in-app purchases instead, as they attempt to curb the effects of piracy and have a profitable business instead of having to disband their studio and go back to a corporate 9-5 lifestyle.

The ‘freemium’ games are extremely popular with titles such as MMO World of Tanks earning million dollar revenues per month, and the makers of games such as Candy Crush and Farm Heroes letting people play for free, quite happily, knowing that even if half

the players purchased extras and upgrades through the game, then they will have earned a profit far greater than having charged a few pound for the game originally.

King.com, who are the *ahem* kings of this model, actually had three of the top ten grossing games on all major platforms earlier this year. Those platforms being the Apple App Store, Google Play Store and Facebook. Yes, Facebook (sigh).

Ok, so there are problems with this model too, with many a non-tech savvy parent being hit with large bills due to their game playing offspring purchasing things in their name, and some companies making games almost unplayable unless you purchase essential extras. However, at least it isn’t tackling the pirates with an iron fist, trying to enforce its rules in an outdated and draconian way, it is trying to push the industry forward in other ways, making it not worth your time in illegally downloading the latest title on top of the Google Play Store lists.

That is until, however, the pirates simply shift from pirated games to cracked in-app purchase systems. «

Nastycloud Is it possible to stamp it out, or is it something that you just have to live with?

It’s something you have to embrace.

On what platforms is piracy worst? Mobile (iOS, Android) or PCs? Probably on PC and Android, since you can install third party content without hacking the devices.

Have you personally been affected by game piracy?

Yes, but in a good way. You know, things now a days turned more into exposure that closeness, and piracy is a term totally so tied to closeness. We don’t believe folks that pirate our games would buy them anyways, so we’re cool with that. We trust that people that find value in what we do will go and buy the thing if they have the money.

Also piracy aids with exposure as well, so, again, we’re cool with it.

Do you think major studios can do more to help the indies in relation to piracy?

We think nothing has to be done with piracy, but switching the a subscription-based model ( like PlayStation Plus) is a good thing.

Pay what you want is another. See how much money is spent in Humble Bundle for example! It’s just a matter of paradigm shift.

Do you think pirates are aware that when they steal from small companies (as opposed to majors) they are hurting the indie industry?

That’s a big supposition, we’d need the stats for that affirmation, and if we embrace an open culture piracy loses its sense. Pirates are highly meritocratic folks, when you have a community that is based on openness and based on merit you don’t need to steal anything. Take a look at the open source community, crackers have no place in that community, since security holes are quickly found because of the openness of the code, and reporting or fixing them increases your position in the community.

The crackers of the Microsoft era now collaborate in open source software to create better software. I think something similar needs to happen in the gaming world. Probably pay what you want or subscriptions is the way to go. Only time will tell.

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FEATURE Game Piracy

Ludobit Have you personally been affected by game piracy?

The only way we have been affected by piracy (as far as we can tell) is having to prepare our games for it (by using encryption, etc). With Wreck’em I worried about sending out apk’s to the press incase they got leaked to a piracy site. We have since changed our tack, we no longer worry about piracy any more than we need to. Pirates can usually reverse engineer a game no matter how much you try and stop them, so if it’s going to happen it’s going to happen. We now just think of it free advertising. We make free games so people who use a pirated version of our game for the free currency were never going to become paying customers anyway.

we would want to inflict on our players, unless we had a much bigger game that stood to lose a LOT from piracy.

On what platforms is piracy worst? Mobile (iOS, Android) or PCs? I am not really equipped to answer this question as I am only a PC game consumer not a PC game developer. I would guess PC however, because those games cost more to buy on average, so when they get ripped off it’s a much bigger loss to the developer.

Do you think major studios can do more to help the indies in relation to piracy?

I don’t think the major studios can do too much to help us indies with regards to piracy (short of lending us their legal teams... haha).

Is it possible to stamp it out, or is it something that you just have to live with?

I think we could stamp it out if we threw enough money at it, but I don’t think many indies can afford that. It also seems that at the moment the most effective anti-piracy techniques come at a cost to the honest user. Making our games ‘online only’ and adding super annoying verification processes are not something

Do you think pirates are aware that when they steal from small companies (as opposed to majors) they are hurting the indie industry?

I think Pirates both know and don’t care. As a gamer, if I like a (free) game I always make a purchase to support the studio. I have recently done this while playing Magicka Wizard Wars (PC), Combat Monsters (Android) and Angry Birds Epic (Android). There are a lot of players who do not think like this however, some players even start to think they are entitled to get games for free. A lot of people now complain on Google Play reviews about ANY form of monetisation. I think piracy is just the next step on from this, a sense of entitlement to have something for nothing.

I am not sure how you combat that. Even if we informed pirates that it hurts indies and much as major companies, I don’t think they would care. Besides, piracy is never acceptable even if the game is from a major company, stealing is stealing.

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REGIONAL REPORT Game Piracy in the UK

Lee Smith Lee Smith is a lifelong fan of Bubble Bobble (amongst other games), and the Creative Director of IND13.

Game piracy decriminalised in UK Shortly before IND13 went to press, the British Government decriminalised online piracy

In a rather unexpected move, the British government has decided to decriminalise online video game, music and movie piracy, scrapping fuller punishment plans after branding them unworkable.

Officials will still work to close and stem funding to file-sharing sites, but the news appears to mean that the British authorities have abandoned legal enforcement of online media piracy.

Although this may seem an obvious move for some in the industry, it is not something that most would expect the British government (not known for it’s forward looking, radical thinking…) to do.

Starting in 2015, persistent file-sharers will be sent four warning letters explaining their actions are illegal, but if the notes are ignored no further action will be taken. Although this might seem rather pointless, most in the industry believe that education and not an iron fist is needed most. After all, legal routes to end piracy in the creative industries have not enjoyed much success so far.

The scheme, named the Voluntary Copyright Alert Programme (VCAP), is the result of years of talks between ISPs, British politicians and the movie and music industries. The UK’s biggest providers – BT, TalkTalk, Virgin and Sky – have all signed up to VCAP, and smaller ISPs are expected to follow suit.

Geoff Taylor, chief executive of music trade body the BPI, said VCAP was about “persuading the persuadable, such as parents who do not know what is going on with their net connection.”

He added: “VCAP is not about denying access to the internet. It’s about changing attitudes and raising awareness so people can make the right choice.”

Considering that, according to a study from Ofcom, almost a quarter of all downloads in the UK are of pirated content this is quite an important decision.

Essentially this amounts to around 1.5 billion downloads of media that infringes copyright, though obviously some types of media attract more illegal downloads than others, with games by no means being anywhere near the most popular.

That particular title goes to films (with a third of all movie downloads infringing copyright) whilst software was most frequently downloaded legally (only one in ten downloads infringed copyright).

The research, which was conducted by Kantar Media on behalf of Ofcom, also showed that more than half of all internet users (58 per cent) downloaded or streamed at least one item of illegal content during the year. This means that if over half of us have downloaded illegally, then we all know, personally, quite a lot of pirates.

Despite this, pirating content was still defined as a “minority activity” with a small number of users accounting for the majority of downloads. Just two per cent of internet users account for three quarters (74 per cent) of all downloads.

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REGIONAL REPORT Game Piracy in the UK

However, the research also showed that those who pirate content were likely to spend more money on legal downloads. Over a three month period piraters spent £26 compared to £16 from those who refrained from infringing copyright.

This is an interesting argument which has been raised for many years, with some debating that the industries are not actually losing out as most are downloading films/music/games etc that they would never have paid for anyway (so there is no lost revenue there), and that that pirates are the ones most likely to pay for content that they see value in.

The research also noted that those who downloaded a lot of content illegally were likely to justify this by saying they had already spent enough on content, and that legal downloads were too expensive (something that I have mentioned in the previous pages).

How? Well there was a contest that awarded its three winners early access to the game and, lo and behold, somehow a cracked copy was distributed through various pesky torrent sites. Not, of course, that we are laying the unproven blame directly at those competition winners of course “To anybody who got MC5 already, shame on you! We are making games for you and all you can do is pirate them”. Weber said, and also went on to declare that he would instantly ban anyone discovered with an illicit version.

They are now taking steps to disable the illegal copies of Modern Combat 5, and are fully engaged in, ahem, modern combat against the hackers and pirates in cyberspace.

However of those that regularly pirated content one in five said they would stop if they received a warning letter from their ISP with a quarter saying they would stop if they thought they might be sued. But now that the letters will essentially be meaningness, apart from an excercise in education, will downloaders really cease to get hold of a copy of the latest Modern Combat game from the many torrent sites out there?

In a strange twist of fate, though, when this was announced Gameloft community manager Florian Weber was taking to Facebook to wage a war on game pirates.

Why? Well when Gameloft released their first-person shooter Modern Combat 5, thousands of people had already played it.

You could argue, though, that Gameloft’s lofty stance is somewhat ironic, considering that it has pretty much made it’s name being "inspired by" the games of others. Including the fact that Modern Combat 5 is basically a mobile clone of the Call of Duty games…

So it seems that if game makers do indeed want to take the good fight directly to the pesky downloaders, they are going to have to do so without the long arm of British law behind them. They are going to have to invent new means to outfox the foxs and continue to outthink the hackers and sharers. However, they should be aware that every new technology gets hacked eventually. «

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FEATURE XD Studios

Jamie Kavanagh Jamie is XD’s Director and resident Game Designer.

XD Studios is a new, UK based independent games studio.

It’s not just another Manic Monday...

XD Studios explain the thinking about their unique Monday game jams...

We specialise in creating fun and innovative games for mobile and PC. We also do something a bit unique… We do internal game jams. Now, that in itself isn’t unique. Lots of game developers do it. Insomniac does it, Bethesda does it, and Double Fine are famous for doing it. What makes us a bit different is we do it a lot. We do a Game Jam every single Monday in fact. Sometimes the games might take one Monday, sometimes they will take two.

Our aim is to produce two games every month, and have them launched on their target platforms. This process has become a very important factor for our fledgling studio, as it gives everyone on the team a creative voice, and the chance to have their ideas produced and released.

Every Monday we arrive at the office early, pitch a few ideas, pick one, and make a game. First off we write a short 1-2 page game design document, which breaks the whole game up into sections, including mechanics, art, sound, UI etc. Each game is also created with a specific goal in mind, it could be something that we haven’t done before, or something we could use some practice with.

For example, we may decide that this week’s game must feature

touch controls, or utilise a mobile accelerometer. Our day is then divided into six, two hour sprints, where each member of the team takes a piece of the game design document, whether it be a game feature, or art assets, and they go and work on that aspect of the game. We coordinate who is working on what and when, to try and avoid any overlap or slowdown in production. When you are working to such a tight schedule, every minute counts and these self-imposed deadlines really help us, as a team, to understand our own capabilities. This gives us a massively condensed version of games production, which allows us to identify problems within our working pipeline and make steps toward fixing it.

Manic Mondays are built around 3 key pillars, Community, Critique and Challenge, with each being as important as the last. We want to build a strong, lasting community, we want to encourage critique and discussion from within the community, and, of course, we want to challenge ourselves to make the best games we can. Each Manic Monday game will be released for free across our chosen platform. We don’t want to charge for them, as we feel that the benefits of offering these games for free far

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FEATURE XD Studios

Tempest Sky is available for free on iOS and Android.

outweigh the benefits of asking for money for them. We look at Manic Mondays as a team sport, and it really feels that way. It allows us to approach the start of the week with a massive level of excitement and enthusiasm, which sets the whole studio up for a good weeks work. It allows us to make more games, and the more we make, the better we make them. Well, that’s the theory anyway.

Another benefit of Manic Mondays is that it allows us to take risks and make mistakes, mistakes that we couldn’t afford to make with a longer term project. It allows us to experiment with art styles, with our user experience, and with mechanics, some of which won’t always work out. But that’s the beauty of game jams; whilst it restricts you in some ways, it gives you an incredible amount of freedom in others, and for a small start-up studio like ours, having that kind of freedom is invaluable. The hours are tough, and there is a lot of pressure to produce work throughout the day, but the rewards make it worthwhile.

Poppin’ Pirates is available for free on iOS, Android and Facebook.

Obviously this kind of super intense and uber-agile development doesn’t suit everyone, and it wouldn’t work as well for remote studios, but it is an incredible feeling to be publishing a game that you only started working on 13 or 14 hours beforehand.

So far we have produced 2 manic Monday titles, the first being Tempest Sky, which is an old-school side scrolling shooting game, where the player takes control of man-kinds finest space fighter to defend against wave after wave of alien ship. The second game is Poppin’ Pirates, a fun physics based game where the player has to sink marauding pirate ships with their cannon before the enemy reaches them. «

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REVIEW Tempest Sky

Gary Mee Gary, amongst other things, is a avid gamer, and is never happier then when tyring out a new game from an indie studio...

Tempest Sky Review Tempest Sky is one of the games that XD Studios created in their Monday Game Jams. The idea behind these Game Jams is to create two games a month (ideally) and then release them onto the market for free. This gives XD Studios the freedom to experiement with different types of games, artwork, and game controls, with the freedom of someone who isn’t after perfection for a corporate client, say.

They enjoy making these games, and actively encourage feedback from the gaming community at large, so as to constantly improve. With this is mind I decided to review Tempest Sky, the first of the games that they have released.

It is a fully accomplished and fun-to-play old style arcade shooter. The graphics are nicely designed with the look of a dystopian future on a faraway planet.

First things first, the game play is simple in essence but very challenging. You control Tempest Sky, a craft that moves from left to right, shooting the alien ships as they fly at you in waves, whilst also watching out for the buildings above and below you. You can fire a laser canon to destroy your dastardly foes, or use the Chrono Shield, which is the most effective. It is quite satisfying to basically headbutt spaceships, but it does has a life force which drains away as you use it so you have to use it sparingly.

Being an old school gamer myself, and still having very fond memories of the Grandaddy of all shoot-em-up’s, R-Type, I was always going to be naturally drawn to the game... and I wasn’t disappointed.

The soundtrack wouldn’t sound too out of place at an industrial rave, which fits the graphics nicely.

PLAY-ABILITY

85%

ART/GRAPHICS

82%

MUSIC/SOUND

80%

83

%

OVERALL SCORE

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The biggest compliment that I can pay it is that it really doesn’t look or play like something created in just a couple of days. When you combine the gameplay, the graphics, the soundtrack and game effects, you would naturally assume that Tempest Sky took a lot more crafting. It’s a very playable game in which you can quite easily lose an hour or so while immersing yourself in it. I would highly recommend a download, especially as it is available for free on iOS and Android.

FEATURE PAC-MAN™ and the Ghostly Adventures 2

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FEATURE London Gamecraft 2014

Lee Smith Lee Smith is a lifelong fan of Bubble Bobble (amongst other games), and the Creative Director of IND13.

London Gamecraft 2014 There's nothing like a good Saturday game jam...

I attended the London GameCraft at Skills Matter. The idea was to watch various developers, artists and sound engineers meet up with like-minded gaming souls, swap ideas and expertise, and build a game. In just under 8 hours.

From the early start it was encouraging to see so many attend on a Saturday morning, before 8:30, all eager to spend the day working on what they love doing; making and playing games.

The premise is quite simple. Walk in with your laptop and equipment, have a chat, form a group with one or two others and then you are given a theme. This year the theme was ‘composable’.

Essentially, any game where various bits can come together (Lego was one example used).

it is not too easy and not too hard. Allowing smooth and steady progress with challenge. You have to collect pots of different colour paints to create blocks in the level, which allow you to collect the coins and then progress to the next level. A real old fashioned platformer, which is a lot of fun.

For the top three games though, which are all excellent, we can do the countdown…

At Number Three: Super Sheep Shape Shifter, from Tom Flynn and a team of 5 At Number Two: ColorTanks, from Max Sims, in a team of one.

In the number one spot, we have: Speed Freq from Sujan McGlynn. Again, in a team of just one. Sujan describes it as “an evasion tunnel flier with audiovisual elements” and went on to say that it “was the most popular voted game of the day which was definitely a surprise!”

It was quite interesting to watch not only the concentration that these groups of developers had, but also the fun and the camaraderie that developed within and between the groups.

Of course everyone would like to win the votes for best game (or even second or third) but there was no real rivalry. They were here to make contacts and share knowledge as much as anything.

Back to the games, though, and there are some real good ones.

Especially when you think about the small amount of time they had to produce them.

It is tricky, and gets your pulse racing a little bit as you try to just get a few milliseconds further in the game. I can certainly see why it won, with it’s Tetris style pieces racing at you with some speed.

Ultimately though, it is about the experience. For once it is the taking part that matters, and not winning. «

My personal favourite of the games created there is Composablez, which is a platform game where you play as “disgruntled man in beret” and must collect “ze american dollars” to buy more reality paint. It is a fun game that gets the skill level just right, as

To find out more about Skills Matter visit www.skillsmatter.com To find out more about GameCraft visit www.dublingamecraft.com

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FEATURE London Gamecraft 2014

Photography by Damien Mee

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FEATURE Meerkatz Challenge

Harry Cole Co-Founder and Publisher of IND13, who runs his own PR agency specializing in the gaming sector.

Meerkatz Challenge...

Simples? Not quite...

Meerkatz Challenge is a new puzzle platformer for iOS that features familiar yet challenging gameplay.

We talk to Travian Games GmbH about their game studio and about Meerkatz Challenge in particular.

What are your game development career histories? How did you get into games development?

Vera Frisch, Game Director of Meerkatz Challenge, started her career in the games industry in 2008 as an Online Marketing Manager for Free-to-Play online games. In 2009, she moved into Game Producing and became the producer for several external social and browser-game projects.

Vera is 33 years old and has been working for Travian Games since 2011 as Senior Producer and Game Director.

What type of games do you strive to create?

Travian usually seeks to create online franchise games that generate long term player communities. These games are known for their focus on planning, strategy, depth and complexity.

Meerkatz Challenge is a distinct departure from that. While it does involve planning and strategy, it is a single player game meant to delight less serious gamers rather than groups of online gamers playing together.

Congratulations on an original and interesting game, what’s the idea behind Meerkatz Challenge?

In early 2013, within Travian Games’ new games process, our colleague Björn Brinkmann sent an idea to the Game Idea Validations Group for a small single-player puzzle-game with the following notes: » Challenging puzzle elements » Watching the cute animals is a lot of fun » High score list and Star-System

This was the birth of Meerkatz Challenge. If you compare the bullet points with the game we have now, one year later, you will see that it meets these requirements. Vera, took the idea, developed it further and pitched it to management in July 2013.

The intention was to develop a game that is fun and has a short development timeline.

“I was exhausted spending years on projects, with more or less success, and wished to work on something smaller with a clear outcome”, she said.

Meerkatz Challenge looks great, how important is the look of a game?

We had a strong vision how the game should look. Many artists around the world pitched their ideas for the game. Imagine the great animated films such as the Lion King or the Legend of Tembo, with a dash of studio Ghibli, in the shapes and color schemes. The scenes needed a sense of depth and reduced saturation towards the horizon.

The art of any game is critical. And, for this game, no art element was more important than the Meerkat itself. The general appearance of the meerkats needs to be cute and cuddly; you will want to save as many of the little fellows as possible.

Due to the fact that on tablet the characters may be only 200 pixels tall, we needed to focus on the readability in all sizes and on all backgrounds, bright or dark. One of the most important decisions we made very early is we don’t want to have human engineered tools for the meerkats: no weapons, knifes or army helmets.

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FEATURE Meerkatz Challenge

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FEATURE Meerkatz Challenge

After evaluating efforts from studios in Spain, Germany and the United States, we received the concept we felt was ideal from a studio in Slovakia and engaged their services for the project.

have also seen many projects fail because developers created the game for themselves. They wanted to see their big dream live - but nobody else did.

Everyone loves meerkats, was that the inspiration for the game?

I studied Business Administration where you learn very early on that you have to find the right audience for your product if you want to make money with it. If you start thinking about a game idea, ask yourself several times; who should play the game and for whom it will be fun in which situation?

Well, my initial pitch of the game was about turtles. When I was thinking about the core gameplay I would watch my Greek tortoise running against several obstacles in my flat.

Turtles are adorable and they definitely need help overcoming larger gaps and nasty pitfalls like the foot of my kitchen table :-) When I presented the idea to my colleagues they came up with some reasonable points, e.g. turtles are too slow and don’t live in groups. So we had to find another animal more suited to the game.

And if you are thinking about a game for a broad audience it is very important to have a character everyone loves.

Who do you see as the audience for Meerkatz Challenge?

In the past I spent a lot of time at airports and have seen many people, young and old, playing games on their iPads and iPhones, while they were waiting for departure. With Meerkatz Challenge, I wished to create a game which is playable for a broad audience in situations exactly like this.

As an indie, what advice would you give to aspiring games makers?

I think there is one important requirement every game developer must meet - know your audience.

During the last years we have had more discussions about platforms, monetization and what works on each. From my experience the game idea sadly comes last. On the other hand, I

You don’t create a game for you or for a business model; you create it for your audience. If you don’t know who should play the game, how big the audience is and what they expect, you can’t understand how successful you will be.

For example, Meerkatz Challenge wasn’t a standalone mobile app from the beginning. We thought about a social cross-platform title as well as designing it as free-to-play. At the end we nailed down the core value of the game to these points: » Players should have fun in short play sessions » The game should be playable wherever and whenever the player wants » The fun of each level is planning ahead – no enormous time pressure.

For us, the logical result was that we can deliver this best with a paid mobile app to casual players who are willing to pay a small amount for the full game experience with no technical interruption like a downtime or skill reduction to get them monetized.

Everything else is not in our hands. You cannot plan success; you only can do your best to meet the wishes of your audience.

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FEATURE Meerkatz Challenge

What are the benefits of being an indie and what are the draw backs?

I never worked for an indie but I can tell you the impression of indie development from the perspective of a larger game development studio. During the pre-production of Meerkatz Challenge I stuck in several meetings with directors who where telling me that the project is too expensive and we should be more indie.

The stupidest thing I have heard during this time was, “an indie can develop this project with the quarter of money in the half of the time”. Established development studios often only see the success stories and seldom the broken dreams.

Many indie developers I know create their games in their spare time and do something else for a living. They only want to create the game idea and don’t care about working long hours, the salary or making sure they have a healthy work/life balance.

Creating the game is their passion, their spare time activity and you do not count how much time you spend on a thing you really want to do. But you cannot compare this with an environment where people are employed, especially not in Germany. Work/life balance is important here. You are not allowed to force people to spend more hours on the project than agreed.

I think both sides have their benefits and draw backs. As an indie nobody will tell you “put this feature in the game because I want to have it,” but you will also have to deal with how much time you can invest for your project if you don’t have an investor.

Luckily, at Travian Games we have the chance to create the game we want. No director or manager is telling us how the game

should look and the Meerkatz Challenge team can act with the freedom of an indie but in a secure employment environment.

Can you tell us about any sharp learning curves that you have had creating games?

You cannot outsource everything - especially not the vision of your project. With Meerkatz Challenge we were in the unlucky position that we haven’t had important positions like a game designer or a concept artist available within the company when we started the project. We tried to hire them, but we couldn’t find the right people. So we were forced to hire freelancers not located in Munich for many of our needs. To bring everything together and push them all to the same commitment was the most challenging part for me.

As producer, I was used to working with external development studios all over the world, but the team itself was a single unit where everybody knows what to do. We haven’t had this comfortable situation during the development and I had to deal with totally new questions and problems. Due to this fact we are more than proud that we have now such a delightful game.

What do you have planned for the future?

Meerkatz Challenge conquering the world! *gg* Seriously though, we have several plans depending on how well the game succeeds, beginning with continuous content updates, starting immediately after we launch on July 24, until new Meerkatz Challenge apps are created.

Travian Games as a development studio is constantly working on new projects and game ideas which will be released in the near future. «

"You don’t create a game for you or for a business model; you create it for your audience. If you don’t know who should play the game, how big the audience is and what they expect, you can’t understand how successful you will be."

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FEATURE Mars on a Stick

Lee Smith Lee Smith is a lifelong fan of Bubble Bobble (amongst other games), and the Creative Director of IND13.

Life on Mars on a Stick What is life like as a small indie start-up? What are the challeges that you face?

We catch up with Martyn Bramall from Mars on a Stick to find out...

We all dream of it a little. You know those moments, normally when you are sat at work completing your next mundane tast for a corporate client, or when meeting friends for a few drinks and talking about the new game idea that you have had; how it is different to anything else out there and if only you had the time and money to really put all your energy into realising your dream.

Sometimes your friends even chip in too... “hey, yeah, well if we set up our OWN games company, we could be rich”, says one.

“Yeah, we could be the next Rockstar, our ideas are better than there’s anyway... they’ve sold out, tsk!” says another...

things as accessible and appealing to as many people as possible.”

Which seems reasonable, and they have a plan in place. A good solid base on which to build which is important for any company, whether a games studio or a running shoe manufacturer, you have to have that initial vision on how the business is going to operate.

To do this, Mars on a Stick are going to ensure that they can find time to establish a ‘rolling prototype’ system that will allow them to assess new game concepts before putting them into ‘full’ production.

As mentioned previously, everyone involved in Mars on a Stick are extremely experienced in their fields, and they bring all this to Mars... “I think this is largely the secret sauce to any company!

We have a large list of our own new IP and crazy ideas squirreled away.” Martyn explains.

Some of us do it, some of us make that decidely big leap away from gained employment and a regular steady wage into the unstable life of the independent games studio owner. Because it is unsteady. I could use the cliched “for every successful games studio...” line, but I won’t. Why? Because I wouldn’t want to dissuade you from setting up on your own; because the indie studios are the lifeblood of the games community; because you are the reason why this magazine exists... And because of this, we spoke to Martyn Bramall from Mars on a Stick, a UK based studio, about what it is like to set up on your own.

Mars on a Stick, who are essentially a collective of hugely experienced individuals, are a little different from your average studio in some respects, as they were formed around their love of ‘social gaming’ ideas. After all, we live in an increasingly social world (online at least anyway...).

“With the boom in social media platforms, the ability to communicate with the rest of the world no matter where you are is getting easier and easier.” Martyn explains. “We’re really excited about this prospect and are looking at ways to best harness the ability to connect with other people in a virtual space whilst keeping

“Working in successful and well established companies provides a multitude of benefits. You get to meet a lot of very talented individuals for a start! It can also be a great place to learn. Talking to people and getting involved allows you to quickly pickup skills and understanding across all disciplines of software development. I think we’ve all been lucky as individual to have been able to work and contribute to such successful products while developing our skill sets!”

But what is it like stepping away from mainstream development to start your own Indie? Away from the comfort of the wages being zapped into your bank account every month to facing a slightly uncertain existence (if more fulfilling...). “I’d say exciting as well as daunting. The hope is to be able to easily pivot and shift with development requirements, something that can prove difficult in more conventional mainstream development.

I expect the biggest difficulty, like most start-ups, will be the

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FEATURE Mars on a Stick

“The biggest difficulty, like most start-ups, will be the process of ensuring cash flow during the early period of our establishment...”

process of ensuring cash flow during the early period of our establishment. After that period, we’ll need to ensure we can grow our team to a size where we can effectively execute our strategies”.

That is pretty much the same for every indie studio, and the challenge that they all face. It’s a matter of getting something setup, an idiology on which to base your company on. Also, to have a clear direction on which you are going to set off on.

interface devices with everyday items such as cars etc.”

And what are they working on first? “It’s kind of a small experimental game that will allow us to test out some of the new systems we’re developing but also provide plenty of amusement and fun for its players!” « To see more of this, you can check out the images on their Facebook page: www.facebook.com/marsonastick

“The current platforms are developing so quickly with new opportunities arising. Being in a position where we can present an agile development environment, we hope to be able to pivot and adapt to the market and areas we see as ‘interest’ and ‘up and coming.’ As an added bonus, it gives us a good base for helping out on other projects if required due to our extensive experiences and ability to close out titles”.

This is no “hold on, I have an idea...” start-up, Mars on a Stick know what they are doing, which most likely comes from all the experiences that, collectively, they bring to the table.

Why now though, why not last year, or why not next year, what is so good about this moment that is so perfect (or potentially at least), so ripe, that feels so ready.

Well, as Martyn eplains, there are so many new technologies and innovations about to be unleased on the market, that they want to be a part of it.

“The development of VR technologies. We’d certainly like to explore the potential of things like the Oculus and Morpheus. We’re also excited about the development of mobile devices. With the progress of ‘super thin’ power sources and flexible hardware, wearable devices will be an exciting prospect along with various opportunities to

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FEATURE Happa Games

Harry Cole Co-Founder and Publisher of IND13, who runs his own PR agency specializing in the gaming sector.

Experience permadeath with Ascendant...

We talk to Happa Games, the makers of Ascendant, a new and unforgiving beat 'em up.

What is the name of your studio and where are you based?

We are Hapa Games, a small indie studio working out of a garage in Orlando.

and want to make our own games. Also, I mean, we work out of a garage. I'd say we're pretty indie.

Who is the team made up of?

Do you consider yourselves indie?

Definitely. Everything we've done has either been on our own or with our community that we've had to built from the ground up.

We didn't come from any big studio and none of us are famous developers. We're a bunch of devs that met in graduate school

We started with a bunch of fellow students during our last semester at FIEA (http://www.fiea.ucf.edu/). When we graduated, half of the student team we had there moved on to other opportunities and seven of us moved into the garage to finish up Ascendant. We have Brian Widman (programmer, co-

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FEATURE Happa Games

" Ascendant is an unforgiving beat 'em up where you are a demigod attempting to usurp your rivals. It's tough as nails but has a ton of rewards for those that are up to the challenge."

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FEATURE Happa Games

founder), Nick Farah (lead design, co-founder), and myself, Ben Crocker (project manager, co-founder) along with Matt Burton (programming), Eric Elzy (designer, sound), Anthony Fariello (visual effects artist), and Andrew Yribarren (animation, UI).

up with almost all of the ideas in Ascendant. His dedication to creating fantastic gameplay experiences is outstanding and without him the game wouldn't be nearly as fun as it is today.

What games and other mediums inspired you to create Ascendant?

In your own words, please describe Ascendant?

Ascendant is an unforgiving beat 'em up where you are a demigod attempting to usurp your rivals. The game employs a number of modern roguelike elements such as permadeath and randomized items that help you progress through the game. It's tough as nails but has a ton of rewards for those that are up to the challenge.

What is the back story to the game?

The demigods of Ascendant are trying to reach the heavens to become the ultimate deity. Whether they want to become a just and benevolent god, or to obtain a special power, each demigod has their own goal or motivation for wanting to ascend.

Ascendant was heavily inspired by games such as Binding of Isaac and Rogue Legacy along with a bunch of old school brawlers like Streets of Rage, Turtles in Time, and Battletoads. All of us here love roguelikes and grew up playing a ton of brawlers in our living rooms and arcades and the mechanics from these games is what pushed us forward with Ascendant. We wanted a game that had the roguelike challenge and reward along with the brutal oneversus-many mentality of a brawler. With the art, we looked to games like Journey and Outland to give us inspiration as well as some shows we grew up with like Samurai Jack.

Who did the art?

Who did the music?

Our good friend, Phil Stehle, was the person who created the music for us. Phil essentially had free range to compose whatever he thought would fit in Ascendant. We would give him a feeling that we wanted to evoke and he would take the idea and run with it. Obviously there were tweaks and iterations but Phil did an incredible job with the music.

Our concept art was created by this amazing concept artist, Ryoma Tazi. He was one of our fellow students and created really incredible pieces early on that all of us just fell in love with. His concepts were the basis for most art decisions during the entire development process.

The bosses are huge, what was the thinking behind that decision?

We wanted the bosses to be very imposing and terrifying. I mean, who doesn't like defeating enormous bosses? «

Where did the ideas come from in creating this incredible game?

The idea started during our time at FIEA, the summer before we even created Hapa Games. We knew we wanted to make a beat 'em up and we had been playing a ton of roguelikes at the time so we decided to try our hand at combining those genres. From those mechanics we started prototyping and everything you see in Ascendant now is just a result of iterating and trying out different ideas. I have to give a lot of credit to Nick Farah for coming

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FEATURE Meerkatz Challenge

WE ARE ANOUK

We are a group of Producers, Directors, Photographers, Camera Operators and Artists.

We are made up of a London based core team of progressive and determined individuals, with an international network of trusted professionals.

We have extensive experience in all areas of production with years working professionally in image and film.

Please get in touch to talk about your project.

0203 605 3806

enquiries@anoukproductions.com 61 ind13.com

www.anoukproductions.com

NEXT GEN GAMER Ophelia Matthews-Smith

Ophelia Matthews-Smith A young gamer with only a few years games experience, Ophelia approaches the industry with a fresh new eye.

Online Gaming Tricksters....

There once was a girl named Ophelia. She searched the internet for thousands of online games that were not tricksters but not one was found. She searched through girly games, boyish games, even animal games! She soon gave up after finding out that every game invented was made to get people to waste every penny they earned.

Online gaming seems to be such a problem these days. All of in-game advertisements to pay £50 for a one year membership.

There's thousands of online games, but they all copy each others ideas so that none of the games these days are different.

You would just be wasting your money over and over again. It is like constantly buying a toy when you already have lots of toys.

You forget about it!

Almost every single online game is about buying clothes and what they don't understand is that nobody actually wants to pay a lot of their money to buy some clothes for a year, though some games are smart and tempt you into buying a membership.

I prefer to go for the sneaky games. I have found my way out of temptation, so I don't feel tempted and I get lots of items. Lets just say that if everybody outsmarted the online games, there probably wouldn't be restrictions for non-members; and even if there were restrictions, what company would be stupid enough to put on lots of restrictions anyway?

Lets say I'm playing Animal Jam and I've got thousands of gems.

I will go into all the shops and buy all of the non-membership things. Then I want to change the colour because I don't think that pink and blue go together but it says I have to be a member.

It's exactly the same with in-app purchase. Do they want to be all over the news too?

I start getting tempted.

I want to send a letter to my friend saying hi to him/her but I can't because it isn't allowed on the free chat. So I ask my friend to meet me somewhere. They meet me but it's crowded so I can't see them. I try to call their name but I have to be a member to have free chat.

Can you see what I mean when I say they are sneaky with that?

There is a way out of the temptation though: pretend you get everything you want. It gets boring, and if you are a member you get everything you want so does that mean getting everything you want on a game is boring? And what if the game just gets so boring while your a member. So boring that you find another game and you become a member on that.

No. They don't. So the only unanswered question here is, why do they carry on? They know the outcome. I understand that there will always be a membership in online games, but they have in-game purchases which is like in-app purchases, so they can still earn their money.

Use the scratch cards for membership! They have the scratch cards for membership so they should use it for every game. There's the £4.99 (£5) ones in Sainsburys so let's give them a use why don't we, and it is cheaper than paying for a year.

Maybe if I just research it for hours or make my own game it'll be different... A game made by somebody other than a trickster (if you want to say I'm not a trickster) will arrive! Adios amigos; a new game is being born every second of the day, so maybe I will just go and play one of those. «

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NEXT GEN GAMER Ophelia Matthews-Smith

"You would just be wasting your money over and over again. It is like constantly buying a toy when you already have lots of toys..."

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FEATURE RoboPanda

Lee Smith Lee Smith is a lifelong fan of Bubble Bobble (amongst other games), and the Creative Director of IND13.

The RoboPanda artists challenge We challeneged two games artists, with very different styles, to come up with a character design based on a short brief that we provided them with. RoboPanda.

Ok, so here's the deal. As well as loving games, we at IND13 are passionate about the artwork that goes into them, and the artists that create the masterpieces that go into the games. What's that you say? The art isn't important, it's the way the games plays?

Well, to that I say: Holy Cow Man! Of course the art is important.

Hey, we fell in love with Mario partly because of the way the cute little plumber looked (and, later on, his chums...). The artwork and the character designs can make or break a game, and you can clearly see the games which don't think that way because, well, they and generally a bit rubbish.

A good games developer/studio puts as much love and care into every part of its game as it can. Be that the game design, the music and, of course, the art.

And the characterisation is key here. When you develop an infinity with the character that you are playing that is down to the artwork and how the artists intepret the brief thats was given to them.

So we decided to set a challenge to two professional artists that we know and have worked with. Rokas, One of the founders of IND13 and our Art Editor, and Junior Da Silva, who is an artist whose work we love and have profiled before in Issue One. We wrote a short brief, sent it to them, and just asked them to create something and send it back to us when they were happy with it. On the following pages you can see the absolutly amazing results, which we were completely taken aback by. So very brilliant, both of them, and so very different too. Infact, they are so good that I would like to see both of the games made...

The Brief:

ROBOPANDA In a post apocalyptic future (2015) where crime is rife, the government is corrupt, and the people are rising up against it with only an underfunded and disillusioned police force to try and keep the peace, one man comes up with a plan.

A plan that, hopefully, will bring some peace and stability to the world while also providing the news media with some kick-ass footage to entertain us all.

That man is Linwood Thoran, the Head of Animal Robotics at London Zoo, and he comes up with a plan that is both courageous and just a little bit mad. He saves Chui Hu-Shou, a young female panda, from certain death after she almost dies in a catastrophic bamboo eating competition.

He then builds her up using the latest in robotic technology, trains her in the art of martial arts and vegetarian cooking, and sends her out onto the streets of London to hopefully restore some semblance of peace.

The people are optimistic although not entirely convinced, the battle is bloody and brutal as the criminals are fighting back, but Chui Hu-Shou and Linwood Thoran are doing all they can to bring some sense of justice to society.

However he is being watched by the mysterious Lady Conflict, a conniving penguin that is controlling the government like puppets...

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RATING

88

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OVERALL SCORE 65 ind13.com

Rokas Butkus Rather than having a robotic panda, Rokas has developed a mechanical suit which the panda climbs into. The panda has some tech implants and upgrades too, it seems, from the drawing which I imagine can plug-in to the suit.

The suit has an array of weaponos built in, not least to it's four arms.

It brings to mind the work of Masamune Shirow, the legendary Manga artist who work includes Appleseed and, most famously, Ghost in the Shell, with the way it's spans both western and Japanese stles of art.

Though it does have a distictive style that belongs to Rokas alone.

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Junior Da Silva Junior has concepted a piece of artwork that seemingly has its origins in the traditional Japanese style of painting.

Using strong and flowing brush strokes, Junior has depicted RoboPanda almost as a folk story, lifted from the pages of a book of tales that are told from generation to generation.

With its vibrancy, bright colours and imagination it almost reminds me of the work of Tawaraya SĹ?tatsu, the early 17th century Japanese artist and also the co-founder of the Rimpa school of Japanese painting.

With this, the style is both modern and classic.

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