Also, IMO protect your game mechanics as a trade secret and only reveal under NDA.

Unless you are a big game development studio, you will gain more by talking about your ideas/mechanics and receiving feedback than trying to save/hide it for some big reveal. Rarely are ideas so awesome and unique that no one has thought of them before. This article among others talks about it nicely.

Well, we've been pretty busy with Christmas, New Year, and Ludum Dare (our entry). But no holiday can stop us from having this bad boy finished!



What you see is the (work in progress) version of player's island that appears in the game world. So this is where the baddies march to. This is the player's central hub and most of the meta-level interaction (upgrades, info, briefings, etc.) take place here. Each building plays a certain role. For example, briefings might be held in the pub; while world lore stuff is stored in the library.

We wanted this to be more than just a sprite and to serve a practical purpose besides being "the base". So we've spent plenty of time deciding how to do things. And I think it's coming along very nicely. Something many games lack is a proper player base that they can relate to across the missions. We certainly would like to add further customization and... stuff. At least this is what I like.

P.S. if anyone wants to do some free sound tracks for this, you can drop us a line. We're a bit stuck on this and all arrows currently point to getting some free music from the Internet in there.

Honestly, I cannot think of a reason why one wouldn't want to release a demo. May be they're afraid it won't get bought once the user tries it and doesn't like it or something. But that's like selling clothes in cardboard boxes.

Great listen, thanks for sharing. Not so much applicable to most indies working with small teams/projects, but useful nevertheless. Certainly a few takeaway home pointers.

This is a really nice thing of you to do, I have enjoyed TotalBiscuit's videos here and there and it's cool to see this proactive reaching out to the dev community.

What he said.

Bundles don't devalue indie games. As said a little above, bandwagon jumping devalues games. Bundles had mostly really good games that were already doing fine, were on Steam and elsewhere. Now you start to get crappier games you've never heard about, more competition, subsequently lower prices and, after initial impressions, lower expectations. But it was inevitable, and I don't see how anyone is still surprised.

The audience often have no idea what they want.

That is so true, the majority of audience (in any industry) have no idea what they want. It is always "more of this", "more of that", "feature X would be awesome" and "why isn't there feature Y?" with little regard to the big picture. This is like everyone wanting more nuclear explosion stuffs in MW3 after MW2 did it. It sells; it may not be very good; but it sells.

From this perspective, being "business-oriented" means designing the game with those features in mind that are "in demand" the most. Of course, this in not the formula of success, and the game can turn out terrible. But this is what advertisement is mostly based on -- "presence of feature X". For example, AAA and casual game marketing is excellent at selling features, like Facebook integration or something.

Of course, as pointed out many times, there is no reliable way of knowing what features (broadly constructed) sell best. But there are certain educated guesses you can make that big publishers are well aware of about their audience. Hell, they hold seminars and conferences about what things attract and retain costumers.

Don't take my word for it, as I may not know better, but as far as I know most countries have a minimum self-employed (and even employed) income where you don't have to pay taxes. It should be below the minimum wage mark. So that's why you don't report income for mowing lawns (though you could if you wanted to ).

A quick update. We implemented a bit more of resources and collectors (posting on DevDiary as well). This should put us to 70% tower/resource implementation-wise. Here are some graphics for our collectors so far:



.. as well as a system to track their usage and report this feedback to the player:



It's quite important that we get these GUI and feedback features right; even if it is just fluff code-wise.

Five resources does not feel like a lot right now (even though it might sound to players of less resourcing-oriented RTSes), especially since wood is universal for building and element essence is needed only for corresponding towers. Still, we want a level of resource management complexity and strategy/balancing in the game that would raise the bar above the "casual game" (what an oxymoron for a TD game!).

We are devising wacky plans to what the player can do once the towers and collectors are built. A test mission or two shows that the game is quite intensive at the very start, as the player needs to build up both collectors and towers in the right order at the right places. So there is a whole lot of clicking. But then at some point the towers are able to take down the immediate peewee waves, so the player starts to idle a bit. This is where some new stuff should come in, like upgrading, power-ups, unit item drop, etc.

I leave you with some pumpkins:



Oh, I missed Halloween didn't I?

[Uproot]

Hi guys!

Since October 2011 we (me and Philip Barker) have been working on our debut title Uproot (website). This started up as a simple TD game early this year, and is now slowly expanding in scope and growing more and more RTS elements (read: feature creep).

At the core, this is a TD game, so you stop waves of baddies coming at you. We implemented a tower system, where you start with 4 base element towers (earth, fire, water, air) and further transformable combinations thereof. We're trying to get these as unique as possible, so each tower has certain functions it can perform (instead of all just firing slightly differently colored projectiles). See the video below for an example.



The story (so far)

We dreamed up a world, where four kingdoms (earth, fire, water, air) are each holding a portion of the world's land and certain trade resources and are at a constant struggle. The player begins as a guard captain that happens to oversee the neutral marketplace, trading and meeting zone between the four kingdoms; but is really just a pawn for the wealthy kingdom representatives. The world is slowly falling apart (basically, they mine too deep and too greedily), but no one takes initiative to change anything. After all, several millennia old, bureaucratic, disorganized kingdoms split into factions and houses within can hardly work together to save the world. An outside push is needed.

Conveniently, some crazy fanatics attack the neutral marketplace city, and this uproots the status quo by awakening a previously dormant flying island that the inhabitants have long forgotten about and built the trade city around. The island "decides" to restore world peace by questionable methods (which according to legend, happens every few thousand years once the kingdoms go out of control). The player gets to control and upgrade the island buildings (that it took with it when it uprooted; thankfully the pub is there) and to fly it to the mission locales. Each locale offers different challenges and rewards, and the player has a choice of what to do with the conquered territories.

The world inhabitants are called "peewees", and are worm-like tall blobs that each belong to a certain element's race. "Wacky" (but explainable) is the word we try to keep as our core principle. We have a few ideas we will do, but we'd like to hear your impression/ideas too.

You can see an alpha gameplay preview video at

.



Progress

The progress for the very beginnings can be seen at my DevDiary/blog. What we have now is the result of endless iterations of different mechanics.

Engine

The game engine is mostly done, and any further improvements use the existing platform. It's isometric, with some clever tiling and arbitrary object positioning. There are various levels of detail on this in my devdiary.

Towers and resource collectors

We currently have 14 towers (4 base element ones, 8 transformations, and 2 even further transformations). We are expecting to add an upgrade system and further conditional unlockable improvements. We also have a resource collection system, where towers require the corresponding element(s) to work or be built in the first place.

Story

We have come up with the larger parts of the world's story. Ultimately, we want non-black-and-white decisions that the player takes for their own benefit, benefit of the world, or certain factions that often offer and promise bonuses to the player. In the end, you may be given a few end-game choices based on previous decisions, each with their own trade-offs.

Art

Phil's been busy trying to do all the things needed - tiles that tile, props that fit, towers that shoot, mobs that have animations, etc.; each requiring a slightly different approach. But "we are getting there".

Music and sound effects

We have a couple noises and free tracks in-game, but this part will need some love very soon. Any sound effect experts willing to work for free are welcome to contact us.

Last 20% (polish)

I just hope everyone is slightly exaggerating about last 20% being 80% of work...

If there is interest, I will post more updates here, though I primarily semi-occasionally post on my devdiary.

Thanks for reading,
Rudy.

Call it cards or spells or whatever.

Just, whatever you do, don't call is "Scrolls"

My guess is companies won't bother to make copyright claims to indies that don't slander their names/trademarks or monetize on their trademarks to a level where it hurts them. In contrast, there is a reason why triple A titles don't make obvious references and if they do you can be almost sure PR went and checked if it's OK. My advice would be "be careful". Technically, you're not "stealing", you are having substantial similarity and would be called for copyright infringement. But, again, I doubt anyone will bother really. There's tons of indie games out there filled with more or less obvious references and they rarely get cease or desists or sued.

You say you have been a "lone wolf" developer. Have you worked or have you thought about hiring or working with a team? I take it you are a programmer?

You said you have a budget of $500. Is that for JUST the artist or for everything involved? You also said 2D, the image shows vector style art, do you want it to be vector or pixelled? Will this be up to the artist?

$500 is for artist only. Art style would be mostly up to the artist. The vector-like appearance of zombies and barren trees in the screenshot is because it is pre-rendered from 3D models. "2D" means I use sprites/textures and not 3D models in-game.

Maybe you should hook up with this guy.

Thanks for suggestion and I love the painterliness-style artwork. That said, I've looked at quite a few portfolios, and I don't have the budget for most of them, unless the artist wishes to collaborate/gamble with profit% on their own initiative.

[The Game]

Thanks everyone for your interest, the position has been filled.

Hello,

I’m an indie programmer and I am looking to collaborate with an artist for an isometric tower defence game. Your primary responsibility will be the game’s graphics – art assets. But at the same time, I want you to have enough creative freedom to adapt the style, theme, and level design to what you feel the game would benefit from the most. So you will also share the designer role if you want.

The Game

Not a lot is set in stone (no GDD or such), but I do have the base concept and gameplay decided upon to keep the goal clear:

• The genre is tower defence, where baddies march a certain path to the player’s base in waves, and the player builds and maintains towers to kill them off. The game should be set in fantasy/medieval setting or similar, and not modern/future. There should also be lightness of tone, not too grim or dark.
• Basic buildable towers come in four base element flavours (earth, air, fire, water). Each tower can be further combined with other elements to upgrade it to a different purpose tower. Such as air+fire=ash, earth+fire+air=volcano, fire+fire=inferno, etc. Different types complement each other and can be efficient/inefficient against certain mobs, such as applying debuffs. Element combination is the main selling point.
• There are also the player’s keep/base and resource buildings that are needed to gather resources for tower building and upgrading and cost gold, which is dropped by killed mobs.
  
• The game progresses in day/night cycles. At night baddies attack and during the day the player can build up the settlement in peace. Towers take time to build/upgrade, so it is important to plan building for daytime.
• Different levels have different “opponents”, who send different types of baddies, so the player needs to choose the right towers/combos for a level.

About half the programming is done.

Here is the screenshot of the game with random terrain, and some mock-up sprites (click to enlarge):


Needed artwork

The game is in isometric projection with 52x26px square tiles, 2D sprites (no 3D involved, but pre-rendering 3D is fine). Towers are about 3x3 tiles wide, so about 78x182px per sprite. Keep/resource buildings are larger. Mobs are 1x1 tile wide, so about 50x90px for small ones and some 80x140px for larger ones per sprite. None of the sizes (expect the 52x26 tile size) are set in stone, and I can relatively easily modify them.

The art the game needs is as follows:

• Mob sprites, at least 4 facing directions, at least several unique variations, movement/death animation frames
• Tower sprites – 4 base, 10 combinations, potentially more if you have the motivation
• Town buildings – 2 or so resource buildings, keep/base, spawner, building/construction site
• Other game world objects/props (trees, rocks, whatever works/looks best for level/setting)
• Various icons – element icons, action icons (build, upgrade, destroy, etc.), feedback icons (day/night cycle clock, wave icons, etc.)
• Depending on how much sprites you can provide, I can add more buildings and strategy or just cool effects. I can do lots with sprites, and a bit with shaders.

I am not terrible with graphics, and I can do some things well enough. So these elements are needed, but because the above art is the priority, I could do these myself:

• Tiles, transitions, paths, terrain – I'm moderately happy with how it currently is
• UI (menus, buttons, labels, panels, etc.)
• One or more splash screens (e.g. level lost, level won) – not essential and can replace with text
• Projectiles, their fly/hit animations, debuff effects
• Miscellaneous scene animations, like smoke, fire, etc.

You can see some of my “artwork” in the development diary of my blog, so you ought to at least surpass that.

The rest

My starting budget is $500 (≈£320/≈€370) and/or profit % if you like to gamble. I am paying from my pocket, so I cannot offer a high compensation. I want to do a collaboration and not just “buy graphics”, so I rather you are in this for the project and not just the . If this gets some nice art and screenshots going, I can try my luck at 8bitfunding or similar for more art budget.

The game is being written in C# w/ XNA. This makes it Windows-only for PCs, but is potentially portable to Xbox for XBLIG. I’m planning on initially putting it for purchase via BMT Micro or some other retailer in a couple to few months (I hope). I’ll register and make a simple website when I get a good title.

The project is not very original, but it introduces (technically “borrows” since nothing is ever new anyway) a few unique elements. I chose a simple idea, so that the implementation is simple and straight-forward. But the concept can also be built upon easily. I want a game published soon, so I can say I have gone through all the steps of online-publishing a commercial game.

I have a blog at http://blog.capdb.net/, and you can see the engine development in the semi-relevant diary I keep. I prefer to keep in touch, so I am in GMT+2 for those purposes. It’s not really essential that you are in Europe’s time zones, but that might work out best for IM communication. PM me, e-mail me at RudyTheDev at gmail, or IM Skype on RudyTheDev.

Thanks for reading,
Rudy.