Hey

During my trip to San Francisco and Game Developer’s Conference, I recorded a bunch of clips and put them on YouTube as a video blog. You can see them all here:

• Day 1 – Travelling to SF
• Day 2 – Visiting Mission and Castro with Erik, Kian, Nils and Bernhard
• Day 3 – First day of Independent Games Summit
• Day 4 – Second day of IGS
• Day 5 – Independent Games Festival pavilion and award ceremony
• Day 6+7 – More from IGF and various parties

/ jeb

It’s 2PM and Jeb and Thewreck are still sleeping, reason?
Yesterday we attended the Swedish Game Awards Grand Finale at Kulturhuset in Stockholm, representing Harvest. By representing I don’t mean just exhibiting the game, I mean social representation too (AKA drinking beer with fellow Indie-spirits discussing Indie-glory).
Great success! If anyone of you ever stop by Skåne, give us a call!

I must say, after having been a bit disappointed by some of the downloadable games at the SGA web site I was pleasantly surprised by this year’s line-up, especially by Blueberry Garden and Swarm!
Hit “Read More” to see the winners and video coverage of the ceremony!
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Yesterday and today the Nordic Game 2008 is running here in Malmö (Sweden), which means the “number of game developers per capita” has sky-rocketed for a moment. We took this opportunity to meet up with some of the indie celebrities, namely Petri Purho, maker of IGF 2008 winner Crayon Physics Deluxe and Crayon Physics, Erik Svedäng, maker of the very much talked about Blueberry Garden, and Martin didn’t-catch-his-last-name who runs www.grapefrukt.com and a lot of cool stuff in his blog.

Hit the jump for pictures!

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During last year we had an office in a barracks owned by the university. This was a great opportunity for us to try working together in a shared environment. Unfortunately this offer was only available for up to one year, so we had to move out sooner or later (we managed to get an extra two months, muhaha). Since we didn’t want to go back to working from our own appartments, we looked for a new office, and found one not far from where we had been.

Two weeks ago we moved our stuff to the new place and I took pictures. Hit the jump to get it all!

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Derek Yu has posted the Independent Games Festival winners over at TIGSource. The grand prize winner is quite surprising, in my opinion, but still very cool! I had vouched for World of Goo, which won two other prizes, or Hammerfall, which had to leave with nothing.

Unfortunately, none of the three Swedish games won anything… better luck next year! Hit the jump for the full list.

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In my humble opinion, the best part about working with game development is that it potentially involves many different skills, like programming, sound editing, composing and graphic design.
The downside of this of course being that each branch comes with an expensive license for the application involved.

Or does it?
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I was given the heads-up about an interesting article over at the indie game developer Grey Alien Games. Jake Birkett, who runs Grey Alien, had attended Casuality 2008 in Amsterdam and seen a lecture by Reflexive and Enkord on the topic of making games for passion or for profit.

During the presentation, Reflexive and Enkord explained which of their games were made for passion and which were made for financial reasons (also some were made for both reasons). They showed this on a simple diagram where passion was on the left and financial was on the right. Then, very interestingly, they revealed whether those games were a financial success or not based on if they had made a profit or loss.

Their conclusion was that games made for passion had a better result on average. That feels good, there’s hope in this world after all.

Read the whole article here.

/jeb

I was pointed to an interesting, if somewhat gloomy, interview with Russell Carroll over at IndieGames.com the other day. Russell Carroll is the founder of Game Tunnel, an indie game site, and he talks about how difficult it has been to get mainstream attention for indie games:

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the 2007 awards came off to the sound of crickets. Major websites, such as Slashdot, which in the past have given us front page coverage, didn’t cover us at all, not even in their games section. Watching stories about rumors and cakes in the shape of a DS showing up on all the major game blog sites while the awards were not covered was initially devastating.

I think Game Tunnel still is the link between mainstream and indie, because most indie sites simply are too indie. However, for me personally, Game Tunnel has became slightly stale over the years. They’ve made some minor updates on the layout, but the images for the game genre links still show the same games as they did two years ago (probably longer). It’s like a bulletin board where the posts never are changed… which also amplifies the disappointment that the game of the year awards didn’t get more recognition.

/ jeb