Indie Dev Podcast

Kevin Giguère is a programmer in his thirties from Quebec, Canada, and the man behind Dragon Slumber, an isometric RPG created with XNA. Previously, Kevin worked on a JRPG, Arelite Core, which went through Steam Greenlight. Originally started as a dream project to create his own game from scratch, Kevin has done everything himself.

Sean Colombo has been making games for 15 years. After quitting college to run web-startup "LyricWiki", he sold the site to Wikia in 2009. A couple years later he founded BlueLine Games to focus on making digital versions of award-winning board games. BlueLine's flagship games "Hive" and "Khet 2.0" are currently the top two rated board games* among the 80 that are on Steam.

Currently, BlueLine is working on the Steam version of a famous Euro-game and updating all four of it's Steam titles which includes the free-to-play Simply Chess.

@SeanColombo

@BlueLineGames

BlueLineGameStudios.com

David Catuhe is a Principal Program Manager on Microsoft's TED team in Redmond. He is also one of the master minds behind the open source WebGL framework, BabylonJS.

WebGL has grown leaps and bounds in recent years, and Babylon continues to iterate with it. As mobile browsers continue to add support for WebGL, we will see more developers go from writing native applications to hybrid web-apps.

Join us as we talk about the current state of WebGL, in addition to his thoughts on asm.js and of c

This week I'm joined Mike Gnade, from Indie Game Stand, a site to discover a new indie game every few days. Developers can upload their wares while consumers can purchase the latest and greatest indie games at an affordable price.Unlike many competitions, this platforms offer a monthly subscription service which gets consumers 20% off the price of the title, and includes 7 games each month.

This week I'm joined Mike Gnade, from Indie Game Stand, a site to discover a new indie game every few days. Developers can upload their wares while consumers can purchase the latest and greatest indie games at an affordable price.Unlike many competitions, this platforms offer a monthly subscription service which gets consumers 20% off the price of the title, and includes 7 games each month.

Tonight I am joined by Daniel Parente, CEO and Game Director of Hydra Interactive Entertainment, a young indie development studio based out of Madrid, Spain.

He's previously worked on a number of titles, including Alien Spidy, History Legends of War: Patton, and Aliens in the Attic. The current title that his team is working on is Upside-Down Dimensions, an action adventure game of love and war, in a colorful paper crafted world, inspired by Japanese folklore and Origami.

We talk about how to properly scope a title that you're developing, in addition to understanding the role that publishers play in today's game development landscape.

In this follow up to episode 15, Michael gives a brief postmortem about releasing his first Playstation 4 title.

We discuss the process for getting approved through the ESRB as well as Europe's PEGI system, in addition to how to prevent burnout and fatigue from working on one project for too long.

Sony's fatastic services for independent developers are highlighted as well, and I inquire about Michael's decision to stick with MonoGame for his current and future titles.

All music is courtesy of Benjamin Briggs.

Intro / Outro: Diddy Kong Racing – Hi There! (Lobby)

http://benjaminbriggs.bandcamp.com/

https://www.facebook.com/bbriggsmusic

Joining me today are Game Designer / Leader Developer Jacob Pennock, and Executive Producer Mike Schaiman, and Art Director Melissa Pennock of Livid Interactive.

We talk diversifying a studio, making money in the middleware marketplace, how to stay afloat as an indie, and how they use Intel's RealSense technology and Unity to create their gesture based first person combat game, Head of the Order.

In 2010, the husband/wife team of Jacob and Melissa Pennock founded a small studio in North Carolina called Unicorn Forest Games. Unicorn Forest was mainly focused on providing outsourcing services, for games on facebook and mobile devices.

Soon after arriving in California, Jacob was introduced to Mike Schaiman, and joined the team at Helios Interactive. Helios uses a variety of technologies to build interactive experiences for consumers in retail and at large events.

In 2013, Head of the Order, a tech demo, was entered into Intel's Perceptual Computing Challenge, and took the first place prize in the games category.

Early in 2014, Helios took notice of the potential of the game, and the saw an opportunity for the company to open a new games division. So Livid Interactive was created, under the wing of its parent company, Helios. Their latest title, Head of the Order, is a magical fantasy game played entirely with gestural spell casts. It's format is similar to a tournament style fighting game but with magic instead of martial arts.

Illyriad-Games

Listen to the podcast.

Illyriad (ih-lih-re-ad) Games is an independent studio based across three continents. Realizing that WebGL isn't just a pipe dream, they've built their latest game on it. Their lcurrent title, Age of Ascent, is built on a custom WebGL engine, and is using Azure as a backend, with the ability to scale to 50k+ concurrent users.

Joining me tonight are CTO, Ben Adams, and CEO, James Niesewand. We discuss what it's like to manage a small team of developers across 3 continents, the importance of managing every last bit of processing power, when it comes to a game that scales to this size, and performance implications across browsers.

ageofascent.com

@Ben_A_Adams

@Jniesewand

Technical Whitepaper from Microsoft

Benjamin Briggs

All music is courtesy of Benjamin Briggs.

Intro / Outro: Diddy Kong Racing – Hi There! (Lobby)

http://benjaminbriggs.bandcamp.com/

https://www.facebook.com/bbriggsmusic

Founded in 2011, and based out of Wilmington DE, Wimbus Studios is the culmination of a few friends wanting to get together and make video games! Fueled by the passion to make awesome games that they would love to play themselves, Wimbus Studios is dedicated to making games that don’t suck! Their first title, The Island of Eternal Struggle, is a turn based RPG adventure.

Joining me today is Steve Sefchick, and Mike Williams. Becky Mount is also part of the team, but not able to make it on that evening. Join us as we talk about how they got started, why game development can often take so long, and their decision to stick with XNA and MonoGame at this time.

wimbusstudios.com

@WimbusStudios