Another year, another Independent Games Festival; another Independent Games Festival, another group of finalists; another group of finalists, another army of aggrieved developers who didn’t make the cut. There has arisen something of a tradition among indie developers of complaining about the Independent Games Festival. There are reasons for that. For one thing, the stakes [...]

Last night, I watched the fourth and final part of Matt Barton’s interview with Jay Barnson, developer of Frayed Knights. In the interview, I was disturbed to hear that someone had gone to the trouble of cracking the (incredibly minimal and non-invasive) copy protection on the game, then distributing it to a variety of warez [...]

Project Zomboid isn’t quite dead-by-real-life (the tag below notwithstanding), but that doesn’t mean that life hasn’t given the project a few sound wallops with murderous intent. First Paypal froze their account. Then Google Checkout decided to do the same. Then pirates created an auto-updating pirated build of the game which threatened to kill them with [...]

Eric Scwarz has posted an opinion piece on Gamasutra arguing that RPGs are not about story or decision-making so much as they are about rulesets: As narrative elements began to creep into RPGs, as players began to get attached to the characters they played as and the universes they inhabited, RPGs began to become associated [...]

GameBanshee caught this little gem from Gamepro, published this past Thursday: The PC version of the Cthulhu Saves the World and Breath of Death VII double pack from independent developer Zeboyd Games launched yesterday alongside Gaslamp Games’ charming roguelike Dungeons of Dredmor. All three are excellent games and well worth your time — cheap, too. [...]

Or, as I somewhat-less-tactfully put it on my developer website: “So you created an action RPG. Stop congratulating yourself.” You may have heard about the recent (and highly unfortunate) Gamasutra interview with Matt Findley, in which the former Black Isle dev announced that turn-based RPGs were basically an unfortunate accident of history caused by limitations [...]

I posted an article on SinisterDesign.net on Wednesday evening analyzing the RPG genre, looking for a common thread that ties all RPGs together. Here’s a choice quote: RPGs are fundamentally creative games: even the ones about killing and destroying everything. Because even those RPGs aren’t really about destroying. They’re about building and shaping your character, [...]

This is interesting: general-purpose RPG news site RPGWatch has posted the results of a poll in which they asked people to rank this year’s upcoming crop of RPGs according to which look the most promising. Indie RPGs made quite a strong showing in the poll, taking second (Frayed Knights) and fourth place (Avadon) in the [...]

Here’s wishing you a great new year full of fun and games!

Canadian gaming blog Above 49 has a post on the unexpected expense of designing an indie game, and the importance of people supporting indie games: It’s also god damn hard to make a game, even as an indie, for less than a million dollars. Another person here, another few months there and a budget can [...]