Utah Indie Night, Summer 2008
Tonight we held the quarterly Utah Indie Game Developer's Meet (that's not an official title or anything...) at the offices of Wahoo / NinjaBee. Lane ordered extra pizza this time for the meeting, because - apparently - last time they ran out. The time I missed. This time, there were fewer people there than usual ("only" a little over 20 people), and I was offering a presentation. Should this be telling me something?

Tonight was a little different in that we had a formal presentation. Well, as formal as we ever get, at least. We were supposed to have two presentations - I had one on marketing for indies, and someone else who had to cancel was going to present a little discussion on developing with the Unity engine. It was just me, and I went overtime. I think I'll re-do the presentation as a blog post or two so I can bore even more people with it. I think it was entitled, "Marketing for Indies Who Know Squat About Marketing," with a subtitle of "10 Quick and Dirty Tips To Help Sell Your Game." I was trying to take 90 seconds per tip, but it was closer to 3 minutes each. Maybe I should have had only 5 tips.

Live and learn. Some people told me they really enjoyed it, and some folks even took notes. So I guess I didn't put everyone to sleep.

After that, we had the game demos and the informal discussions. ALWAYS a good time! Dan & Herb Flower and Paul Witte were there showing of LinkRealms, which I understand is about to undergo a name change. Except they haven't quite figured out the new name yet. They've also done some massive overhaul of how the player-created "realms" are organized.

Daniel Orcutt, representing Gabob.com, was demoing their newest game, "Now Boarding." It's sort of a comedic airline tycoon game, and is available as a PC download (Mac version coming soon). It looks really, really cool. I was impressed. It's definitely not a hardcore tycoon game, and should appeal to more casual audiences. It's currently at a special price for launch of only $14.99.

Josh Jones had three flash games he was showing off. The first game, "Mudsling," was.... weird. It was a physics-based game that using what I'd consider hyperactive mud balls. The balls would stick, vibrate, and move each other around. It's a two-player game where the goal is to create (or delete) mud balls to get as many balls as possible on your side of a playfield by the end of the game. Careful application of mud can cause an entire stack of sticky, vibrating mud to creep from one side of the playfield to the other. His second game, which I think was called "Tarijump" or something like that (I'll correct it later if I got it wrong), which was a short puzzle / adventure game where you could collect items, and then jump near them to change them.

The third of Josh's games was called "Fate" (Not the same as the the WildTangent RPG) and consisted of four mini-games. The first was a side-shooter. The second was sort of an RPG-esque thing where you were in a ship fighting sea monsters (and... uh, mermaids). The third was an incomplete text / story creation game a la Madlibs. And the fourth was a puzzle game. What was interesting is that the game would measure and monitor how you played these games - what you did, how long you played, where you clicked, where you focused your attention, etc. At the end, it would then tell you what kind of a gamer you are based upon your responses to the games.

And then we had the discussions. I spoke at length with Joseph Gonzalez of The Media Mogul blog, Josh, Greg, Herb, and others about all kinds of topics from marketing, going indie, frustrations with mainstream game development, I.P. management, hiring and managing contractors, developing in Torque and other game development tools, running an indie game website, and just how much the industry is changing right now. In some ways, the discussions and networking always feels like the "meat" of the indie nights for me, though it's the part usually only shared by different groups of 3-5 people at a time. Which means everybody has a little different "Indie Night" from me.

And ... speaking of which... I found that Joseph has blogged about the Utah Indie Night too, and so I recommend visiting that site for more insight as to what goes on at these secret, smoke-filled indie meetings. And as usual, Greg Squire has offered his recap of indie night.

Most of all, my take-away from these meetings was a feeling of inspiration and excitement for the indie side of the video game industry.

Previous Utah Indie Night Posts:
* Utah Indie Night, Winter 2008
* Utah Indie Night, Fall 2007
* Utah Indie Night, Summer 2007
* Utah Indie Night, Spring 2007
* Utah Indie Game Dev Night, Fall 2006
* Utah Indie Night, Summer 2006
* Utah Indie Game Developer Night, Spring 2006

Labels: Indie Evangelism

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