Monthly Archives: November 2009

This talk is awesome. I mean, really, really relevant stuff if you are an indie trying to get your game onto XBLA, PSN, WiiWare, or Steam. Dave Edery delivered a fantastic keynote at the Digital Distribution Summit in Australia on what indies can really expect to have to do to get their game accepted onto the Xbox Live Arcade, where the bar is an how it’s moving, and how to best hedge your bets and make sure that your game does as well as it possibly can.

Skip to 8 min in and then watch the entire video. It’s super business oriented but again, if you make games and are serious about making a living doing so then I would really recommend checking this out.

So what do you think of the new website? Pretty badass, huh? If you are experiencing problems viewing the page please, PLEASE e-mail us at support<at>firehosegames[dot]com so we can fix the bug. Please include what browser and version you were using when you saw the bug (you can find out by clicking in the top bar on Help, then About to find out what browser version you’re using), and a screenshot would be super useful too. Thanks!

This week has been packed with talks. On Tuesday I was part of a panel at Northeastern on business and making a name for yourself in gaming. Some of the highlights? The most game changing innovation in gaming in the past 5 years has been the advent of social networking in games (and games in social networking), that new UIs will be one of the main changing forces in the next 5 years, and that the iPhone is a complete shit platform for developers without major IP to make real money (although the business model of a 70/30 split with the distributor is a pretty good one). The panel was a bit pessimistic about one’s chances of “making it big” in the games industry given how fragmented and hit driven the industry is, but that’s with good reason! Think how many studios are shutting down nowadays, and how many people try to make games and never get off the ground.

The AI talk at Boston Post Mortem on Wednesday was a bit more technical, and featured a high powered panel of AI designers for major titles like Halo 2/3, Bioshock, and F.E.A.R. . The panelists discussed some of the problems with making “intelligent” AIs (“Ray casting is the bane of my existence”), and there were lots of interesting anecdotes. One panelist pointed out that it is more important for characters to NOT look stupid than to look smart, since people may not notice an AI that is coming up with a neat plan but will definitely notice a character trying unsuccessfully to walk through a wall. Another good point was that many people won’t notice AI when they are desperately trying to survive, but that if you put the game on god mode all of a sudden you can see all sorts of little bugs you might not have normally noticed. The panel was really great, I hope future post mortems are of the same quality!

So while we were busy crunching for some competition deadlines, GAMBIT was in full swing with some awesome speakers. Most recently they had Clint Hocking, a super famous developer and the creative director of Ubisoft Montreal, in to give a talk on hyper realism in video games. Being the main guy behind Far Cry 2 and Splinter Cell I think this guy has some serious cred in that area, and the talk looks fascinating.

Gene was awesome enough to video tape the entire 90 minute talk and following Q+A, watch it here!

Over the next 24 hours or so this site might look a little bit messy as we redesign it. Yes, we’re going to edit a website while it’s live and yes, we know it’s a bad idea.

What are you going to do about it, punk?

We’d like to introduce you to Slam Bolt Scrappers!!

What is Slam Bolt Scrappers, you ask? Why, only the awesomest game you’ll ever play! It’s a smart brawler, full of frantic beat ‘em up action with an engaging puzzle element. It’s what we’ve been hard at work developing over the past few months, and what we recently entered into the IGF and the Indie Game Challenge.

Check out www.slamboltscrappers.com for more information on the game and some awesome concept art.

Keep checking back for juicy tidbits of development as we chug along.