Four months ago, I went indie. Since then, I’ve been dealing with some light anxiety about my work and my place in the game development community. To some extent, this is totally normal; after all, I bet my life savings on my ability to succeed in a perpetually overcrowded market. But my anxiety goes beyond […]
Read more →Meet Aaron: Aaron San Filippo is an indie game developer. More importantly, he’s a nice guy. He gives a lot back to the community, writing articles and doing interviews, and he’s always been polite and positive in Twitter or email conversation. We’d all be better off with more people like him. He and his brother are making a […]
Read more →A blog post by Sara Gross made something of a splash yesterday by blasting indies for elitism. “After the indie community’s reaction to the preview of Bungie’s Destiny game, I am absolutely ashamed to be called an indie. FUCKING ASHAMED. Seriously, indies! What the fuck is wrong with all of you?” As evidence, the article […]
Read more →(The subject of this article, Bombball, is playable online. Check it out!) At GDC 2012, I had the pleasure of playing a game called Hokra at a party. I had never heard of it before, but I watched a game from across the room, and it looked like some easy fun. And it was! Playing […]
Read more →My OUYA dev console arrived last week, and almost immediately afterwards I heard about the Kill Screen CREATE game jam. Since deadlines do wonders for my productivity, and since I knew I eventually wanted to make something for the OUYA anyway, I decided to give it a shot. I started late, unfortunately. It’s billed as […]
Read more →You can play Farmpunk here. I created Farmpunk for the 2012 Indie Speed Run, a 48-hour game jam / competition. It was my first game jam ever, and I worked solo. Development was kind of a mess. What Went Right: 1) The idea. I was given the random variables of “Construction” and “Seeds”. In the […]
Read more →Hi. I’m E McNeill, and I am an indie game designer. I’ve been making that claim for a while, but only now do I feel like I can really mean it wholeheartedly. About a month ago I finally took the plunge. I went indie full-time. Of course, I’ve been doing my own work in games […]
Read more →Moralityball, my experimental sport / social experiment, finally debuted at the 2012 DCGames Festival on September 1st. I wrote previously about playtesting the game, which gave a pretty good idea of how the game is played. I didn’t settle on the “final” rules until the night before the festival, but I’m pleased to report that the game […]
Read more →Moralityball is a new sport / social experiment that I submitted to this year’s DCGames festival. It was originally created for a “Values at Play” course at Dartmouth College, drawing inspiration from the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons to model a tricky collaborative problem. That was the intention, anyway! In practice, it needed a lot of work, […]
Read more →Some games are designed to addict players and take their money. That is their purpose in this world. If the player engages with the game repeatedly, the game verbs are declared “fun”, no matter how vapid they may be. The usual pattern is to get players emotionally invested in the game loop and then hold […]
Read more →
Mar 11, 2013
emcneill