There was a particular genre of games, a rather niche genre, that existed in my gaming youth. It could best be described as "action flight simulator" and while it hasn't carried forward into today's gaming market as readily as the 'shmups and platformers, many of its ideas and mechanics can be found in modern flight sims. Kenn...
Most games these days seem to have a supported "shelf-life" of about two years. That time is even shorter if the game is pretty much universally billed as "one of the worst games ever." But that didn't stop the developers at Spiral Game Studios and TREK Industries when ORION: Dino Beatdown was released....
This month in Indie-Ana Co-Op, we hear from Devil's Dare developer Secret Base about how to balance a game for multiple players. Devil's Dare is a four player beat 'em up that takes may of its cues from the arcade games of yore. Raymond Teo, lead developer at Secret Base, takes us through his process of adjusting a game f...
Co-op gaming has definitely grown in the past few years but it's a two-edged sword. Just because a game includes co-op doesn't always mean it has co-op that was part of the design decisions from day one. This month in Indie-Ana Co-Op, lead designer/founder of Mount Olympus Games, Lyle Cox, shares his vision and design philosophy with u...
This confession should come first: I seriously considered making Retrobooster only a single player experience when I started it. As a solo developer, more game modes sounded daunting. Fortunately, all the complaints from friends and my memories of co-op and melee games were too much to bear. In fact, the multiplayer modes in Retrobooster were origi...
This month in Indie-Ana Co-Op, we hear from the Yeti Trunk, aka "Team Wanderlust." Since their initial outing into the world of game development a year and a half ago with Wanderlust: Rebirth, Yeti Trunk has released a couple of mobile game for the iPhone/iPad market. Now they're looking to return to the world of Wanderlust, and co-founder Matthew Griffin wants to share with all the other indie devs out there the one thing that's helped them out the most: listening to the fans.
This week in Indie-Ana Co-Op, A Jolly Corpse steps up to the microphone to share with us their own story of how two plucky adventurers can bring out the best (and at times, the worst) in us, all in the name of cooperation.
This week in Indie-Ana Co-Op we host yet another great Dev Story, this time from Misfits Attic, developer behind the recently release A Virus Named TOM on PC. While the lack of online co-op was a little disheartening, the camaraderie built via couch co-op is one of the game's stronger selling points. Tim Keenan, lead developer/designer/Bostonian for the game, discusses this and how interacting with your players is like a marriage.
This week in Indie-Ana Co-Op, we continue with our Dev Stories series with an entry from Cadenza Interactive, the indie dev studio behind Sol Survivor and the upcoming Retrovirus. They share their story of what they learned about cooperative gameplay, how it helped inform areas outside of co-op in their latest game, and the opportunities indie developers have to help shape cooperative gaming.
When the Indie-Ana Co-Op feature first began, I always intended to one day extend this space to the indie development community to share their trials and tribulations in game making. Today marks the first of what I hope to be many such pieces as Final Form Games, developers of our PC Co-Op GOTY winner Jamestown, share their story of making a four player 'shmup, and the challenges they faced along the way. This is a must read!
