http://www.cynicalstuff.com A blog about casual games development, science, culture and cynical observations Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:17:42 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I have an ever-growing file with ideas for various games and applications. A few years ago it contained a few gems like Grabble (Grammar Scrabble) in which you place words instead of letters and have to form grammatically correct sentences, and DoodlePad which was a text editor much like Notepad, ... http://www.cynicalstuff.com/a-quick-look-at-my-ideas-file I recently saw a couple of blog posts discussing the price point of indie games. Here's a good writeup by Dave Gilbert, author of games like The Shivah and The Blackwell Legacy. Another good piece is the How to Afford that $15 Indie Game comic. Be sure to read the ... http://www.cynicalstuff.com/indie-games-price-point My latest game Wildhollow was released before Christmas, and while I'm still no millionaire it's selling enough to finance my next project. I'll do a proper Wildhollow postmortem later, but right now I'm going to babble on about upcoming things. Interestingly enough, when I started working in Wildhollow it was ... http://www.cynicalstuff.com/my-next-project-is-a-spandex-force-sequel Last week I had an interesting conversation about confusing units. For instance, the commonly used light year is of course not a measurement of time despite its rather confusing suffix. During that conversation I heard about another length measurement called beard second. As you can imagine, what it measures is ... http://www.cynicalstuff.com/beard-second-and-drunk-mile In my last post I complained about the lack of a perfect silver bullet game engine that would fit my needs as a small indie developer starting up a new game project. My three primary target platforms are Windows, Mac and the web, in roughly that order. "But Karja, haven't you ... http://www.cynicalstuff.com/web-and-downloadable-game-engine-choices-2009 This post is going to get a bit technical, so if you're easily bored by the gritty details of game development you might want to go somewhere else right now. Maybe to Cute Overload or something. My latest game, Wildhollow, is released and I have some great ideas for my next ... http://www.cynicalstuff.com/game-engine-choices-for-indie-developers-2009 My latest adventure/pet raising game Wildhollow is released and things are progressing fairly well. Many seem to like it, and thanks to Pätr a game-stopping bug was found in time. It could have been immensely embarrasing otherwise... For the ones curious what Wildhollow is all about, here are two reviews: http://jayisgames.com/archives/2009/11/wildhollow.php http://www.gamertell.com/gaming/comment/gamertell-review-wildhollow-for-pc-and-mac/ Also, I'm ... http://www.cynicalstuff.com/wildhollow-reviews-and-warez Juuso of the Game Producer blog has initiated a cool project: an indie games xmas calendar. The concept is to reveal a new game each day, until...well, you can guess what day. For obvious reasons there's only one game revealed so far, but I'm interested in what games are going ... http://www.cynicalstuff.com/follow-the-indie-games-xmas-calendar FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Get Ready for Adventure! KarjaSoft Releases Wildhollow Sweden, November 27, 2009 -- Independent game developer KarjaSoft proudly announces the release of tongue-in-cheek adventure/pet raising game Wildhollow for Windows and Mac. Wildhollow introduces the story of a young boy or girl returning home to find his or her parents missing under ... http://www.cynicalstuff.com/get-ready-for-adventure-karjasoft-releases-wildhollow "Karja, you lazy sod! Why haven't you blogged for several weeks now," I hear you cry. Well, SOME of us have a full time job while we also try to fit in a wedding (not my own!), beer with friends, TV-series (I love House M. D.!) and casual adventure game ... http://www.cynicalstuff.com/wildhollow-release-tomorrow