Dev Links: Battleship
Marketing, tips for stealth games, and a new direction for Facebook game developers, in today’s Developer Links.
Mark Of The Ninja‘s Five Stealth Design Rules (Gamasutra)
“For Klei Entertainment’s Nels Anderson, making a great stealth action video game meant throwing out a lot of a lot of the genre’s existing tropes. Anderson was lead designer on Mark of the Ninja, a stealth game that brought an unconventional twist to the genre through its 2D side-scrolling vantage point.”
Battling The Past (Vlambeer)
“For the past six months or so, Vlambeer has been working on LUFTRAUSERS, our 2D dogfighting game in which players get to pilot and customize their own RAUSER. This new game is built upon the foundations of the singularized original, LUFTRAUSER, which we released more than a year ago.”
Sir, You Are Being Funded: Kickstarter Complete! (Big Robot)
“The Kickstarter is complete. We’re funded, and we’ve been able to unlock a whole bunch of brilliant stretch goals. It’s been an amazing experience.”
Working For The Quiet People (Bientôt l’été)
“One of the reasons why our culture is flooded with loud banality is that the people who enjoy silence and integrity are, in fact, silent. They do not talk. They do not participate in the collective circus of capitalism. They do not vote on things. Because they believe making a competition out of everything is demeaning. So what they believe in always loses.”
Collecting Playtest Data (The Witness)
“In The Witness, when progress in your game is saved, we also save a thumbnail that shows you where you were. This makes it easier to load a particular game later if you had multiple saves. Here is our current, very unpolished load screen:”
The Mobile Transition: Why Facebook Developers Are Making The Shift (Gamasutra)
“The Facebook market is transitioning; its power players have reached out and embraced mobile and tablet versions of their games. Buoyed by an opening of the floodgates on the viral channels enabled by Facebook itself earlier this year, today’s top-tier developers now say it’s essential to support these platforms with native apps that hook into the Facebook versions of their games.”
Marketing Outside The Box (AltDevBlogADay)
“So, as an indie developer new to the scene, the thought of marketing my game has proven to be a daunting one. There are many avenues for marketing available through third parties, but indies rarely have the money for that sort of thing.
Many excellent blog posts before have gone into the various ways in which an indie can get their product out there on the cheap, but I want to talk about going a little bit deeper, and tell how you can use gamer psychology to your advantage to do a lot of your marketing for you.”
Hmmm…Big Todo List (Cliffski.com)
“So… most of this week is probably going to be spent doing early preparatory code on the mystery ‘new’ game, which I plan to talk about in January, although don’t expect nice screenshots until at least march. The reason for that is all the intervening stuff, not least Christmas and it’s traditional disruption, and some tedious decorating to do, but I’m also going to to visit friends in Australia. Yes Australia.”
