by Jason Ward | February 23, 2009 in Industry Blog | 2 Comments
Pardon my french, but this is fuckin’ cool. You’ll have to check out the video for the full skinny, but after you do be sure to hit the jump and let’s talk about what a scanner like this could mean for Indie Developers who don’t have the resources to hire an army of 3D sculptors!
by Jason Ward | February 19, 2009 in Indie Games, Site Maintenance, UBS | Comments Off
Over the past few years we’ve covered a fairly broad range of topics on this site, blogging about anything even tangentially related to the Games Industry. At the same time we’ve provided period reviews of titles both big and small on all platforms. Heck, we’ve even covered Industry Events such as E3, E for All and others, with our team of…well, admittedly lazy but quite zealous geeks marauding about assorted booths taking pictures of scantily clad babes, playing stuff that hasn’t been released and generally having a good time.
But the raison d’etre of the Ugly Baby Studios team has always been the development of fun ideas, especially those relating to games and animated shorts. We’ve participated in (and actually did pretty well at!) film festivals with ridiculously short deadlines, we’ve worked on Mod projects, and generally had a good time doing all of it. Now it’s getting a little more serious, and so we’re honing in the focus of both our team and our site. As we move forward from now, we’re zooming in on Independent Games, with a special focus on XNA and Xbox Live Community Games (XBLC), which may just be the most significant turn to ever hit a games console or the Indie Developer scene. We’ll have some announcements coming a little further down the pike with regards to this topic.
As always, UBS will remain a blog, and as such we’ll do periodic reviews, though we’ll focus these on Indie Games (or their demos if we’re too cheap to buy the full game). We’ll blog about tools and techniques that you can use in your own Indie Games, and we’ll interview and have conversations with other Independent Development teams who’re working on their breakaway masterpieces as we speak. Any way you slice it, though, this narrowing of focus and reinvigoration of purpose will enable us to deliver a superior experience as we move forward, and we hope you’ll join us.
If there’s something specific you’d like to see covered, by all means let us know! We’re always open to hearing from you and believe me, we read every email we get from those who feel the need to drop us a line. If we can make your experience on the web a better one, don’t hesitate to tell us how.
by Jason Ward | February 13, 2009 in Gaming, Indie Games | Comments Off
Recently I had the opportunity to talk a little with Binary Tweed Managing Director Daniel Jones about the studio’s upcoming game release, Clover. If you haven’t heard, Clover will be the studio’s first foray onto the Xbox 360′s new Community Games service, which for the first time allows Independent Developers legal and authorized access not only to put their games onto a legitimate games console, but to sell them for a profit. For countless small teams without the resources to get on the radar of the big publishers, this is a veritable dream come true. For the Games Industry as a whole, this is an opportunity for hitherto undiscovered talent, both in skill and in gameplay concepts, to create a name for themselves.
In pursuit of that we’re pleased to speak with Mr. Jones and thank him for his time. Without further ado, Binary Tweed!
UBS: What factors drew your team to create a game for the new Xbox Live Community (XBLC) games service?
DJ: XBLC has dramatically lowered the barriers of entry to large-audience games development. The biggest draw of the service has to be the extremely large user base combined with a piracy-proof delivery mechanism.
UBS: Working with XNA, have you found the technology to be limiting in any way or has it allowed you to express the vision you wanted to? What would you say is the biggest strength of using XNA to create a game for XBLC? It’s biggest weakness?
DJ: So far XNA hasn’t limited us in any way, and there are some very impressive titles being developed using the technology. Being a C# library, it’s mostly object-oriented which brings with it the strengths and weaknesses of C# itself. I come from a Java background and by comparison C#’s documentation and APIs just aren’t as well thought-out and presented, but moving to an OO language helps move games development away from the ‘hacking’ mentality that C++ can lend itself to.
The biggest strength of XBLC development is probably not XNA itself (although being based on a high-level OO language enables this) but the community that Microsoft have been nurturing. For the most part there are some really friendly and helpful people on the Creator’s Club forums.
Coming from an enterprise Java background looking in on the games industry, it’s always seemed that games development has suffered from the closed nature of the business. There’s a great deal of information sharing present in the J2EE development community, and a lot of great open-source projects. Hopefully the Creator’s Club will start going some way to emulate this more collaborative approach.
by Jason Ward | January 21, 2009 in Consoles, Industry Blog | Comments Off
Although Executive flame wars like those routinely highlighting mega-gaming blogs can be a lot of fun (after all, who doesn’t enjoy reading about Sony’s crackpot comments or Microsoft’s clueless retorts?), ultimately they just make the companies involved look a little…juvenile. We all love to laugh at (insert company name here) when they make fools of themselves, and when they do, the blogs love it because they get page traffic like there’s no tomorrow.
But what these things ultimately end up engendering rarely reaches beyond the level of pissing off Group A, Group B or both. It doesn’t take much effort to find a PS3/360 related flame war on the net, after all.
Then enter Nintendo, who’s Wii has become the utterly undisputed champion of this generation, nearly matching the combined sales of both its competitors, a goal it will likely reach this quarter. When we see mention of Nintendo in the press it’s usually in the context of how their new system and its software is helping someone. The elderly. The sick. The Injured. The Children.
One of the best examples I’ve seen of this is a posting on mega-gaming blog Kotaku today, proclaiming that Wii Fit Helps Paralyzed Girl Walk Again. I’m sure it’s overstated, I’m sure it had more to do with her doctors than Wii fit itself did, but the effect on perception is profound all the same.
