So, hi! My name is Kelley Frisby, and I’m an unsuspecting victim in the indie game process (LOL). Truthfully, I’m a traditional artist who saw a unique and interesting challenge in front of her and jumped head first without thinking of all the obstacles I was about to come into contact with. When initially approached to join with Ugly Baby Studios and their premier game, Exhumed, I thought to myself, “Oh, no. I can’t do that. I draw cute things, girly things, things that parents read to their children before bed.” What do I know about zombies and video games? Not that much apparently, but it turns out I am a quick learner. I took my ridiculously expensive art school education and did some research.
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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.
I know, I know, we JUST changed the look. It’s a bit soon to be making the change, but we felt that the new look, while a pretty good improvement over the old one, just wasn’t quite popping for us. Consequently we’ve moved onward, upward, forward, and here we stand. Whaddya think?
So, you can probably tell that a couple of things have happened. First off, we’re back. Yay us! Second, the site’s different now…like WAY different. We’ve taken an exciting plunge and dumped our previous content management system, Joomla, in favor of the vastly superior WordPress blogging system. For our needs, WordPress is simply a better fit and offers far more features with a great deal less management hassle, and we’re excited to be joining the very large community of WordPress bloggers out there.
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