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ContributionsDevelopment

GameStylus: We Want to Allow all People to Create Their Own Games

November 14, 2018 — by Industry Contributions

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By David Moren, GameStylus consultant

GameStylus is a small game studio located in Prague, Czech Republic. It started in 2013 with one idea: To create a simple game engine and game editor, which would allow anybody to create his/her own adventure games without lengthy programming. And so, many months later, the GameStylus.com web site and game engine were born. And first adventure games came, one of them reaching more than 1,4 millions of downloads.

GameStylus game studio was founded in 2013 by Petr Mandik, who had previous experience with adventure games development from his previous game company Agawa, which published adventure games in 1990s in the Czech republic. These were games for PC, published on CDs - who remembers these times? But the times has changed and this time he decided to target broader audience - mobile and PC gamers around the world. But as aforementioned, he wanted not only to create games, but also to offer his game engine and game editor to other people.

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Juggler Games: Exploring the Difficult Stories

November 21, 2017 — by Catherine Quinton

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The winner of Indie Games Poland (an Indie Prize Partner Event) is a game studio based in Warsaw, Poland. As a winner, Juggler Games had the opportunity to participate in Indie Prize Kyiv 2017. Although Juggler Games is relatively new on the game scene, it was formed by industry veterans who collectively bring more than twenty-five years of experience to this company. The three founders, Mikolaj Pawlowski, Jakub Jabloński and Łukasz Janczuk, discussed the possibilities for more than a year before taking the leap to start the company. The undeniable fact that led to forming the company was that when you work for someone else you have limited opportunities to explore your own ideas for games. In order to make their own dream game they had to have their own company.

What Sort of Company?

During their year of preparation they spent a great deal of time analyzing what sort of company they would have and what their first project should be. They also looked for an investor to help them get started. In February, 2016 they founded the company and by August they had a working prototype of their first project to take to GameCom.

EventsNews

Winners of the 20th Indie Prize at Casual Connect Kyiv 2017

October 30, 2017 — by Catherine Quinton

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Casual Connect Kyiv 2017 has been going strong in beautiful Kyiv, a city known for its history, creativity and culture, October 24, 25 and 26. And now we have the results of the exciting 20th Indie Prize competition.

Best Game Audio

Best Game Audio was awarded to Kenshō developed by FIFTYTWO, a Russian game studio. Kenshō is a mysterious game that takes place within a ruined room with doors opening onto beautiful landscapes. It is an addictive puzzle game with the player matching blocks and overcoming challenges to unfold the narrative.

Best Game Audio Kenshō developed by Fiftytwo was awarded by Natalie Portier and provided with prizes from Amazon and Appodeal at the 20th Indie Prize Awards during Casual Connect Kyiv 2017

Nominated for Best Game Audio were Melody Streaks by Beeble Games of India, a game where the player creates music with every move the character makes; Talking ABC by Hey-Clay of Ukraine, which uses animal characters to make learning fun; and Guns ‘n’ Stories: Bulletproof VR by Mirowin of Ukraine, bringing VR to the Wild West Era.

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Paweł Jędrysiak: Joining the Indie Masquerade

October 27, 2017 — by David Radd

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Paweł Jędrysiak is the Co-founder/Game Designer at Digital Melody. The indie developer created Masky, which was honored with the IGJAM 2016 mobile game category award.

“Participation in game jams let’s you test your skills under pressure of time. It’s also a lot of fun,” said Paweł. “Winning IGJAM 2016 in mobile game category was a truly great award! People appreciate our work while we had tons of fun - for what more could you ask for?”

“Game Jam is an extreme test of our skills as game developers,” Paweł continued. “Working as a team can be compared to a factory. To keep it productive every one needs to focus on their job that’s why we need to understand each other clearly. This kind of experience improves our everyday work. Especially process management and we improve our work as a team.”

The Expanding Polish Development Scene

Digital Melody is supported by Indie Games Polska, a game developer organization in Poland. The organization works to help developers, particularly indies, with support as needed.

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Artem Savotin: Find a New Homeland in Sayri Adventure

October 26, 2017 — by David Radd

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Artem Savotin, a Ukrainian developer, is the owner of Vidloonnya Reborn. He says that he got into the IT business more than 12 years ago.

“Games and game business always were a hot theme for me. I’ve created my own game projects at school and in the university along with my artist friend. I was a developer,” said Artem. “After graduating from the university I was working on enterprise development and outsourcing, where I went from a developer to a leader of a German IT company in Ukraine.”

Artem Savotin is the owner of Vidloonnya Reborn

Artem says that #DevGAMM 2016 in Moscow where he really started to understand game development. “I’ve decided there that I want to work on premium games, not F2P, since the creation of a fully functional commercial product was closer and clearer to me,” he detailed. “After the Moscow #DevGAMM in May 2016, we’ve started to experiment, and the first idea was based on evolution theme. The first prototype wasn’t very successful, alas. We’ve experimented with the control methods, and that appeared to be a typical beginner’s mistake, though the idea appeared to be very interesting from first sight.”

Early on the development team was Artem and Vasyl. At the time, Vasyl was still working with Unity, but he was experimenting with Unreal Engine during evenings and weekends and pushed that it was much better.

EventsNews

Indie Prize Participants from Poland to Compete in Kyiv

October 3, 2017 — by Catherine Quinton

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Four developers from Poland will be participating in the 20th Indie Prize at Casual Connect Kyiv 2017. The games require skills in racing, shooting, agility, determination and even friendship. To win any of the games you must overcome great obstacles.

Game Title: My Memory of Us
Developer: Juggler Games
Platform: Desktop Win
Website: www.jugglergames.com

Good, evil, human relationships – these are all things children experience differently from adults. My Memory of Us tell the story of two children from different worlds who meet and enjoy their friendship. Unfortunately, war breaks out and they must fight for survival. Robot soldiers are everywhere and some citizens are marked and forced to live in an area sealed behind a huge wall. As much as events seem to be pulling the children apart, their friendship holds them together.

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Pajama Llama Games: Finding Treasure in Flotsam

September 28, 2017 — by David Radd

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Stan Loiseaux of Pajama Llama Games is one of the creator of the game Flotsam. The indie game recently won the Grand Prix at White Nights Prague. The White Nights Conference is an international cross-platform business conference for game industry professionals, featuring plenty of networking parties and attended by thousands. As winner, Pajama Llama Games has the opportunity to compete at Indie Prize London at Casual Connect Europe.

“It was amazing and totally unexpected!” said Stan. “We’re still early in development so didn’t even think of winning any prizes anywhere yet. It certainly gives us a lot of encouragement to continue developing, knowing that people like it.”

While it’s a huge moment winning the Grand Prix and receiving a place at Indie Prize, Stan is still very reluctant to give out advice. He says this is his first game and he’s not sure he knows the real keys to success yet.

“If I had to give any advice it would be to start showing your game as soon as possible to other people,” said Stan. “Either to other developers or at conferences like White Nights. We have a small gamedev community in Belgium and we help each other all the time.”

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Kevin Beimers: Mona Lisa Stealing a Smile

September 13, 2017 — by David Radd

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Kevin Beimers fulfills a lot of roles for Italic Pig: writer, editor, producer, director, animator, artist, designer, developer, coder, and storyteller. He has helped create Schrödinger’s Cat and the Raiders of the Lost Quark with Italic Pig. He noted that what he learned from this was: “the weirder the idea, the less likely it is to be stolen”, which led to the development of Mona Lisa, a game where the titular character is a Renaissance robot art thief.

“I’ve always found Da Vinci fascinating – I think everybody does at least a little bit. I mean, here’s a guy so far ahead of his time, with buckets of ideas, talented in every facet of art and science from inventing to sculpting to painting to engineering to botany to anatomy… and that’s just from the codices that he let everybody have a peek at,” said Kevin. “The thing is, for every time he dropped a bomb on human invention – ‘Here you go, folks: I call it a helicopter. That’ll blow your mind.’ – how many of his ideas never saw another human face? I would imagine that for every codex he felt comfortable putting on display, there’s another 10 back in his basement he never told anybody about, and more than a few that he probably had to set fire to.”

“Then you’ve got the mystery of Mona Lisa: Who was she? Oh sure, historians think they’ve got her pinned down as either the wife of a Florentine cloth merchant, his secret same-sex lover, or Da Vinci himself. In other words, nobody’s got a clue,” he continued. “I asked the question: what could be the culmination of Leo’s work? All of his sketches of engineering works, all of his sketches of the human body, what if Mona Lisa the Painting was not his greatest creation, but Mona Lisa the Girl?

ContributionsIndieIndustry

Six Tips to Help You Be a Successful Indie Game Developer

June 26, 2017 — by Industry Contributions

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By Matt Garrett, Writer for LaptopNinja

The indie video gaming market is booming today, but although times have never been better for indie developers, it can still be tough for new indie developers to get things off the ground. If you are an aspiring indie developer and you need just a little help getting that first game released, keep reading. Below you will find five tips to help you become the next successful indie game developer.

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