Wolfire at Fantastic Arcade

Back in September, we stopped off in Austin to talk to a few people and do some shooting at Fantastic Arcade.  A couple of the many fine Indie Game Folk we met, were the guys from Wolfire Games.

They were there to talk about their latest game Overgrowth, and their (very) open development philosophy behind the project.  We were there with cameras in hand and thought we’d record the session and put it together.  We found it interesting and thought you would too.  (The talk is about 20 mins, but John & Aubrey make it go by quite fast).

Now, if you haven’t been to the Wolfire site yet - do it now!  It is staggering, the amount of information & blog posts they put out.  What’s really amazing is the production value & effort put into each post - they do a great job. Very much worth a read.

We had a great time at Fantastic Arcade.  It was a great event, with a tremendous amount of effort and support thrown behind it.  These guys wanted to put on a serious Indie Game showcase and they did exactly that!  Can’t wait for year two. The guys at Wolfire did a really nice recap of the event, check it out here.

Big thanks to Brandon Boyer & Adam Saltsman for the great hospitality and for letting us follow them around.  And we’d like to give a HUGE thank you to Mike Plante for allowing us to run around the Festival filming whatever we wanted, it was great :)

Polytron Shoot in Montreal

Earlier in October, we traveled from the south-west United States (by airplane this time :) ) to Montreal, Canada, to film with Polytron, the makers of Fez. (If you're not familiar, check out their most recent game trailer below.)

Phil Fish & Renaud Bédard were very generous with their time, their game and their personal story of development. Fez has been in the making for a while, and lots has happened since its initial announcement and win for Excellence In Visual Art at the Independent Games Festival 2008.

The guys at Polytron haven't released a lot of info about the game and/or their process during that time.   So, naturally, we were very grateful that they gave us so much access. We got insight into journey to make the game and the game itself, including all the decisions and layers beneath what you see in the trailers and screen shots (Hint: What's been released so far barely scrapes the surface of Fez :)

Their story is exceptionally compelling, and we're very excited to share it with you in the film!

IGTM At Your Local Newsstand!

Nathan Meunier wrote a really great article about what’s turning out to be a really exciting wave of independent docs focused on indie games and videogame culture.  Aside from the nice ink we scored, the article also talks about (and you should definitely go and check these out if you haven’t already):

• 2 Player Productions’ ‘Reformat the Planet’ - a Chiptunes documentary, and their behind-the-scenes productions of Sucker Punch’s ‘Infamous’ and Penny Arcade: The Series.
• Dan Lameroux’s ‘Nerdcore For Life’ - a doc looking at the nerdcore scene.
• Get Lamp - A doco by Jason Scott about the rise and fall of text-based adventure games.
• The Demoscene Documentary - A 7 part series that delves into the Finnish Demoscene.

Also, if you’re looking for more well-produced game video content, ByteJacker is back from hiatus and from the rumblings on twitter, Area5 is gearing up with more content (I think/hope).

Thanks so much to Nathan and EGM for including us in the article.  It's a total thrill seeing IGTM mentioned in EGM!

Super Meat Boy: Control

Hey Everyone,

We had a two day layover in Phoenix before our next shoot.  How did we spend it?  Kicking back and relaxing - notsomuch:)  We thought we'd put together a couple of new videos for the site.  This latest one is a small piece of conversation with Tommy & Edmund of Team Meat.

In it, the guys talk about Tommy's innate 'feel' for what's good/what's bad in a game's control.  It's a fun little talk that we thought would make an interesting video.  Check it out and let us know what you think...

Indie Game: The Movie - Online Extra - CONTROL from IndieGame: The Movie on Vimeo.

Super Meat Boy Out Soon:  And of course, SMB is coming out very very soon (Oct 20th) on XBLA (PC, Wii & Mac soon to follow).  The reviews for the game are fantastically positive.  Congrats to Tommy and Edmund!  They've worked their asses off on this game (we have proof on film!) and its great watching all that hard work pay off.

On that note, we thought we'd re-post a couple of the other SMB-related videos for your viewing enjoyment...

Kickstarter Panel At Comic Con

This past week, we had the very good fortune of being invited to New York by the Kickstarter Crew.  We were asked to be a part of a Kickstarter/Crowdfunding panel at Comic Con New York.  Naturally, we jumped at the chance!

We were on a panel with Yancy Strickler and Cindy Au of Kickstarter, fellow KS’ers Jamie Tanner (The Black Well) and Courtney Zell and Justin Rivers  (The Wonder City) - all very cool people :) The panel was scheduled to last only an hour, but the Q & A kept going well beyond that.

There was lots of good info for people considering doing a KS project.  The general conclusion of the discussion was that, for the most part, you get out of KickStarter what you put into it.  As Yancy put it, getting your project on KS is not equivalent to finding ‘some magical box of money in the woods’.  Though the community aspect to KS is strong, for the most part, people are not simply browsing KS looking for something to give their money to.  We often tell people to treat the site as a tool for engaging and enabling your audience.  But it’s an audience that you must go out and get and bring to the site.  KickStarter won’t do it for you (that’s not their role, its yours). 

R: Yancy Strickler of KS, L: The space pre-talkWe thought it might be useful to do a quick & dirty list of some of the takeaway points (note:  I’m going by memory here, so some of these numbers may be slightly off):

• Success Rate:  Approximately 40% of KS projects reach their funding goal.  A large number of the projects that do not succeed, fail to raise a single dollar.
• Number of Projects: As of this writing, Kickstarter has successfully funded over 3,000 projects (out of approx. 9,000).  Raising over $20,000,000 for independent creative projects.
• Gaining Steam:  6 of the top 8 largest Kickstarter fundraising totals have happened in the past couple of weeks (it is projected that this project could be the new number one).
• Tipping Point:  90% of projects that hit 30% of their funding target are eventually successful.  30% seems to be a magic number of sorts.
• Shorter the Better:  On KS, your project fundraising period can be set anywhere between 30 and 90 days.  According to the numbers, the most successful fundraising duration is 30 days.  The least successful:  90 days.

Fun Fact:

Kickstarter was originally conceived as a way to save Arrested Development.  The general idea being that if a website could motivate fans to pre-fund a season’s worth of DVD sales (and/or related assets), the network would sign off on a fourth season or the show could be produced independently.

Kickstarter’s founders had a friend who was cousins with David Cross.  They pitched the idea to Cross, and though it (sadly) never happened (for many reasons other than funding), David Cross signed on as an initial KickStarter investor.

So, there you have it, Kickstarter, a site meant to engage fans in the creative process was born out of an attempt to do just that.

Outside the Kickstarter officesWe had a great time in New York.  We like to send a HUGE thanks to Kickstarter for, number one:  existing!  And number two:  Inviting us out to talk.  Thank you to Yancy, Cindy and the very nice Kickstarter gang!