I (Mac) just returned from Indiecade in Culver City (LA) which was equal parts inspiring, tiring, and pure fun. I was there as part (music/sound) of the Pillow Castle team showing off the latest demo of Museum of Simulation Technology. What an amazing event filled with daring and exciting games largely free from the evil tentacles of corporations and profit margins. One of the big stand outs for me was GoodbyeWorld Games’ Close Your which was an extremely moving and fascinating experience that won the developer’s choice award. It uses a webcam to accurately detect when your eyes are blinking. Every time you blink the narrative jumps forward. I won’t spoil too much of it, but it’s execution is incredible.
Wandering around Indiecade, I was also fortunate to run into David DeCarmine, the creator of Gamejolt. Gamejolt holds a very special place in DAM’s heart as one of the main reasons we were able to reach so many people with the prototype of Not Everything is Flammable. In addition to being the main place we pointed people towards for downloads, Gamejolt allowed us to reach a tremendous amount of Youtube Let’s Players all across the world. David was thrilled to hear about how much the site meant to us. It was cool to hear stories about how many people doubted David when he created Gamejolt for things like allowing any game to be uploaded and for allowing downloads rather than keeping things strictly flash-based. Now it is one of the biggest sources of free indie games on the planet.
Some exciting steps forward were taken by the hard-working DAM team this week. Finally we carved out a day to set up and integrate a FMOD Studio pipeline into our Unity project. FMOD Studio is an incredible piece of software that allows you to design variable and interactive sounds/music easily and quickly for games and other interactive projects. I will share a little bit more about this process in a later update. While I was in LA, David and Alex implemented and playtested 4 different input control schemes for iOS. We will be continuing to test them out to see what is most fun and intuitive, but already have made huge progress on that front.
Until next time NEIF fans.