Indie Game Night

Last night Peter and I went to an Indie Game Night at ITT Tech. There was a presentation about making games on the iPhone, free pizza, and a time to show off what we were working on.

The presentation was given by Chris Evans of Morphosis Games. He started with the history of the iPhone and went on to describe how big the iPhone market is. In order to become an iPhone developer you need an Apple computer, and need to pay $100 to register. Once you become a developer you get the iPhone SDK (software development kit) and you can put the programs you write on an iPhone. You can also sell your application in the app store, but remember that there are already TONS of apps there. Apple reviews each app before it releases it to the store, and apparantly if apple rejects it they sometimes won't give you enough information to fix it. Yay Apple!

So onto the money! Everyone hears stories about how some game or app has made the developers hundreds of thousands of dollars. But if you don't make $250 dollars you'll never see a cent of it. Also, Apple will take 30% of the money made from the app. That's not really that bad of a deal for a publisher. But you should expect to not make a whole lot of money developing for the iPhone.

Thanks Chris! Onto the games!

The presentation went a little long, so I didn't get to see very many games after I had done a little demoing of Darkened Dreams. Here's what I got to see.

Tusk by Jon
It was a space shooter that he made. A person from Germany liked it and wanted to put his art in it so they did, then Jon was able to sell the game to the German company.

Kiten by Josh Jones
Another space shooter, with an emphasis on the AI. The ships would change colors depending on what AI they were running. Blue for defensive, red for attack, and purple for a little of both. While I was watching the person whoi was playing it was getting slaughtered until all of the ships turned blue to give him a chance to rest and get some revenge. It was awfully nice of them :)

A dancing game by Les Pardew
I hope I spelled his name right. I can barely make out my own handwriting >_<. It's actually being developed on a console, and I was asked not to say a whole lot about it for that reason. In any case, the graphics look great, gameplay was smooth, and there were no noticable bugs.

Radioactive Joe by ???
The creator wasn't there when I got there, and it seemed to have some trouble running so I never found out what it was all about. Something about a redneck named Joe who starts the game in a toxic waste spill...

Tank General by ???
This game was broken when I came by, and the creator was too busy debugging it to answer any of my questions.

Jay at Rampant Games has a more detailed list of games, though what he says for Darkened Dreams 2 leads me to believe that he didn't see all the changes to the maker.