Living The Dream and Enduring The Nightmare - It’s tough being indie

A short time ago I was lucky enough to be asked to be one of the keynote speakers at the New Zealand Game Developer Conference. My talk was about the highs and lows of indie development, specifically talking about my experiences with Eufloria and Cletus Clay. This is a subject I’ll write more about in due course. 

The conference was excellent and I understand it will pave the way for more such events in the area. The industry still seems very youthful but it’s definitely an up and coming industry for Kiwis.

Note that 1) I refuse to watch the video and 2) I ran out of time slightly and it ended up on a more negative note than planned!

If anyone is interested, the slides can be found here.

Prototyping in New Zealand

Having finished my stint on Eufloria for a while, I made my way out to New Zealand via Hong Kong and Australia. The first few weeks were spent travelling around, as can be seen by some of the photos on this blog, and then I moved to Napier to do some prototyping with Cletus designer/artist Anthony Flack.

With the main Cletus Clay project on hiatus for the time being, we’re developing two iOS prototypes based in the world of Cletus, one being Cow Patrol and the other an as yet un-named one. Cow Patrol was originally prototyped nearly two years ago and is a perfectly fun game, but the other prototype has also proven interesting. 

At the same time, we’re researching some new techniques and learning new skills which can be put to use on both current and future physical model based projects.

As you can see from the pictures we’ve been having fun with modelling, trying different photographic set ups, and someone has been jamming on a banjo in preparation for a future recording session!

I’ll be posting more news about the direction we’re going in over the next few weeks.

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