Thursday 12 December 2013
Nihilumbra nominated for Best Indie Platformer of 2013 at IndieDB.
Thanks to your votes we passed the first stage of the IndieDB Indie GOTY 2013 competition! now we are only ten candidates in the "Platformer" category and things are getting much harder. Great games like Rogue Legacy will be hard to beat, but we will try as hard as we can! so if you think Nihilumbra still deserves your support, we encourage you to go to the contest page and vote us for a last time. Remember there is no limit for the number of games you can support, so you can vote all the candidates in each category.
Via Aniol.
Win a key for your favourite PC game thanks to this Allkeyshop.
AllKeyShop.com, a comparison site for CD Key Digital Download Stores has teamed up with us to offer an exclusive promo for all of you BeautiFans! It consists of the typical rafflecopter widget that asks you to do some stuff to get more points, so you have more chances to win the code.The winner will win a free CD key of the PC Game you choose (to select the game you want to win, you have to go to the page of the game on their site and paste it on the first field of the widget).
Also, if you want to participate in a couple of Nihilumbra giveaways, we have one running at Hardcoregamer.com (4 copies) and another at Akihabara Blues (5 copies).
Bilbao's Fun & Serious Game Festival 2013 video.
The full video of the Fun & Serious Game Festival Ceremony is now available, there Nihilumbra won the Best Independent Game of 2013 Award. You can go to minute 45 to see Kevin on stage picking up the price for BeautiFunners glory! He thanked everyone for the recognition and also dedicated encouraging words to other hardworking indie devs!
Via Aniol.
Some great guidelines about how Unity works as a company.
Unity is a company that not only knows how to create a great product used by tons of developers around the world (we are among them), they also know how to create a product like this they have to develop an efficient and comfortable company culture. Recently their 4th employee Aras Pranckevičius shared this presentation called "Lightweight Chaos For Distributed Teams", that he prepared for his lecture at BuildStuffLT 2013 (Lithuania). It's worth a read, as it explains how Unity grew and evolved as a company along its 12 years of existence. Oh, 12 years developing the same product, can you imagine a game that could take that long to develop? (Duke Nukem Forever doesn't counts ;) maybe it can be compared with online games like EVE or WOW, since they are more conceived as services... Now Unity has aproximately 320 people spread along 17 offices, that's impressive numbers in terms of scalability! The document gives details about their philosophy, how to manage human relationships in the company, the tools they use to handle remote work, and many other stuff you game developers may find really useful, etc.
Via Jesús.
Do you know what a patent troll is?
Thanks to this article by our friends at Indie-o-rama some of us recently learned that there are companies who dedicate their time and effort to patent ideas used in game development that never put into practice, they never create a game or an IT system with them. So what they do to be profitable is look for other companies who create commercial products and may have implemented the same thing, totally ignoring that this pattern/procedure was already patented, and then sue them. Turns out that usually this kind of companies and their lawyers always aimed at big firms, but they are starting to shoot at small indies like recently happened with Bad Pug Games. Take a closer look here at this GamePolitics.com's article if you want to know more.
The Most Viewed Youtube Gaming Videos of 2013
Recently Kotaku posted an article about the most viewed gaming videos on Youtube this year. It has a little bit of everything, we can see a mixture of big games like BattleField 4 and indie games like Minecraft, also there is a big contrast between youtuber homemade videos (i.e. PewdiePie's) with super elaborated trailers (League of Legends). It's remarkable how a video of an RPG Game like Mad Father is on 3rd place just after GTA V and the PS4 tech demo with almost more than 27 million views. That helps us developers to see how important the figure of the youtuber is becoming to raise awareness of humble but carefully made indie projects.
Youtube, copyright and BeautiFun Games titles.
Recently there has been certain discussion about how Youtube treats copyrighted content, You can read some details here. Seems it has to do with some changes on the Youtube data robot that analyses inappropriate use of third-party content. We at BeautiFun Games wanted to clearly state that anyone can make use of our games with streaming purposes and monetize the views they get from them. Read our note here.
The "Empty Force" Master tries to invoke the powers of the Void in Barcelona.
Empty Force is a term used in martial arts to denote the expression of force without making physical contact. Whether or not this force actually exists is the subject of debate in the martial arts community.
Jukka Lampila, known as Master of this mysterious mental technique called Empty Force came to Barcelona a few days ago, and guess what? yes! you've nailed it! it has been since proved that his power is not so effective here in our region. If you don't believe us, go check it out in the video below:
We have a simple explanation for this missfunctionality of Jukka's powers. Firstly, he was close to our studio's energy influence area, where we concentrate the our secret HVMG (Humongous Void Matter Generator). Empty Force, logically, doesn't have anything to do against our HVMG. So, since there can only be one, Jukka's energy got absorved by ours, quite simple.
As we are sure Jukka doesn't know how to get rid of the Void Energy, we will send a copy of Nihilumbra his way and recommend him to beat Void mode. Its almost impossible puzzles will train his mind and make his powers more resistant.
Via Kevin.
