Gregzilla Games

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_Force

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.

Today we start a new series of posts, where we will talk briefly about the most intense things we lived along the week and the best stuff we have found on the Internet, hope you like it!

Well, we can`t start this first post without mentioning something very important that recently happened to us. Nihilumbra won two awards! At HòPlay Indie Festival, an event mainly focused on promoting the indie scene, it got the Best Gameplay Award! and yesterday Nihilumbra was also awarded with Best Independent Game Award at Fun & Serious Festival 2013! We want to thank everyone who supported us and also tell you that our designer Kevin Cerdà, who travelled there to spread the joy and beauty of our studio among the game industry, is going to write an awesome post next week explaining everything that happened with more detail.

Game Maker Standard Studio is free for a limited time! if you ever wanted to try your luck as an indie developer, now there is a great chance with this tool, there are tons of documentation and tutorials out there. You only have to download the software and register it, so YoYo Games will send you a key to activate the standard product.

Source: BeautiFun Games' Twitter.