Here are some kick ass independent games to play while you are waiting in-between alphas of Overgrowth!

Why should you check out indie games? I think Ron Carmel of 2D Boy says it best: "The video game medium has been in a bit of a rut for about a decade. Many truly great games have come out in the last 10 years, but the market is dominated by big-budget photorealistic sequels and movie tie-ins produced by large public companies. Many of these games are the equivalent of second rate airport novels, straight-to-DVD movies, formulaic TV, and synthetic tween pop."

There are a lot of truly awesome independent video games and as an independent video game company, at Wolfire, we play so many video games for "research" that we think we have come up with a pretty good list. Remember, when you are buying or giving away one of these games, be sure to get it from the creator's website directly, which could mean the difference between the author getting 100% of your sale or 30% depending on where you find it.

1. World of Goo

This game kicks ass. For an in-depth look at what makes it great, check out David's design tour. World of Goo is available for Mac, Windows, and (almost) Linux, but the Nintendo Wii version is possibly the most fun. You can play four player co-op! This game is one of the most successful indie games in recent history, so it is worth looking at very carefully for that reason alone.

2. Braid

Braid is the other indie behemoth of 2008. It offers an exciting twist to 2D platforming by incorporating the element of time travel. Some of Braid's puzzles will seem daunting at first but wrapping your brain around the game's time manipulation system to beat levels is very rewarding. Beyond innovative gameplay, Braid's artwork, music, and storyline combine to give the game a beautiful and nostalgic texture. It is only available on XBLA right now, but if you own an Xbox, definitely check it out.

3. Aquaria

Another IGF winner: Aquaria takes place in a vast and immersive underwater world where you join Naija on her quest to find her family. Movement, spell casting and combat are all nicely woven together in one intuitive and streamlined system. The amazing diversity of creatures, quests and puzzles in Aquaria leads to countless hours of enjoyable underwater spelunking punctuated by spurts of intense combat. Bit-Blot offers a free demo on their web site, so go check it out.

4. Mount&Blade

Mount&Blade is incredibly addictive third-person, medieval fighting game. What's most unique about it is the scale of the battles in the game. You can accrue and army of dudes who fight next to you and just personally fight hundreds of enemies in a single skirmish, taking them out one by one. I bought this game back when it was in beta and was little more than a kick-ass sandbox. TaleWorlds actually was able to create a huge following before the game was even finished yet, and we are shamelessly copying their business model.

5. Gish
Gish is a 2D platformer that demonstrates how a few, simple but elegant controls can combine to create high-quality gameplay. For in depth analysis, check out David's Gish design tour.

6. Castle Crashers

Castle Crashers is an Xbox Live Arcade game that addicted Wolfire for a few days until we completely beat it. Basically, it's a side-scrolling beat em up, sort of like Golden Axe, but a lot more intricate. It's one of the few local multiplayer games out there, so it's an awesome game to play with friends -- 4 players.

7. Multiwinia

Don't let Multiwinia's intentionally minimalist graphics fool you. Multiwinia has all the trimmings of a proper RTS. You can battle your friends in multiplay with up to four players in one of six exciting battle modes. A free demo is available on Introversion's site. Survival of the flattest!

8. Cortex Command
In the history of mankind, mining for gold has never been so fun or so dangerous. Cortex Command depicts the distant future where prospectors battle each other for control of resources on an earth-like planet. Imagine Worms Armageddon, but in real time with extremely detailed pixel-art physics and damage modeling. There's something very satisfying about landing a dropship on a group of soldiers and watching the guts and gears go flying.

9. Droid Assault

Droid Assault is a retro arcade game for Mac, Windows, and Linux. I have to admit I'm the only guy at Wolfire who had heard of it, but I'm a huge fan and got totally addicted to it. Basically, you are a little robot and you must shoot or "take over" other bigger robots. You can amass an army of robots who help you out along your journey.

10. Schizoid

Shizoid is another XBLA title that we've really enjoyed. It's a top down cooperative game. One player controls the red ship and can only kill red enemies and will die if touched by blue monsters. The other player has the blue ship and can only kill blue enemies and must run from the red ones. Sounds simple, but when you account for Schizoid's twisted level designs and devious AI, you and your friend end up on the edge of your seats screaming survival strategies at each other. Just in case the regular co-op challenge isn't hard enough, you can also play the Uberschizoid mode where you have to orchestrate the whole two-ship ballet by yourself.

If I missed some of your favorites, please let me know in the comments! Also, please share this list with your friends using this new ShareThis widget I just added below!

Hey guys, here is a small update to Overt Ops. In case you don't know what this is, the idea is basically that Wolfire is a tiny, indie game company. However, the world is a huge place. While we can contact most of the video game magazines and websites in the US, we don't even know the first thing about the video game industry in say, Germany.

Thanks to Overt Ops, John is now an international man of mystery, and we are gradually getting more and more coverage abroad! We still have a long, long way to go, but as we continually improve Overgrowth and keep building momentum, I am hopeful that one day people will recognize my Wolfire t-shirt -- instead of complimenting me on my awesome "FireFox" t-shirt.

We have added a number of new languages to our press section and have a bunch of new Overt Ops. Recently added languages include Korean, Traditional Chinese, Danish, and Romanian. We also have Latin, Pig Latin, and Pirate, for our fans in the Vatican as well as on the high seas.

Here's a full list with a lot of pretty flags (although I realize flags are kind of a dumb idea, in the case of "traditional chinese", for example) and here is the Overt Ops page.

Hey guys, you can get the fifth weekly alpha of Overgrowth in the usual place! If you haven't preordered yet, I hear that this week is the best week to preorder Overgrowth.

New this week are a bunch of new models, textures and art from Aubrey. We will probably be showing them off soon in dedicated blog posts with concept art explaining them, but they are pretty hot. We've also gotten multiplayer working so you can create and join servers -- although all you can do is chat and fly around the level at the moment. It's a great start! We will probably be coordinating the testing of some multiplayer chat in IRC sometime this week.

Finally, the map editor is better than ever, and a bunch of new things are included. I don't remember all the details but they are sweet. We are really excited about this build, because we think there are enough assets to start making some cool stuff, and Phillip's map editor is better than ever. Looking forward to your feedback.

Here are a couple of screenshots. Now by popular demand, they have been annotated.

As always, see you guys in IRC and the forums!

P.S. get Lugaru for free and tell all of your friends!

This third design tour is about Gish by Cryptic Sea.

Be sure to click here to watch this in HD!

Press the triangle button for captions (download transcript)

I asked Edmund McMillen (co-creator of Gish) what he thought, and he said, "I thought it was a well thought out critique of the things that made Gish an important indie game, and also pointed out its flaws in realistic way. Everything you said is totally what we have been talking about for the past few years, so I think you were spot on."

Be sure to subscribe to the blog so you don't miss our next video! If you missed the first two, you can check them out here: Knytt Stories and World of Goo.

Hey guys, I recently attended a conference about the video game industry: the Gaming SDForum. During the conference I had the chance to hear the inside scoop from a lot of industry professionals. I left with 6 major takeaways that I think can help every game developer.

1. Make your game fun!
This was opening speaker, Bernie Stolar's, main point. This sounds like an obvious one. After all, a game is intended to be a mechanism for delivering entertainment. However, as barriers to entry into the gaming industry continue to drop, Mr. Stolar has observed the market becoming over-saturated with sub-par content (actually he used the word "crap" ). The key to survival, is developing a product that's more fun than what the rest of the crowd is making.

I had the good fortune to be able to tell Mr. Stolar about Wolfire's policy of openness with its fans. He agreed with me that accepting and responding to fan feedback during the development process is a good way to help you stay on the path to crafting a fun game.

2. Make your game social!
So now youve thought hard about how to create fun and you've come up with a great structure for your game. Wouldn't it be even more fun to incorporate chatting with friends, battling strangers, bragging about achievements, and showing off custom user-made items? Current market trends say YES! Do everything you can to foster a sense of community within your game.

FUN GAME + ONLINE COMMUNITY = VERY FUN GAME

3. Physical distribution is losing to online distribution, plan accordingly!
Now that almost everyone with a computer also has a broadband internet connection, online distribution is on the rise.

Consumers like it: Ever gone to the local GameStop and found out the store was closed or that the new game you wanted was out of stock? Well that never happens online. With online distribution consumers never have to leave the comfort of home to access their entertainment.

Game Developers like it: Online distribution does not involve manufacturing costs, transportation costs or renting shelf space from Best Buy so profit margins from online sales are much better. The best case scenario for game developers is distributing through their own site which gives them 100% of the profits.

Make friends with online distributors (thank you Steam) and try to streamline the purchasing process on your site. Realistically, only the big boys can still make good profits off traditional retail at this point with what Dan Winters of Activision called the "home run" model (very few highly developed and highly promoted products).

4. Consider All Your Monetization Options!
The hard truth is that if you want to be a full time games developer, your games have to earn you enough money to pay the bills. After listening to a discussion among representatives of Double Fusion, Echovox, Playspan, Offerpal and Twofish it is clear to me that we are in a new era of game monetization methods (but not all of them necessarily work for us indie game devs).

In-Game Advertising: Unless you have millions of users, you will not be able to convince many people to buy your in-game advertising space. Also, if your ads dont fit well with your game, your gamers experience may be negatively impacted. Be careful with this one.

Subscriptions: Only mainstream MMOs can really pull off a subscription model (like WoW).

Micropayments: Look at what iTunes has done with music. Instead of having to commit to buying full albums, we can now snipe our favorite songs for just 99 cents a piece. Some games are now starting to successfully incorporate micropayments for items, levels, episodes and upgrades.

The Freemium Model: The freemium approach is a secret weapon that can complement all of the monetization methods above. The freemium model is comprised of both free and premium (paying) users. The freemium approach encourages a lot of people to try the game for free (pumping up your user base, thus "adding fun" and increasing the value of your advertising space). Then if premium users are walking around sporting upgrades and special paid-for content, free users may transform into subscribers or make micropayments for better stuff.

Theres nothing necessarily wrong with the old model of selling a game for a fixed price but its important to know that new monetization options are out there. The trick is figuring out what kind of game youre trying to make and what payment system is likely to work best for you.

5. Know The Endgame (according to Lars)
Lars Buttler, CEO of Trion gave the closing speech at the SDForum. His prophecy described a world where gaming platforms are no longer consumer-owned hardware. The gaming platform of the future will be comprised of a server and your internet connection to that server. The device sitting in your house will be just the physical UI you need to interact with the game.

Buttler said WoW is the first step. You take a solid genre, in the case of WoW an RPG, and then make it an MMO. However, WoW is still a static framework with dynamic players bouncing around inside of it. Lars says the endgame (pun intended) is "server based games" where the whole world is perfectly dynamic and determined by every action of every user. Lars believes there are still short-term holes in the market where other tried and true genres (FPS, Sports, RTS, etc.) can be made into MMO's.

I think this prophecy is credible especially with respect to the mainstream gaming industry. How will this affect tiny indie developers like us? Only time will tell for sure. Hopefully, as long as indie game devs remain agile and courageous enough to innovate beyond the status quo set by the mainstream industry , we will have a chance to carve out niches where we can survive.

6. Where There's A Will, There's A Way
I had a chance to speak with Professor Zyda after his speech about the USC Gamepipe Laboratory curriculum. Professor Zyda is the same guy who served as development director for the US goverment's game America's Army. I asked him what his major advice was for small indie developers like Wolfire. He said simply "Make games that you are passionate about". If you are prepared to pour your heart and soul into a project, working long hours everyday, this will be reflected by the quality of your game. I guess there's still hope for us hard-working indies (just look at World of Goo)!