By John Walker on July 7th, 2010.
What would you do if you’d made an indie game, and suddenly found yourself impressively wealthy as a result? Build a castle out of diamonds? Buy a zoo just so you can eat all the animals? Or would you create an angel investment fund so you can help other indies get their projects off the ground? That’s the excellent choice that a number of successful indies (you can find out more about who in Alec’s piece from March), and the Indie Fund project is now alive.
By Alec Meer on March 2nd, 2010.
Some indie games make a lot of money. Most don’t. Worse, many never even get off the ground because they have no funding. The freshly-announced Indie Fund means to change that – it’s an angel investment group set up by some of independent gaming’s greatest current luminaries (the likes of 2D Boy, Jon Blow, Flashbang…) and intended to help the next generation of indie devs get started on making wonderful toys for us lot to play with. I.e. more Worlds of Goo, more Braids, more Audiosurfs, more Solium Infernums… This is a good day. A fantastically, wonderfully, bloody good day.
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By John Walker on November 8th, 2009.
It’s first thing in the morning here in the land they call “America”. In a country where Mythbusters is on TV before 8am you know everything is magical. Also magical is the video the boys at 2D BOY just spotted showing World Of Goo in real life. It’s a really beautiful thing, and it’s below.
By John Walker on October 20th, 2009.
As expected, 2D BOY have published details of their World Of Goo First Birthday experiment. Offering the game for whatever price people wanted to pay (previously it was $20), this meant people could get a copy for as little as $0.01 or as much as fifty million squillion space dollars. (I believe that’s the upper limit.) Originally this was intended to last for a week, but has now been extended to 25th October. And being a rather open sort they’ve announced how many copies they’ve sold so far, and indeed how much people have been paying, along with much more. It’s an unprecedented amount of detailed sales information. Its significance shouldn’t be underplayed.
By Jim Rossignol on May 28th, 2009.
Via Offworld we notice that 2D Boy have released a “not-revolutionary” Rapid Prototyping Framework, to help other would-be devs on their way. This gives you a trimmed down version of the tools 2D Boy used to make World Of Goo. 2D Boy explain:
This means two things:
1. Minimizing the amount of code required to set up a new game
2. Providing all the basic facilities so as to avoid wasting time reinventing the wheel (2D rendering, sound, input, persistence layer, and resource management)
Which is probably quite neat, if you’re wanting to make a 2D game from scratch.
By John Walker on March 7th, 2009.
2D BOY are offering a really interesting glimpse into the process World of Goo went through, on its way to become the cuddly bundle of ludicrous loveliness that made us crack our ears with smiling last year. These will apparently be in seven stages, and the first is available to download from their site today. It’s a single room, containing some very primitive goo balls, which begin to show some of the characteristics that would form the final game.
By John Walker on January 30th, 2009.
Mr Kyle Gabler, who apparently made something called World of Goo, has posted on the 2D BOY blog his first night keynote speech at the Global Game Jam 2009. Immediately leap below to see his guide to a group of people attempting to make a game in 48 hours.
By John Walker on January 21st, 2009.
In good good news news, 2D BOY have released the soundtrack to World of Goo. Anyone who has played the game will know what a fantastic score the game has, and quite how sickeningly talented Kyle Gabler is to have written it all himself. What price would you pay for the lot? Well, it’s free.
By John Walker on January 15th, 2009.
Just a quickie – my interview with the lovely chaps at 2D BOY is up on Eurogamer today. We discuss how the game got made, the reasons behind some of the more esoteric decisions, and learn some important facts about the mysterious Allan Blomquist. It’s a fun time.
By John Walker on November 15th, 2008.
The post yesterday reporting World of Goo’s 90% piracy figure drew a surprising response. The P-word regularly generates comments threads that scare our hosts, but this one was odd. It became a discussion about whether one could disprove the 90% figure, and then extrapolating this to reach peculiar conclusions. Some could see this as people claiming there were far fewer stab wounds than first predicted and therefore there hadn’t been a murder. Others might suggest that fighting over the exact number is completely irrelevant, as that’s not the point of the issue. Now 2D BOY have responded with new look at the figures.
By John Walker on November 12th, 2008.
Updated below.
Good news, Euro-people. World of Goo is officially reaching our shores this December. Now, obviously you’re sensible enough to have bought the game directly from the 2D BOY site, so haven’t had to wait. But you might know someone silly enough to have not done that for some stupid reason, and now you can let them know the news.
