DISQUS

Pat Wilson · 8 months ago

These guys nailed the name for that game. The name "Off-road Velociraptor Safari" conjures up a game concept, and a snicker as soon as you read it. It conveys, to the gamer, a rough idea of what they will be doing in this game, and the light-hearted tone of the game itself.

imre · 8 months ago

There's only one thing I'd love to know: _where_ do they find all that contract work?
But yeah, they really seem to be doing something in the right way.

Ben Garney · 8 months ago

They're talented. How many companies ship a game a year, much less one every 8 weeks? I bet they're beating off contract work inquiries with a stick with chops like that. :)

Best place to get contract work especially when you're specialized (like with Unity) would be the community for that tool. Tied with networking in the industry so your name comes up when people need work.

joshuadallman · 8 months ago

Only six games a year? Slackers. Jeff had 'em beat in '89 with 8 games released that year. :)

Kevin Ryan · 8 months ago

1989 was the year before Sierra bought us and Dynamix was still fairly small. If I remember correctly we between 20-30 people at that time.

joshuadallman · 8 months ago

The whole history of Dynamix is in the book "High Score" (which I just found through google books, hence my reference) pages 144-147. There's even a picture of you and the gang at the top :)

http://books.google.com/books?id=HJNvZLvpCEQC&p...

Jeremy Alessi · 8 months ago

I read that book cover to cover multiple times in 2002/2003, it was fantastic.

Jeff Tunnell · 8 months ago

1989 was a hard year. We were working vary hard on our two Affiliated Publisher products, A-10 Tankkiller and David Wolf: Secret Agent, as well as a bunch of Activision products like Mechwarrior. It is kind of funny to think that 30+ developers could create 8 AA products in one year, but we did. In addition, a bunch of those games got great reviews and were very influencial. For instance, A-10 was one of the very first game to support 256 colors! Sound funny now, but it was nearly the equivalent of being the first to support 3D graphics cards. Going to 256 colors was one of the biggest visual differences in games ever.

Logan Foster · 8 months ago

I know we all have mouths to feed and bills to pay so I am not going to suggest that anyone who takes on a contract gigs for the main game-dev work to pay the bills is 'selling out', but anyone with any small amount of experiance can attest to how much more invigorating and enjoyable a project can be when you work on something you care about like these guys are able to do. You invest a bit of yourself into the project tend to put in the extra effort to add the little touches and effects that help make the project from something 'good' to something 'amazing'.

I guess in some ways this is a pretty good commentary on the market and why a lot games continue to look at the 'indies' to product the next great it products versus the commercialized crap that the the AAA market seems content with developing. There rarely is any love left in AAA to have teams invest themselves into what they are doing, developers are stuck under the heel of "Do you want to keep getting paid? Well then do your work like I am telling you to" attitude of studios.

Thanks for hiliting this company Jeff. I will definately have to go and take a look at their stuff.

joshuadallman · 8 months ago

Mathew Wegner and the guys at Flashbang are awesome. I'd love to see more highlights of indies "making it big" on this site. Great pick.

As an aside, a friend emailed me a while ago and thought his bronto-in-a-jetpack game ripped off my turtle-in-a-jetpack-game which came first. Guess the meme of putting reptiles in jetpacks is a more common one than you'd think!

Jeff Tunnell · 8 months ago

I have some more ideas for Indies Doing It Right. I'll post a now one from time to time. I am open to getting suggestions from the MBG community as well. If anybody has any ideas for successful Indies doing great things, let me know.

joshuadallman · 8 months ago

I'd also be interested in hearing about not just developers successful indies of all kinds. For example, not just developers but publishers, virtual worlds, social gaming. Big Fish Games started out of a garage with 2 guys, that's about as indie as it gets. Last month SuperSecret picked up $10 million VC funding, making it one of the best funded independent virtual worlds. And Zynga was formed by 6 guys less than 2 years ago and now has 46 million monthly active players, 4 times more than WoW's 12 million! I'd love to hear insights into these companies, or again, any indies off the obvious path in general.

Andrew · 8 months ago

The question, though, is how are they going to monetize all that IP? Ad rates are in the toilet at the moment ($0.50-$1 CPM's, if you're lucky), and to make any real money that way requires ludicrous amounts of eyeballs.

So, port the games to other platforms? Some sort of microtransactions? Build it into something like a Unity-based version of Kongregate and sell it off? At the moment it's a great looking site, and the games are fun, but I don't see how they're going to stop having to do contract work anytime soon...

Jeff Tunnell · 8 months ago

The advertising market will not always be in the toilet. In my article I was looking a few years out. The first step is getting a lot of fans to love you. Once you have that, you can make money from direct sales, micro-transactions, ads, and even subscriptions. Without an audience and community, you can implement all of that stuff you want, but you won't be able to make it.

Also, taking your best games to XBLA or other paying platforms is a viable strategy. They don't seem to have a lot of desire to do so, but if they keep going, odds are they will create a game that becomes a huge hit. At that point, they will get approached by publishers willing to pay them to take their IP's to other platforms.

Doing contract work for a few years while playing this strategy out is not such a bad thing. It looks to me like these guys are having a great time.