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Hello, all! I’m happy to announce the launch of the new version of TIGRS: The Independent Game Rating System!

After much feedback from developers, publishers, and distributors, the system has been reworked and reformed to meet your needs! The system is now entirely flexible to match exactly what you want, from age and content ratings to the style of the rating box! In addition, the new system is being launched with a brand new website designed to make creating ratings easier than ever! You can get started rating your games right away:

http://www.tigrs.org/?page=generate

From family friendly games to mature adult titles, it only takes a few minutes to make a beautiful content advisory for your game!

If there are any suggestions or rating themes you’d like to see, please post them here. The new system is still in soft-launch, so it’s ready to be moulded to your needs! Also, if you have problems with the rating generator, please let me know immediately. It has been tested on major Windows browsers, but not on Mac browsers.

If you are using the old rating system, it is strongly recommended you upgrade today! It only takes a few minutes and there is no uploading necessary!

You can visit the site’s homepage here: http://www.tigrs.org/

Your feedback is much appreciated!

How often do you exercise your game development muscles? Are you a game design heavyweight, or just a scrawny wannabe?

Every few days I challenge myself: I choose a random word and charge myself to come up with 3 scales of design centered around that abstraction - a web-game, a casual game, and an medium-scale indie game. The only requirement: the designs have to be compelling. The words are usually verbal (as in “verb.”) I try to shy away from nouns, but might occasionally accept an adjective.

For example, here’s what I came up with for “radial” a few months ago:

Web Game

Setup: Two players (or 1 human player and 1 computer player) placed equidistant from a central point.
Verbs: Players rotate around a central point “circle-strafing” one another. Players fire at will, each shot aimed at the center of the circle.
Objective: Player wins when he strikes the opponent with his shot.

Casual Game

Setup: Various dots are placed on the playfield. Various circles are placed on the playfield, each is attached to at least one other circle and form a jointed body.
Verbs: Any circle can be dragged around its parent’s rotational constraint; the child circles move with it.
Objective: The player must encircle all dots with the provided circles, adhering to the rotational constraints.

Indie Game

Setup: Planets and star (or stars) on playfield in traditional solar system formation. One planet is the start point, another is the end point. Rocket begins at start point at a fixed angle.
Verbs: Planets can be rotated along their orbits around the star(s). Planets emit gravity.
Objective: Player adjusts orbital location of planets around the star(s) to create a gravity “path” for which to guide the rocket to its destination.

At first, it took quite a while to think up any attractive game designs, but after over a year of doing this regularly, I find it to be a lot easier. By the same token, this thinking has also found its way into my own productions by the way of meta-games.

Looking back, some of the ideas are rather silly, but most are truly golden - I’ll never have a shortage of designs to develop. And its value to my ongoing development simply can’t be measured.

If you aren’t already, I recommend you try to adopt a similar mental exercise you employ at least once a week. You won’t be sorry.

If you already do this, or are starting now, what have you come up with?

There’s no question the Casual Games market is inundated with cheap remakes and shameless immitations, but does this behavior actually hurt the industry? Does it actively damage the future of what could otherwise be a bright future for gaming?

Nintendo’s Wii console is unabashedly winning over the hearts of non-gamers with its poignant originality; “casual” gaming is on its way up in a very real way. However, the currently dominant platform for Casual Games is the Internet-connected PC, and there exists a market with far less originality. Massive on-line retailers like RealArcade, Big Fish Games, and Reflexive Arcade dominate the Casual Game market, releasing, in some cases, a new title almost every day. This is a booming sector of gaming that has regularly exceeded financial predicitions to become one of the fastest growing entertainment markets. With all the money to draw from, it’s no surprise there’s a steady influx of new developers to feed the almost daily releases on the major portals.

An unfortunate side effect of this volume and frequency of releases: an overwhelming majority of the games add little - if anything - new, to preceeding titles. Whatever is hot on the charts is what developers produce. “Match-three,” “Zuma,” and, “Diner Dash,” are the phonemes that make up the Casual developer’s vocabulary.

Occasionally, a unique title comes along and surprises everyone with its success, but it’s either ignored as a fluke or quickly becomes the next victim of a clone-happy developer. Original titles, like Amanda Fitch’s Aveyond, a traditional console-style, top-down RPG, have recently popped up on some of the leading Casual Game portal sites prompting many developers to question what Casual Gamers really want.

There’s no question the industry is decidedly insular, satisfied with transforming creative works into commodities. But is this inherently bad? Unfortunately, there’s a dearth of concrete data regarding profitability of original works. However, we only need to look East for an example of a creative community thriving on remakes and copycatting.

In Japan exists a phenomenon known as, dōjinshi. Dōjinshi is a sub-culture of manga artists that produce their own version of popular, commercial manga. This is somewhat like what you may know as fan fiction. However, these pieces are commercial entities, produced and published by the artists and sold for profit. Without permission from the original copyright holder.

Japan’s copyright code is analagous to the U.S.’s, so there’s no doubt this is technically illegal. And yet, this market flourishes in the land of the rising sun. Some say it’s allowed to go on because it benefits the mainstream manga market, albeit indirectly. Others chalk it up to a lack of lawyers to handle the cases. Whatever the case, manga in Japan thrives as one of the dominant forms of entertainment, despite the plethora of fan-made alternatives.

Is dōjinshi hurting the mainstream manga market, or does it help? And how does this apply to us? Are our cultures so vastly different that what would help one would ultimately hurt the other?

Without any real proof, can we be sure Casual Game copycatting is actually causing any harm at all? Perhaps the clones create and support a market that otherwise wouldn’t have the stamina to survive. Is this a necessary crutch for a burgeoning industry, or is it a disease destined to rot its core?

You tell me.

A lot of confusion surrounds the (sometimes erroneously) interchangable use of “independent,” and “indie.” I think it’s more a problem of lexical conventions than anything else. Nevertheless, heated debates often arise because of this disparity, and I think it’s an unnecessary side effect of two facets of an industry struggling to find their respective identities.

“Independent” game development didn’t appear out of thin air. Independently developed games were given this definitive word for a reason. “Independent” is first and foremost a business qualification. It’s simply an identification of who owns the business.

“Indie” is only tangentally a perspective or style, and only because a similar perspective and style is shared among many independent studios, not because there is any intrinsic value in the word, “independent.” The slang, “indie,” has a maleable meaning derived through an aesthetic that has pervaded the independent game development industry. Just as “casual” shouldn’t be considered interchangable with “indie,” nor should “independent.” It is slang, and nothing more.

To avoid further confusion, I suggest we try to adopt a consistent lexicon regarding our respective identities and employ the following:

• Independent - an entity not dependent upon an external entity for the distribution, promotion, and sale of wares developed and provided by the afformentioned party.
• Indie - an aesthetic or workflow derived from common practices among Independent developers.

Perhaps through the distinction of the two words in their own contexts can confusion be lifted from otherwise valuable discussion.

If you’ve been hanging out in the wings, waiting for a sign so you can take your gaming passion and turn it into a real game development business, I’ve got one word for you: Don’t. If I can’t disuade you, then perhaps I can offer some advice to make the transition as painless as possible:

The best time to go indie

• is when you’ve got enough money in the bank to support you for two years.
• is when the competition is far behind in innovation and market acceptance.
• is when everything at home is stable and you can really focus.
• is when you’re out of debt.
• is when no one is already working on your idea.
• is after you’ve got your degree.
• is after you’ve worked all the kinks out of your plan.
• is when you’re sure it’s going to work.

Actually, the best time to go indie was last year. The second best time is right now.

Frequently, the most undervalued facet of game development is music. Nobody would disagree that gameplay is paramount. A boring game, no matter how fancy the presentation, is still a boring game. Then, most developers would suggest graphics as a secondary importance. But I’m going to challenge that.

When I was in college, I headed a psychological study regarding emotional malleability in the presence of music. Myself and a small team of colleagues presented to a number of volunteers various photographs accompanied with a rotating playlist of music of various emotional overtones.

What we discovered was shocking.

Regardless of the content of the photograph, be it a wedding or a disfigured beast, it was the music that expressed the majority of the emotional value. Display a photograph of a child’s birthday party and the elated emotions were felt universally. But accompany that photograph with a menacing soundtrack and that joyous day became something sinister. An adrenaline infused dune buggy ride became a flight of fancy with some soothing background music. And an average grandfather turned into an insightful wiseman with the sound of tribal drums beating around us.

Music - with its powerful ability to shape our emotions and experiences - is a profound thing. So why is it so often overlooked?

Graphics are tangible, easy to digest bits of information. It’s not hard to immediately place value on a well drawn image. Music, on the other hand, is a very cerebral experience. It manifests only upon performance, pushing the limits of our minds to the (literal) fourth dimension. Unlike graphics, music never really exists at any discrete moment of time. Only through our own reconstruction of what has been played, and the expectation of what will be played, can we ever really experience music. It’s easy to overlook such a subtle, yet powerful, medium.

So, next time you’re designing the production of a game, ask yourself if you’re overlooking the soundtrack because it really has no value, or because you don’t understand its value.

1. Look at problems in many different ways, and find new perspectives that no one else has taken (or no one else has publicized!)

Leonardo da Vinci believed that, to gain knowledge about the form of a problem, you begin by learning how to restructure it in many different ways. He felt that the first way he looked at a problem was too biased. Often, the problem itself is reconstructed and becomes a new one.

2. Visualize!

When Einstein thought through a problem, he always found it necessary to formulate his subject in as many different ways as possible, including using diagrams. He visualized solutions, and believed that words and numbers as such did not play a significant role in his thinking process.

3. Produce! A distinguishing characteristic of genius is productivity.

Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents. He guaranteed productivity by giving himself and his assistants idea quotas. In a study of 2,036 scientists throughout history, Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California at Davis found that the most respected scientists produced not only great works, but also many “bad” ones. They weren’t afraid to fail, or to produce mediocre in order to arrive at excellence.

4. Make novel combinations. Combine, and recombine, ideas, images, and thoughts into different combinations no matter how incongruent or unusual.

The laws of heredity on which the modern science of genetics is based came from the Austrian monk Grego Mendel, who combined mathematics and biology to create a new science.

5. Form relationships; make connections between dissimilar subjects.

Da Vinci forced a relationship between the sound of a bell and a stone hitting water. This enabled him to make the connection that sound travels in waves. Samuel Morse invented relay stations for telegraphic signals when observing relay stations for horses.

6. Think in opposites.

Physicist Niels Bohr believed, that if you held opposites together, then you suspend your thought, and your mind moves to a new level. His ability to imagine light as both a particle and a wave led to his conception of the principle of complementarity. Suspending thought (logic) may allow your mind to create a new form.

7. Think metaphorically.

Aristotle considered metaphor a sign of genius, and believed that the individual who had the capacity to perceive resemblances between two separate areas of existence and link them together was a person of special gifts.

8. Prepare yourself for chance.

Whenever we attempt to do something and fail, we end up doing something else. That is the first principle of creative accident. Failure can be productive only if we do not focus on it as an unproductive result. Instead: analyze the process, its components, and how you can change them, to arrive at other results. Do not ask the question “Why have I failed?”, but rather “What have I done?”

[ Source: Study Guides and Strategies ]

Try-before-you-buy may have been around for 20+ years, but it’s on its way out. In an effort to maximize returns, it has gotten a lot more restrictive over time. What were once given away as full-featured programs with nag screens are now often time and content limited, and even those limitations have become more strict over time, dropping from 30-day trials to hour demos, or less. The reason? It’s inefficient.

A “good seller” in the industry profits from only 1% of their downloaders, and the majority of games don’t make even half that. Here’s a more appropriate way to look at it: For even the best selling titles, 99% of the people aren’t buying. This is 99% that may not want to shill out $20, but may be willing to watch a short ad or even pay $0.25 per play. By honing in on these non-payers, a significant amount of income can be gleaned from even a poorly selling game. Combine strategies to maximize both types of players and you’ve opened a door of opportunity.

To limit your strategy to such a poorly performing facet of what could be a much larger pie is just silly. On the other hand, we don’t have much choice at this point. The infrastructure for micro-payments is non-existant for the indie, and advertising solutions nearly so. Once the ball gets rolling, we’ll see a lot of opportunities open up - opportunities far beyond the familiar try & buy model. It’ll just take a big player to open the door for us.

From theory to inspiration; from history to sociology, if you’re serious about designing and developing games, you’ve got to educate yourself. Veteran game developer, Ernest Adams, has created a list of 50 must-read books for every designer, aspiring and established alike:

What I’ve done is to assemble a collection of books that address the following questions:

• What are games (and videogames)?
• What has been the history of video games?
• How are games related to other media, and what might we learn from those media?
• How and why do people play games? And finally, how (in general terms) should we design and build them?

I can’t claim to have read all these books, much less to own them all; but an informal survey of developers whom I respect has produced some great suggestions.

Regardless of your interest in game development, you’ll find something to inspire and educate you.