Dev Links: Best Defense

“Twenty-one randomly selected indie developers walk into a digital room and ponder the question, “Which online distribution system has been the most effective for your games?” If this were the set-up to a joke, the punchline would probably be, “Facebook.” But for many indie developers, the question of which platform to publish their games on is a very serious one, with potentially dire consequences.

Indie service wars, platform confessionals, a day in the life of a programmer and more in today’s Developer Links.

Steam is king in service wars, Humble Store a sleeping giant, indies say(Joystiq)
“Twenty-one randomly selected indie developers walk into a digital room and ponder the question, “Which online distribution system has been the most effective for your games?” If this were the set-up to a joke, the punchline would probably be, “Facebook.” But for many indie developers, the question of which platform to publish their games on is a very serious one, with potentially dire consequences. Pared down, platform success is all about accessibility, upload and support, and in terms of those factors, there’s a clear, unsurprising favorite: Steam. But maybe not for long.”

Indie platform confessional: PSN, XBLA, eShop, ‘all of the above’(Joystiq)
“The internet is kind of like a classic confessional – except it’s not a box, it’s a lot brighter and everyone can hear what you have to say. Still, we asked a handful of independent developers for their thoughts on what exactly makes a platform effective, and they spilled it all, dissecting the pros and cons of the most popular, current models of distribution. Today, we feature answers from SpyParty’s Chris Hecker, Retro City Rampage’s Brian Provinciano, Ska Studios’ James Silva, Thomas Was Alone’s Mike Bithell, and others. This group of developers had specific thoughts about Sony’s PlayStation Network, Microsoft’s Xbox Live Indie Games and Arcade services, the Nintendo eShop, and the dream of having it all.”

An Interview with Indie Developer Alistair Aitcheson(IndieGames.com)
“Alistair Aitcheson, one of the few developers that have properly endangered my iPad with his 2-players/1-iPad offerings and a genuinely talented crafter of games, discusses his creations and provides us with some handy tips for the aspiring game developer.”

From XNA to MonoGame(Gamasutra)
“A reprint from the May 2013 issue of Gamaustra’s sister publication Game Developer magazine, this article explains how you can transition your XNA projects to MonoGame.”

BattleBlock Theater Game Updates(The Behemoth)
“If you haven’t done so already, be sure to download the update for BattleBlock Theater on Xbox LIVE. We’ve updated a couple areas in the game.”

Design with the Devs: BattleBlock FF Selection(The Behemoth)
“Since opening night, players everywhere have embraced the BattleBlock Community Theater as the best place in the whole world to share your thoughts and dreams, so long as your thoughts and dreams looked exactly like BattleBlock Theater levels. Otherwise, you may just want to start a journal blog.”

Dungeon lovers dx(Auntie Pixelante)
“”Rooms 59-60 – These rooms comprise the interior of the temple proper. Its vast space is dominated by a stepped dais at the west end on which stands a golden statue of a two-headed serpent, the ancient god Sin.” The above is an excerpt from the computer game HELLFIRE WARRIOR. or, rather, it’s an excerpt from the book that comes with the game. if your digital avatar is standing in room 59 or 60, you might decide to look up the room’s description in the book. the “paragraph book” represents a strategy in digital game storytelling that rose out of the dungeons & dragons pen & paper role-playing tradition: when you set your playing pieces on the square on the map that represents the next room in the dungeon, the dungeon master – a live human emcee – will tell you what your characters see in that room. computers have always been good at displaying squares – when their graphic economy didn’t leave much room for visually describing the contents of one of those squares, game authors like jon freeman, joyce lane and jeff johnson – the writers of hellfire warrior’s “book of lore” – borrowed an idea from the game experiences that inspired theirs.”

A Day in the Life of a Programmer(Gaslamp Games)
“The programming team codenamed our current milestone El Dorado after the mythical city that doesn’t really exist. Most of the stuff that we have been doing towards El Dorado… well, it isn’t ready yet. Also, a lot of it is systems which are transparent to the user (networking, refactoring, serialization, etc.) It’s all important, but it’s not glamorous. We should, however, have a few interesting things to show next week. We (well, mainly Micah) wrote up some of the work that we did on our threading and messaging system, and submitted it to an academic conference; I am pleased to report that HotPAR ’13 (the Usenix Hot Topics in Parallelism conference) decided to accept our paper, which will be presented at some point in June. I should figure out when that is…”