Space Station Managing, Post Mortem

M0b1u5 writes "Mistaril is a small company with an intriguing product: Space Station Manager. It's a finalist for the Independent Games Festival and a follow-up game is planned: Luna Base Manager. However, the SSM project has a developer post-mortem which is well worth a read if you're thinking about launching a game development company, or are just interested in game development."

Love it.

[BigZaphod]

I like reading about behind the scenes stuff after games are released. Its just so cool. I want to be involved in that. It seems like working on games is sort of like a wild-west thing. It isn't obvious what will work or how best to do anything so you have to play it by ear a lot. Shoot from the hip. Stuff like that. I dunno.. it just excites me in some strange adventurous sort of way.

Maybe because I've never worked in the games industry.... :-)

Profit!!!

[Aelfy]

The sweetest, juiciest quote of the whole article:

The game found an appreciating target audience and managed to generate enough profit to let the company continue developing games.

This goes to show, people are finding indie games, and done right they can generate enough profit to sustain a small development studio. They did have a little help from the IGF nomination, but still its an incredible achievement given they worked full time and risked it all.

Is that a light I see at the end of the tunnel?

Reminds me of...

[BadFormat]

A few years back CogniToy [cognitoy.com] came out with a really unique robot design/combat game called MindRover:The Europa Project [mindrover.com]. You would start with a simple chase (tank, car, or hovercraft) and outfit it with weapons, sensors, and propulsion. However, the real meat of the game was in the programmer's window. Each piece of equipment had to be wired together with a network of logic gates in order to get the robot to anything meaningful. If your radar sensed an enemy robot, you could signal the weapons to fire or just ram him at full speed. If the radar sensed enemy fire you could signal the motor to move in reverse and fire your own weapons to try to intercept. The smarter the bot, more complex the logic network had to be. The development capital seemed to have dried up for them as well since MindRover was their one and only product of interest.