English
Português
About Distributors and Publishers
When I first tried develop a game with a friend back in 1996, we knew that the task would be nearly impossible. On the technical side, the engines were not accessible at the time and there weren’t available documentation on the internet but the biggest challenge would be to find a publisher and a distributor for the game – which would be impossible for two young guys from the south hemisphere. The times have changed, the independent games market boomed and everyone can easily distribute a game in multiple channels – Apple Store, Google Play, Steam, Web, among others. Developers no longer need a distributor. The traditional distributors will not survive.
The market has changed for everyone, not just for developers. Just as there was a boom of new game developers, there was also a boom of new publishers. When I launched Rescue City I received several proposals in the weeks following from publishers asking for partnerships for my future projects – and these new publishers are also competing with the former ones. And what happens then with the old publishers in this new scenario? Well, they’re still strong with their large and profitable franchise titles, but until when? Will they survive? The first major “advantage” of a publisher is their expertise to reach markets, but today the online channels replace part of that advantage. The second big advantage is power, money – they have capital to finance new games. This advantage still exists, but increasingly we have heard news of creators who succeeded in other ways to raise money to finance their projects – the most recent and popular are Double Fine Adventure (Tim Schafer) and Wasteland 2 (Brian Fargo) that raised respectively 3.3 and 1.6 million U.S. dollars at Kickstarter.
This scenario has democratized the publishing and distribution of electronic games. There is now a large number of professionals and organizations involved in this market. How many publishers will survive? Only time will tell. The former game publishers will not end, however, there will be a consolidation in this market and they will acquire the best of the recent ones.
There is another important issue related to the price of today’s games, ever lower – “good” for the consumer, but uncertain to the developers and publishers. But this subject is for another post.
Finally!
After several months, finally I release Rescue City for iPad (iPad Edition). The game has bigger levels designed to take advantage of the big screen.
Game Position Tool
I’ve found a quite useful tool for those who program in cocos2D. A difficult task when you need to layout some interface is to guess the right position (in coordinates) of the objects on screen’s device. We don’t have a visual interface to do that in cocos2D.
RC – iPad / Work in Progress
After updated a lot of interface items, it’s time to create every single level again. Bigger levels will let the game more strategic on the iPad.
Rescue City for iPad
Time to return to work and start converting the iPhone project to iPad. If Rescue City was 3D I think this task would be easier, but as it is a 2D game that requires all the arts in the right size, I need to recreate them. (fortunately I have all the images in high res, probably it can support an iPad retina someday). My first idea was to simply copy the entire XCode project to another folder and rename it to a new name, but it does not work like that. All links to the new project and references still pointing to the iPhone project, the smartest way is to right click the Xcode target, then “Duplicate and Transition to iPad”, so the XCode automatically duplicates the info.plist and makes the necessary adjustments, and it also duplicate the resources folder.
Rescue City: Prologue
Well, I’ve decided to keep a blog to tell a little about my experience with games and also for sharing some useful informations about developing games. To be honest I don’t have a lot to say, I’m not a professional programmer neither a professional developer, I mean, I’m using the “professional” term here to define those who work with that every day. I work with 3D, doing visual effects for television advertises: www.msleal.com. Developing games is what I’ve been working on in my spare time.