Bit Barons Blog Feed

The Astroslugs head for your iPad

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 14:34:00 +0200

Today is an important day for our small indie studio. We're now officially able to announce the release of our first mobile game, Astroslugs for iPad. It should right now be available on all AppStores worldwide in two exciting flavours.

1.) Astroslugs Deluxe for iPad – 1.99$
This is the Deluxe version of Astroslugs which gives you access to all current puzzles. You'll also get all future content updates for free. It is currently on sale for 0,99$. This price will stay for a week to give you - our friends and fans - a chance to get the game for a little less than everyone else.
2.) Astroslugs Lite for iPad - free
This is the Lite version of Astroslugs which will let you play the first two planets (15 puzzles) for free. You can unlock more planets via In-App-Purchases.

Rising Sale
We currently have 35 different puzzles in the game. Some of them will be known from the PC & Mac version of Astroslugs but a lot of them are completely new. We also plan to release 10 more completely new puzzles about every two weeks. That means that everyone who buys the game now will get about 75 puzzles for just 99 cent - if you wait until the last update the prize will have risen to 5.99$.
What's new?
Astroslugs is still a colorful and soothing puzzle board game. It still features the same game mechanic of fitting all those finicky shapes into the play field. It still has a lot of Astroslugs & slime in it and features the beautiful soundtrack by our friend Filippo Beck Peccoz. That hasn't changed.

But whille Astroslugs for PC & Mac plays in the current age and all Astroslugs are rather ... well ... dumb, the new Astroslugs for iPad is set in a long forgotten age when the universe still looked like an old parchment. See, in that age the Astroslugs were pretty intelligent. They already had their space ship going. And they used it to travel through space and visit far-away planets to gather the prized Slug Energy. Also,

We've changed all the graphics. Not because we didn't like the old ones but because our Art Department (Alex Widl) wanted to be challenged and create something new.
We've streamlined the controls for the iPad and re-designed all tutorials. They're now much more intuitive.
We've added something that all Astroslugs players asked us for: a proper hint system that will help you once you get stuck in the game.
We've also put in a few dozen Game Center achievements. Some of them are pretty easy to get. Some are so hard to spot that we don't expect a lot of people to get them.

And now, without further ado: Here's the release trailer for Astroslugs for iPad.
Flash is required!

The Astroslugs are on their way!

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 15:27:00 +0100

As of 00:00 on this Thursday the 27th, Astroslugs has officially launched. If you head over to our online store, you'll get the full version of Astroslugs free of any DRM and for both PC and Mac for a modest 9.99 EUR / 13.99 USD / 8.99 GBP. There is also a demo version of the game that'll allow you to try Astroslugs for half an hour.

We're looking forward to hearing your feedback on the game. We've poured our heart and soul into and and we're already quite anxious to see how you like it.

To answer a frequently asked question: Yes, we'll have solutions for all puzzles on the web site for you tonight. You'll find them at astroslugs.com/solutions but beware - it's way more fun to do it on your own then spoiling the fun with the solutions. So before you go for them, take your time and try it for yourself. You can do it - every puzzle is solvable.

Seven composers - one indie game album

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 12:58:00 +0100

The indie game scene is a magical place of friendly collaboration and unrestricted creativity. While this sounds like a big-time cliché, it is more often true than not. This is another example of what great things can happen when creative people work together without asking for money first. You probably already know that Astroslugs' complete soundtrack was composed and recorded by our friend and office room-mate Filippo Beck Peccoz, a Munich-based and Italy-born freelance composer who graduated from renowned Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachussets. Fillippo one day told us that he'd love to continue working on the Astroslugs theme even if the game music itself is already completed. So he decided to call up his former fellow students, some indie composers from all over Germany and the local munich audio scene. They were all provisioned with the Astroslugs theme song and only one request: "Please take this piece of music and make something great out of it that reflects your music style."
And so they did: The album entitled "Astroslugs & Friends - Theme and Variations" currently consists of eight tracks by six different composers. All have their roots in the Astroslugs theme song but each of them sounds very different. There's a "Progressive Trance Mix" by our own Alex Widl, a Speed Metal cover by independent composer Bastian Kieslinger, a solo piano version, a jazz arrangement and many more. More releases are already in the works, including a chiptunes remix and a Ukulele cover. Here comes the best: If you're fast, you can get the album for free from the Bit Baron's Bandcamp-Account. The first 200 downloads will be completely free of charge. Afterwards there'll be a pay-what-you want sale where you can download the album for a donation of "whatever you think our work is worth". All proceeds of this project are going to be split equally amongst the participating composers. So don't hesitate and get this great piece of game audio now.

Current track list:

1. Filippo Beck Peccoz - Astroslugs Theme Medley 05:34
2. Ajan Shani - Progressive Trance Mix 04:48
3. Simon Osterhold - Astropiano 02:58
4. Bastian Kieslinger - Metal Version 01:40
5. Casey Merhige - Arrangement 01:37
6. Lex van Dawn - Remix 08:18
7. Jakob Thomsen - Astroslugs Techno 03:13
8. Jakob Thomsen - Spaced Out 00:51
9. Jakob Thomsen - Three Fourths 01:15

Astroslugs will be released on January 27th 2011

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 18:22:00 +0100

We're very glad that we can finally give you the definite release date for Astroslugs' PC and Mac release. We'll launch on January 27th 2011 via digital distribution (globally) and in retail (Germany, Austria, Switzerland; in cooperation with Headup Games). Astroslugs should be available for 9.99 EUR / 13.99 USD / 8.99 GBP on all platforms. There will probably be some minor variations in pricing but this is what we're shooting for.

Final beta version:
We've finished the last beta version that we're ever going to release. Our next milestone will be the first release candidate. You can download the latest beta here. There is a lot of pretty cool stuff in this release, for example:

You can now delete shapes by simply right-clicking on them. You can turn this feature off in the ingame menu.
Added an ingame menu to the playscreen where you can adjust sound and music volume and right-click-deleting.
Added sound effects to nearly every object in the game. All praise Filippo.
Added particle effects and background animations throughout the game. Everything is now much more vivid.
Added a level-end-screen to praise you for solving a puzzle. You really deserve it once you go beyond the desert.
Styled the profile screen. You can now also delete profiles.
Re-Designed the zone selection (planet) screen. It's gotten a lot more cloudy on Slegmo.
Added an intro screen to the game to remind you who made this game. Yeah ...
Added a file icon to the game. We really like the Unity icon but this has really been overdue.

Final screen shots / press kit:
We've updated our Flickr account with a new set of Astroslugs screenshots. There have been a lot of minor improvements but these now represent the final graphics of the game. Feel free to use them for any coverage. You can also download them in maximum size in our press kit which will also deliver you some captions and logos for the game and our company.

Thanks for being with us on this huge roller coaster ride towards the release of our first game. We're having a blast and we're very glad to have you on board.

Financing Indie Games: We Need More Game-Savvy Investors

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 17:13:00 +0200

On Friday, we've been at gameplaces international (GI). GI is a yearly one-day-conference with a focus on game financing that takes place in Frankfurt (Germany). There was a interesting session about the financing model of Entropia Universe (the developer just provides the platform and other companies create and run their own planets) and one about the future of stereoscopic 3D in games (may thrive on mobile but not in your living room for some time due to technical constraints). What I enjoyed the most was a panel on the topic of how to finance game projects. It was held by Thomas Bidaux (ICO Partners), Marc Jackson (Seahorn Capital Group) and Jan Wagner (Cliffhanger Productions). At the beginning it centered around how you could securely finance your big AAA-project (hint: completion bonds seem to be the rage nowadays) and was not too relevant for small indies. Things started to get interesting when the Q&A part started. I was able to ask some questions more targeted into the direction of financing smaller game projects (= indies). The outcome of this was that the panel agreed on the fact that Venture Capital (VC) is not interesting for indie projects. This is mostly due to two reasons:

VCs look for companies to invest into, not projects. They want to sell the company to the next round of investors, not share distribution revenues with you.
Indie projects are too small for VCs. They have to invest 2MM+ or else their overhead (for consultants, due dilligence etc.) is getting larger than the sum they can invest.

This is not really big news but it made me ask them about how they thought of Business Angels (BA), Incubators/Accelerators (like YCombinator or HackFwd) and the Indie Fund. It was agreed upon that BAs (also called Angel Investors) and Accelerators are probably not the end-all-solution to your indie needs. They may be good for 10.000 to 50.000 EUR which sounds like a lot in the beginning. But even when you only plan with a small team of three guys and a short development time of one year this will not be near the money you need to develop your game comfortably. If you like having a day job and/or live in a very cheap place then go for it. But if not, you'll need to raise more money. That is if you're not able to run a pre-order model such as Markus Persson or the Wolfire guys. Should your budget be more realistically between 100.000 and 300.000 EUR you need a bigger financier. There is only one that comes to my mind, the Indie Fund. They are a small group of pretty successful indie game developers who decided to spend some of their money and invest it into other indies. This is just what we need. They combine all that is good and honest:

They can invest more money than your typical business angel.
They look to finance projects, not whole companies.
They have internal game dev knowledge enabling them to assess your proposal on their own (without hiring expensive consultants).

There's just one problem: There is only one indie fund. With limited funds. And limited time. And there's hundreds of promising game projects out there. A lot more than can be funded by just one entity. What we need is more of those game-savvy investors. Rumour has it that the guys behind Jagex (Runescape) and the ex-heads of some other AAA-Studio that was bought/closed (forgot the name, damn) are also looking for investment opportunities. Let's hope that they'll soon come out into the open. They are desperately needed.

Awards Extravaganza: Astroslugs wins the European Games Award Gamesload Newcomer Award

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 20:22:00 +0200

... yes, thats really the full name of it. =D

Anyways, yesterday was definitely the second biggest (positive) surprise in the short history of the Bit Barons (the first being the day when we got our EXIST grant). Flashback: A few weeks ago, we submitted a beta version of Astroslugs to the Gamesload Newcomer Award, the only category of the European Games Award that is open to indie and student teams. There were 13 other great games competing with Astroslugs ranging from Night of Joeanne (that already won a Audience Award at the Living Games festival) to Imagine Earth (that was already nominated for the German Computer Game Prize). Long story short: Even though we believed in the fun game that Astroslugs is we felt like big time underdogs. So it came extremely surprising to all of us when the award ceremony came to the Newcomer Award nominations (huge AAA games like Heavy Rain or Battlefield Bad Company 2 had already won other awards) and Astroslugs was in the final three of the race. A few seconds later both Critical Wave and Sui&Cide got greyed out and the only thing we saw (on a very large screen) was our Astroslugs cover shot. We had won! After we realized what just happened, time passed pretty quickly. We got a huge cheque with 2.500 EURO in big letters on it and a golden statue (which looks like some kind of female oscar but whose name we still haven't found out). After a few badly stuttered words of thanks it was all time for hugging, cheering, phone calls and gratulations. And that's where we stand now, one day later. We're still amazed and extremely thrilled. Now it's time for us to show that we're worthy of this prize and complete Astroslugs as the great and fun game that it was always planned to be. Thanks a lot to all who congratulated us after the show. Hats off to our award competitors - we look forward to playing your games on stage of GDCE and gamescom.

Cheers!

Alex Zacherl

PS: We've uploaded a few images on our flickr account. More will follow in the next days.

Gamesload European Newcomer Award: The Nominees

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:38:00 +0200

We’ve submitted Astroslugs to the Gamesload European Newcomer Award which is a category in the European Games Award. The award show will be held tomorrow at 8 PM on board of a ship cruising on the river Rhine in Cologne. We’re pretty amazed that we’ll be able to participate, no at least because the first prize in our category is 2,5k EUR and a distrubition deal with the German-based game portal Gamesload. In preparation for tomorrow’s show, we’ve put together a list of the other cool games that have been nominated in the same category.

Critical Wave - a Dual-Stick-Shooter for the iPhone by Grannies-Games
Corporate Property - a 3D first-person Jump’n’Run by a student team from Games Academy
Night of Joeanne - a horror game by student team Sluggerfly from MDH Düsseldorf
War Commander - a Sci-Fi browser game

Hacker Evolution: Untold - a game about hacking by exosyphen studios
Imagine Earth - a “Serious Casual Game” by Serious Brothers Sui&Cide - a suicidal 2D Jump’n’Run by a student team from Games Academy

Well, that’s some pretty amazing stuff. Some student games have already won other awards or are nominiated for the German Video Games Award so that’s some pretty high-quality competition. Good luck to everyone and see you tomorrow!

Alex Zacherl

PS: There’s a few more nominees but we haven’t managed to find any information on them on the web. We hope that we can see (and maybe even play) them tomorrow.

Abaddons Erbe
Affinitaet
Avalanche
Last Exit
Ping
Online Battles

Contacts for Indies

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:18:00 +0200

[Update] We do now have nearly 500 contacts in the list and six indie studios (Broken Rules, Pixelate, Farbs, Piece of Pie, Whatever Games and yours truly) on board. If you want to join, get one of us to vote for you. —- Starting up as an independent developer of video games is hard. No only, because making games is hard. This is what every newbie expects. Programmers expect to write a lot of code and squash a lot of bugs. Artists expect to design and re-design the game countless times. But what people normally don’t see is that to make a living by making games, you also have to find people that will play your game. Sadly it’s not just “build it and they will come”. Here comes in the work you normally don’t think about when going indie: Communication, Public Relations, Community Management, Distribution, Sales, Marketing, etc. … call it what you want. It’s always the same goal: make it possible for people to discover your game. Because what threatens indies the most is being completely unknown to 99.9999% of the world population. That’s why we do a lot of research on who is writing for indie game blogs and magazines, who can get your game on a download portal, who can help with distributing the game and so on. All this information is out there, either somewhere on the internet or in the heads and spreadsheets of other independent developers. As it currently is, every indie has to do this research work on his own. Seeing how many small indies and new start-ups there are, this amounts to thousands of hours of repetitive work that is not spent on improving our games. To change this, I propose Contacts for Indies What’s that?
Contacts for Indies is a invitation-only contact list for independent game developers. It has contacts for media, portals, platform holders and publishers on it.

Where’s the sense in that?
Every independent developer has to talk to a lot of people to get his games out into the wild and to get people to know and play them. This is a lot of work. And nobody can take it from us. But a large part of this job is just plain and simple research, mostly googling and cold calls. I propose that we help each other out and share our contacts in one location, to keep them up-to-date and correct at all time.
ot of time wasted on this in any indie studio. And I thought that maybe we could change that.

Why should I participate? I’ve got all my contacts together. They are my business capital and I don’t want to share them.
a) To help out other indies. Because it’s nice and the right thing to do.
b) Because no one has all the contacts and noone knows everybody. Even if you’ll only gain ten more contacts, these could be the guys who could help you tip over the edge and make your game a success. There will be people on the list that you have never thought of contacting. For example: I know quite a lot of german game-biz journalists. Ever thought of contacting those guys? No? Well, I thought so. =D
c) Because updating your contacts is a lot of work and we can all save a lot of time if we go all-out wisdom-of-the-crowds and keep each other updated about changes in who is currently in charge (and in the mood) for dealing with the likes of us.

How do we do it?
As simple as possible. We’re currently using a shared google spreadsheet. Everyone who got an invitation can update it. It has a version history so if someone should accidently delete or overwrite valid information, we can revert it at any time.

Why invitation-only and not visible for anyone?
To protect the people on the list from spam. It has a reason why most journalists or business guys don’t have their e-mail adress and telephone numbers visible on the web. They get a lot of mails and calls all the time. We don’t want to make this worse by making their contact information public. But we want those who are in need of this contacts and who have a legit reason for calling (i. e. fellow indies) to be able to reach them. I’m an Indie and I want to participate!
That’s nice. Contact me on Skype (dbltnk), Twitter (@dbltnk) or via mail (az@bitbarons.com) and we’ll get the ball rolling. Alex Zacherl

Being social isn’t easy

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 10:36:00 +0200

Well it is, if you're just one guy with a lot of time on his hands. But if you're trying to develop a cool game and set up a solid development studio, then lots of time is something that you probably haven't had in a while.

This is my problem right now. Besides the everyday work on Astroslugs it's my job to keep you guys updated on what we're doing, how we're doing and why we're doing it. This is why I'm pushing hard to get at least a minimum of web presence. With our Corporate Design and our web site still in the works, we'll have to rely on a place-holder site that holds together all of our community pages for now. [Note: We'll probably change the plain-html-look to something more eye-friendly nextr week.]

Yesterday I was setting up a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a Flickr profile, a a YouTube channel and this Tumblr blog. Today I'm trying to get to know each of these better, as I haven't used Flickr, YouTube and Tumblr before. My first learning: Trying to integrate those services is hard. While there are lots of possibilitites to integrate one tool with another, it's pretty hard to get them all integrated into one working set. What I want this setup to do is that it should automatically notify you on Twitter and Facebook, whenever I post a new blog entry, video or picture set. This works fine in some cases (Twitter) and pretty much sucks in others (Facebook page). Well, I'm still trying. =D

If you have any helpful information for me, feel free to drop a comment. Alex Zacherl