The stealthy 2D side-scrolling cat burglar indie game Gunpoint recouped its development costs in one minute and four seconds according to Suspicious Developments. Tom Francis, lead designer of Gunpoint, posted some results of his indie game launch.
So, I quit my job.
In fact, I think I have quit jobs, as a concept. I started Gunpoint as an audition piece to get myself a position at a developer, but designing it has been so creatively satisfying that I no longer want one, and so commercially successful that I’ll never need one.
I haven’t been retweeting praise or flaunting any actual sales figures, but if it’s not going to sound too horribly braggy, I’ll share the one part of Gunpoint’s success that you might actually care about:
I can now make games full-time for the foreseeable future
Francis did specify that he was only counting the purchase price of the development software in his calculations. It’s likely that the cost of labor would’ve extended his time to profitability by at least a few more minutes. Either way, Francis says he’s pleased with the success of Gunpoint and plans to continue working on it.
The quick tease of Mad Max at the Sony pre-E3 presentation had tongues wagging, especially when it was revealed that Avalanche Studios would be developing it. They know explosions. They made the Just Cause games, and if there’s one thing those games do well it’s making things explode in satisfying ways. They also know accents. Tom’s favorite Just Cause 2 character sports an alluring speech pattern that makes a man weak in the knees.
But where is Max’s Aussie accent? He just has a generic American videogame voice in the trailer. Avalanche’s Christofer Sundberg told IGN that this game is about more than just a location.
“We treated this as a completely new property and that was really the only way for us to take on a licensed game. It’s the first licensed game we’ve ever taken on. And we wanted to treat it like an original IP. The setting – where it is in the world – has really nothing to do with the Mad Max video game. It’s really a game to do with the relationships between different people in this world.”
The game was originally going to be a direct tie-in with the upcoming Mad Max: Fury Road movie, but it’s been confirmed that this is now a separate story in the Mad Max canon.
Vince Zampella, General Manager of Respawn Entertainment must’ve had a good time at E3. Respawn’s Titanfall had a well-received showing at Microsoft’s pre-E3 stage presentation and everyone seems suitably impressed by the game’s mechs versus humans premise. Speaking to IGN, Zampella discussed the relief of finally showing off his project and how Microsoft’s cloud computing effort drove Respawn forward.
It wasn’t until the cloud functionality that Respawn realized what it could do with Windows 8 and what would become Xbox One. “It allowed us to think of the game a little differently,” Zampella explains. “That was the perfect solution.” Offloading artificial intelligence and dedicated servers to the cloud guarantee a smoother experience with smarter enemies in a game that blurs the line between single-player campaign and competitive multiplayer.
Vince Zampella didn’t rule out the possibility of the game coming to other platforms, noting that it was a “solvable problem.”
