If you play independent games, you may have noticed an amazing Strange Sclaffold hit indicator. Each of the studies – from ClickkoldingIN I am your beastAnd recently Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical removal – He finished somewhere in the “positive” ranking system on Steam (with several “very positive” and even “predominantly positive”).
So like the imaginative director of the Xalavier Nelson Jr. He assures that his studio turns out to be Bangers?
To find out, I sat with Nelson at a programmers’ conference in March-Lub more accurately, I sat with him just before GDC, because he could not afford a ticket to the prestigious (but exorbitant) extravagance of the network. And even this is part of Nelson’s strategy involving work in very strict limitations and never tries to do more than exactly what his studio can do. Think about the opposite of Icarus: build wax wings, but then NO Fly in the sun. Nelson’s business strategy is simply flying straight.
Result? AND TMNT A game that is only 5-6 hours and an immediate hit towards Steam players, in particular those who play tactical games. Strange scaffolding became known not only for making game critics recognized by critics, but also for the fact that these games were miniature – or maybe more accurately, exactly of the right length and scope.
It doesn’t work, as Nelson explained. The time-honored model of development and publishing an independent, as he put it, is “putting a group of people in a room for three to five years, they spend a game, and if it does not cope in a month, everyone is losing their jobs. It simply does not make sense to give players something special, or allow these programmers to learn and develop and build the next thing.”
The Strange Scaffold studio structure allows each of this to act; It is about miniature -term, at every step, and this means that it is a compact community of performers, not full -time staff. A strange scaffolding concert is one that the developer can take, in addition to or among other contracts that can have somewhere else. But, according to Nelson, this does not mean that this is not an opportunity for programmers to get the experience of learning from themselves in the same way as they could if they were employees in a enormous studio.
“Strange scaffolding is the gigantic floating collection of game creators that falls and leave the projects, means that we learn from each other all the time,” he said. He described the recent “workshop symposium” with Dan Pierce, designer Strange Sclaffold’s Creepy Redneck Dinosaur 3about three match matches; Pierce was able to both convey what he learned about the genre and obtain feedback from other strange scaffolding programmers about his design decisions. “So creating a learning and development community means that we can honestly send a disgusting number of projects and in a way that at every stage calculated the question:” Is it worth? “Because if humanity is lost while creating a game, people who created the game first cannot do things you love.”
Until now, Nelson said he had gained a positive reinforcement from programmers who decided to work as part of very specific Strange Sclaffold restrictions. Certainly it is not the same as full -time work in the AAA Studio System system, but it may not be a bad thing.
“The feedback I receive most often is refreshing,” Nelson told me. “We are surrounded by environments that say:” If it fails, you don’t deserve to be here. ” Singling of strength is a place that says: “Let’s make the best game we can have in time and budget.”
