Indie game night tonight was at Wahoo's studio. Lee Baker from Sandman Studios gave a presentation. Sandman studios started out as a special effects company (they did the effects in Pushing Daisies), but it looks like now they've branched out into flash mini-games, children's picture books, and maybe animated movies. They do good stuff. He talked a lot about what they do and how they do it.
One of the interesting things about a visual effects studio is that they make a lot of bids on jobs, so they really have to know how much it costs to do certain things. To get backers for other projects, they have to prove they can do it and that their investors can get their money back somehow. I think with games you can see effective and ineffective pitches over at Kickstarter (I think the general concepts would apply to non-kickstarter pitches as well). I'd like to help make a game someday so I'm kind of fascinated by how you really have to have a good-looking prototype before you can get any money.
There were a couple of games there, including McKay's ongoing Flexitris project (super-customizable tetris), Siphon Spirit (an action game kind of like Osmos), and some other games. The guys who are working on Me and My Zombies were there and it was kind of fun to have already played the game and use the time to give/hear feedback.
I'm still trying to figure out how I want to cover indie game nights. I'd like to mention games as I find out about them and then review them when they're fairly complete, and I think Greg does a pretty good job archiving indie game night (which games appear when). Oh, and I've added photos to the Minecon posts.
