Over the weekend, we attended the Freeplay Independent Games Festival. Having had some time to recover from the brain-load of inspiring discussions, we thought we’d write a quick thank-you message to the organisers, the volunteers, and everyone who attended.

It’s really interesting to be part of a festival where everyone is so deeply passionate about games.  Few artistic realms have get such a rabid crew of practitioners, willing to play, think, reflect, discuss and research their passion all day, and then long into the night. It really shows how unique the games industry is, where everyone is part of a Play, Enjoy, Share, culture.  Freeplay really brought us together, it was truly amazing to see such a diverse group of like-minded people, sharing, playing and enjoying their time together.

The festival wasn’t all just fun and games though.  There was also an awards night!

Brawsome did an excellent job with his game Jolly Rover, winning Best Australian Game; and a surprise victory goes to Sword Lady & The Viking; two university students awarded Best Game Design with Up, Down, Ready. I had a chance to hang out with both at the event, and they absolutely deserve it.

Jolly Rover

Up Down Ready

We picked up Best Game Audio with Train Conductor.  Thank you Freeplay, we’ll keep the funky SFX and pumpin’ music coming in future titles. Thanks especially to Joel Joslin who writes our tunes.

Train Conductor takes home 'Best Game Audio'

Thank you to the international speakers who flew such a long way to share their thoughts with us.  A further thank you to Multimedia Victoria for funding the festival, and the Victorian Library for hosting it.  The Victorian government has done a great job of making Melbourne the ‘Games Capital’ of Australia.

Finally, I’ll leave you with a shot of the team brandishing the 2 awards (Best Game Audio, and Runner-up for Best Game Design)

The Voxel Agents

We are really sorry that the graphics on iPad and iPhone 4 were not up to scratch. The complaints are totally warranted – we are and have always been listening. It’s completely our own fault for wanting to get the game onto iPad and iPhone 4 right away, but not having enough time to stick to our own quality standards.

Here’s how we’re planning to adress the iPad and iPhone 4 issues:

We’ve been working nights and weekends and, fortunately, we’ve been able to fix many, many bugs while giving the HD graphics a major overhaul! On both iPad and iPhone 4, all text is now crisp and hard edged, buttons are pixel-perfect, train models have increased detail, particle effects sparkle at high resolution, the HUD is cleaner.

We’re pleased to say that this major “World Leaderboards + bug fixing and graphical improvement update” was submitted to Apple just *yesterday* and it will arrive on the App Store shortly as a free update soon!

Graphical improvements in the 1.1 World Leaderboards update:

You're looking great Penny

The trains sparkle in the sun!

when HD and SD collide...

I score better in HD

Train Conductor 2: USA all crisp and clean

What’s next:

Since submitting the update we’ve continued to improve the HD iPad and iPhone 4 graphics — they will be prioritized and made better with each subsequent update. We’re really hard at work developing techniques to make better use of the screen space and to have the graphics render more cleanly on all resolutions and devices – not a simple task for the first major game to be distributed as a Universal App.

These improvements will arrive alongside new locations (such as Seattle), a bevy of achievements to keep you busy for hours, and some exciting new gameplay that we are still hush hush about.

We read every single bit of feedback that we can find. We believe in making super fun, tight experiences that feel great to play and so it means a lot to us when people aren’t happy. Here’s a list of feedback to date, and what we plan to do about it:

• “I miss the multiplier” (Georgina, TouchArcade) – We can’t satisfy everyone on this one. There were complaints from the original game arguing that the multiplier system was too complicated. We tend to agree that it needed simplification. Ultimately though, with endless play mode that old system just couldn’t work. Your multiplier would be reaching numbers larger than human beings have ever imagined. We wanted to start with a simpler scoring mechanism, and build on it. Stay tuned.
• “Missing the PROGRESS METER. Now we have no visual indicator of the requirement for unlocking the next area” (thespaciousmind, iTunes user review USA) – We agree that the experience points of Train Conductor Australia were a motivator. With TC2 we really wanted to focus on high scores and sharing and competing with friends. We felt that high scores didn’t receive anywhere near enough attention in the first game, yet they were a core part of the train conducting experience. We will fix this issue in a future update by giving more feedback about what you have to do to unlock the next level.
• “I was surprised about lack of Plus as well. Perhaps they are holding off in anticipation of Game Centre?” (eugekav, TouchArcade forums) – Two reasons; first, Game Center is on it’s way and we didn’t want to have Plus+, Game Center and Facebook – it would have been a complete mess. Secondly, we wanted to integrate the leaderboards into the experience a lot better than we could with Plus+. With Achievements (a.k.a. Awards in Plus+ speak) we’ve actually got all of the important Plus+ functionality anyway. World Leaderboards will arrive in a couple days, and Achievements shortly after. What features of Plus+ you’d like to see in TC2? Let us know in the comments.

There are some big things coming, so keep your eyes peeled and your fingers ready

Please keep posting with suggested improvements, levels you liked best, questions about design decisions, etc… We plan on keeping an active conversation going so we can keep improving the game.

Thanks
TC2 Development Team

He is a massive fan of the original Train Conductor Australia, and back in March we got an email from him wanting to know when he’d have more levels to play.

Well, after the release of Train Conductor USA today, Andrew got his chance and he was kind enough to record himself playing. Andrew, I have to say that you made my day.

Click here to listen (Warning! Incredibly cute!): Andrew Plays Train Conductor 2

We’re glad you love the game Andrew and we’ll get some more levels made for you to play soon.

For the past few months we have been planning to release the mega sequel to Train Conductor on the 4th of July.

Just like this blog post, our submission was unfortunately not released in time for the Independence Day celebration of fireworks and barbeques.

No need to stress! Train Conductor USA will be available shortly after the holiday weekend. It’s currently in the submission process. We’re simply waiting for Apple’s approval before we release – we thought it would be nice to give them the weekend off.

While we were researching trains in America, we were actually quite inspired by the enormous impact they had upon the American industrial revolution and the role they continue to play today.

We pay homage to this throughout Train Conductor USA. It features the steam trains of the old wild west, the modern monorails of Miami, and of course the electric subways of New York – enough historical transport to make Paul Revere proud.

No need to wait long! We expect to be approved soon after the long weekend is finished. After that we’ll start our own celebrations with a few competitions and prizes for our very patient Train Conductor fans. We’ll be running the comps over Twitter and Facebook so if you’re not already friends with us make sure you don’t miss out – join us at Twitter and at Facebook.

This is Agent Simon here. Recently we’ve been reflecting on our first year as an indie game studio, and at the April meetup of the IGDA Melbourne Chapter I presented a retrospective of the business side of running the studio. I’ve posted the slides (link at the bottom), but first I thought I’d give some context to the presentation.

Slides accessible at slideshare and in PDF

Going indie is very rewarding and enjoyable. It is also extremely hard to make a living from it. We wanted to share our experiences to help others who are planning to start an indie studio. The retrospective covers our mistakes, our successes, the things we did that gave the most value and some harsh realities of the indie financial situation. To succeed as an indie, you need to be well organised and have a clear plan. We set out with some pretty outrageously unachievable goals, and although that blind optimism has certainly helped to get through some difficult times, I think we’ve mostly stuck to the goals and we’re now well on our way.

I like to think of running an indie studio as pushing a snow ball along. There isn’t any one single thing that you do that will make you successful, but each successive step forward helps to slowly build the snowball bigger, and hopefully one day it will be big enough to start feeding yourself from it (we’re not there yet).

There’s a very vibrant community of indie developers in Melbourne, and in the hope that we could help, we were really happy to share all the details. The presentation covers how much we invested, our income and expenses and a quick summary of our marketing and production approaches, as well as other tidbits.

The slides are available on slideshare and in PDF. There is a lot more detail I would have liked to add but couldn’t in a 30 minute presentation. I am now developing the retrospective into a full article and if there’s any aspect you’d like covered in particular just leave a comment. You can be notified when the full article is ready by following us on twitter, facebook or via RSS.

Good luck to those who applied for the Film Victoria funding round.

Assistance starting an indie studio in Australia:

• IGDA Melbourne Chapter – a bunch of friendly developers
• GDAA – Game Developer’s Association of Australia
• Multimedia Victoria – ICT industry support body
• Film Victoria – the Victorian funding body for game and film production
• Freeplay – Freeplay is an independent games festival that focuses on the creative and artistic side of making games
• New Enterprise Initiative Scheme – government income support for new enterprises

We couldn’t have made it this far without fantastic support from our friends, the gaming community, and help from the Victorian Government and Industry, particularly Multimedia Victoria and the Game Developers Association of Australia.

To celebrate our birthday, we have taken the decision to go Green. We have calculated the amount of carbon we produced over the past year and we are offsetting that by purchasing carbon offsets from Greenfleet.

The Voxel Agents’ take our responsibility for the protection of the environment and the sustainability of its business very seriously. To help us in the fight against climate change we have partnered with Greenfleet. Greenfleet is the first not-for-profit forestry organisation in Australia to become an Approved Abatement Provider under the Australian Government’s Greenhouse Friendly™ initiative.

At the next Melbourne IGDA meetup (7pm Tuesday, 13th April at The Embassy), Agent Simon will be conducting a detailed discussion about our experience so far which will be of interest to everyone in the games industry, and particularly those who are contemplating going indie themselves. For those unable to attend the talk on 13th, we will make all the notes and slides available on our blog so that you don’t miss out.

Thanks for your support over the past year. A big thanks to Derek Pritchard, Logan Dowell, Jarrod Anderson, Joe Gatling, Joel Joslin, Sam Wong, Rob MacBride and of course, thank you Mr Steve Jobs.

Regular New York travellers will feel at home with the new subway track numbering, based on real MTA subway lines.For now we’ve chosen the 1, 4, C, Q, and S lines, but, as always, we’re open to suggestions. The visual style in the subway is very urban (as you would expect) and features some stunning graffiti details. In the final level, look out for buskers performing on the platforms!

Manage real MTA subway lines in the NYC Subway!

The challenge in this crowded NYC subway level is to avoid the columns between the tracks. You’ll really need your conducting hat for this level! We’ve played with many different column layouts, some more complex than others. So expect to see several variations in the final game!

Avoid the obstacles between the tracks to be sure the trains arrive safely.

Watch this space for more upcoming levels and inspiring new art and music!

Everybody has been waiting for us to add new cities, and we’re finally ready to announce which ones. Get ready for a big suprise, because we are definitely adding new cities, but they belong to a whole new continent!

In this latest sneak-peak video you can see footage of two fantastic locations.

Build bridges over the Grand Canyon

In the Grand Canyon players will have to build bridges to connect trains across the gap. This unique new gameplay will challenge your train management skills. You only get one opportunity to get each bridge right, so don’t mess it up!

The Grand Canyon

In the future we’ll be announcing details of the hotly awaited survival mode, as well as posting details of new cities and funky new gameplay!

If you have any suggestions for which US cities you’d like to see first, be sure to let us know. Leave a comment, or tweet about it!

We’ve just received the daily figures from apple for the period, and after operating expenses, we will be contributing $1,697! We don’t pay ourselves (yet), so this represents quite a hefty commitment on our part.

Our most sincere thanks go to all the players of Train Conductor, in particular those in Australia, Italy, USA, Japan and Great Britain who represent the largest contributors.

Distribution of sales by country

Extra kudos goes to Japan and Italy, sales of Train Conductor jumped significantly in those regions during the donation period. (And thanks to AppViz for the PieGraph)

We’re still trying to decide between whether to donate to the RedCross or MSF or perhaps another worthy source. We won’t be receiving the cheque from Apple for the sales until the end of Feburary. If anyone can help suggest a worthy charity, please let us know before then by leaving a comment.

Update: We have chosen to give the proceeds to Médecins Sans Frontières Australia. The full amount of $1,697 has been donated and will go to helping MSF’s efforts around the world and in Haiti. Thanks to everyone for helping us to do this!

Get started in Alice Springs, the first level of Train Conductor.

Sydney featuring Gold-rush trains.

Ghosts running amok in busy Melbourne

The Main Menu of Train Conductor

Welcome to Train Conductor!

The sunny beaches of Cairns

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