Black Jacket Studios

Indie Collaboration Through In-Game Ads

September 14th, 2009

At GDC this year in San Francisco, I met up with a bunch of Indie game developers at the Kongregate building down town. The event was put together by Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler of 2DBoy. It turned out to be a great opportunity to get to know a bunch of top indies and discuss the adventurous non-stop glamor that is indie game development.

Around this same time, Brian and I were trying to figure out how to flesh out the Metal Drift world with a little more life. We wanted to push the sports angle by adding arena ads, but didn’t want to invest a ton of time making up and designing logos for fictitious companies. So it seemed like a natural fit to advertise for our fellow indies instead.

So at the Kongregate meet up I made the offer; free advertising to anyone who wanted it. All we needed in return was the use of a logo. The idea got plenty of interest from the room…so we were off and rolling and ended up with some great companies. The final line up includes:

HotHead - Makers of the ever popular Penny Arcade Adventures.

Klei Entertainment - Makers of the hot titles Shank, Sugar Rush and Eets.

Games Faction - Makers of the beautiful Project Aftermath.

Garage Games - Our illustrious benefactors.

Nimblebit - iPhone domination machine and creators of the super polished Zero Gear.

Fully Illustrated - Our web designers, and just incredible people all around. There are none better.

Torpex Games - Creators of the award winning Schizoid.

Firehose Games - Working on top secret games involving Super Heroes and Love (?)

Ronimo - Maker of the fantastic Swords and Soldiers for the Wii.

It was our job to animate the logos once we got them. So I did some research to hunt down the best looking animated ads I could find. Not surprisingly Japan had the best stuff. I broke down the dominant styles and came up with some basic animations.

After a bunch of trial and error, I managed to throw together animated ads for each contributor. It was a little more work than I had anticipated, but I think it was worth it. Each ad ended up being between 30 to 60 frames, some with overlapping animations. Take a look at the final product:

I think they turned out pretty well. Thanks in large part to the great initial logos and all the folks who participated. We look forward to collaborating with the indie community again soon.

Find more regular updates from me on Twitter.

Weston

Categories: Development, GDC, General