Matthew Annal, the managing director of Nitrome will be joining us for a developer Q&A on Thursday! Mark your calendars!
Date: Thursday, August 20th
Time: 10am PST (5pm GMT)
Location: Mochi Media Chat Channel (also known as the #mochi channel on Freenode)
Nitrome has created some great Flash games in the past and is also one of the early Mochi Coins developers with their game Twin Shot 2. This is your chance to ask him any questions you have about Coins, monetization, game design and development, building a top games site and more!
Call For Questions
Comment below with your questions! Or if you’re shy, feel free to contact me directly and email them to ada (at) mochimedia.com.
Talk to you soon!
UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who attended and Nitrome for their time! You can read the official round-up of all the topics here.
How large is Nitrome (staff) and how large you intend to grow? Flash games market often seems as one man developers sometimes with some little help from designer/music composers. But you clearly take another path.
Judging by your games you target a specific style. Is it Nitrome aim to be recognized by that style? Does it feel limited sometimes?
To my knowledge you guys have followed a market strategy that consisted almost entirely of selling Non-Exclusive Licenses, does this work well for you, and do you have any intentions on altering this strategy to increase your revenue?
wonderwhy-er: there are now nine of us at Nitrome but we grew from just two of us! We also use two freelance musicans on a regular basis on top of that. We have never had any long term plans but I see no reason not to grow if we can afford to and as long as we don’t feel it will spoil our creativity.
porter: our strategy is actually a combination of advertising, non exclusive licensing and sponsorship (Miniclip, MTV, Candystand). That seems to have worked well for us so far so we have no reason to change from that. We are however always open to trying things on top of that such as recently Mochi coins which also led to us freely distributing the game.
I would like to know more about the development methodologies, do you guys have a consistent planning phase with class diagrams and more, before starting code?
I already heard that you have your own framework, is it mvc based? Is it built over another existent (opensource?) framework? Please if you can say a bit more about it, we indie developers would love to heard about that.
Yes, please tell us some more about your framework and engines you’re using.
Thanks for all your games with great graphics and unique concepts.
I’m love the art in Nitrome games. Could you share some of the sketches, concept art, color palette tests, or other such non-final art from Nitrome games?
Also, I understand Mat Annal developed the Nitrome “look” – do you have any favorite artists that you look (or looked) to for inspiration?
[quote]Could you share some of the sketches, concept art, color palette tests…[/quote]
That would be great, please do so.
Ruy Adorno: Too much planning really eats into the development period and in flash games that is really important. We are constantly coming up with new ideas that we run by each other verbally and we do write them up as a document but it is very small. Usually it consists of little more than a paragraph outlining the core concept a bullet point list of potential elements that might be included beyond that and a few scetched diagrams. Basically we feel this is the bear minimum needed to make sure that everyone on the team and any sponsor understands what the concept is so that there is no confusion later on. We also have a second phase….we try to have a mock up shot and a tech demo together in the first week at which point we review what any other elements should be that are left in the game.
I’m not really a programmer so I can’t comment on that but if your interested just email in and I’ll forward it to one of the programmers.
Junkyard Sam: We don’t really hold onto the scetches we do and we settle on the look for a game pretty quickly. If we get a large call for this I guess there probably is stuff we could dig out and post it somewhere.
I may have set us working in pixels and set up a few guildlines that we stick to but I think all the artists add something that we take on. My main influence is really that I make sure we only take on very tallented artists :)
I am really influenced by Japanise video games from the 16 bit era but also I think we get a lot from more modern designer ilustators too both pixel based like Eboy or vector like Tado.
1) Is the transcript of the chat posted anywhere? I missed it and would love to read it.
2) Thanks Mat, for the response. I think you’d be surprised how much many of us would be fascinated by the early sketches/idea sheets – anything, really – for Nitrome games, if you find it in your heart to share. =)
@JunkYard Sam: Yes, I just updated this post to give you the link to the transcript and question round up.
Twin Shot 2 was my favourite game!