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Keeping the Independent Spirit Alive.

Name:	Glenn Thomas
Date Posted:	May 20, 2008
Rating:	5.0 out of 5
Public:	YES
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Some of you know me and some of you don't but for those that don't I'm Glenn and it's nice to meet you. I'm building a company called No Comp Studios and at its roots we want to support independent gaming and the communities that thrive from it. Independent gamers and game developers are the foundation that will allow game development to advance to greater heights, in creativity, variation, entertainment, innovation, and so on so forth. That's what I believe and that's the foundation I'm building my company with.

With that said me and my colleagues believe that Garage Games has a similar goal or spirit and we want to fully support them and their products. We want to develop content to support their products and services. We also want to develop products and services to support the independent gaming community which needs help to release competitive products in short time frames at industry standard. Our goal is to meet if not exceed those standards. With that said we need your help in telling us what you, the independent gamers and developers want. What game genres do you want to develop? What art packs do you desire? What animation types do you need? These and countless other questions we want to provide solutions for.

I currently writing a business plan to develop a small development business dedicated to you. We are also developing a few other things that are secretive at the moment but will change the face of the industry for indies. At the moment we doing research to find out what your desires and needs are and afterwards we keep you updated on how we're doing on the business end. Hopefully this .plan opens the lines of communication between our goals and your needs.

Glenn F. Thomas Jr., Owner
No Comp Studios.

Recent Blog Posts

List:	06/19/08 - The WIGI (Women in Games International) fundraiser 05/20/08 - Keeping the Independent Spirit Alive. 01/09/08 - Last Man Standing Behavior Competition - Round 1 01/07/08 - Sign Ups Closed - LMS Behavior Contest 01/05/08 - LMS Behavior Contest! Sign Ups Closed 01/03/08 - Community Involvement 09/10/07 - The Risk Taker

Submit your own resources!

Brian Wilson (May 20, 2008 at 15:04 GMT)

What happened to the LMS contest? Looked like a fun project...

Mark Dynna (May 20, 2008 at 15:45 GMT)

From our project's perspective, our #1 need is art. Maybe we aren't the norm, but for whatever reason we have had trouble attracting 3D artists that can do character modeling and especially animation. At the same time, I don't necessarily think "content packs" are the answer. People generally don't want to have the same avatar in their game that someone else had. Additionally, in order to hit mass appeal a character content pack needs to be very generic to get maximum appeal and can end up being too generic for anyone's needs.

A better approach (I think) would be to create a skeleton and mesh that you know can be quickly and easily adapted to suite the needs of the developer. Try creating a product where you offer an avatar that can be customized, within certain limitations, to the developer's requirements. I know our project would be willing to pay a few hundred dollars for a customized avatar. You should be able to design some limitations to the customization that should allow you still ensure a profit even if every order requires some time investment on your company's part.

Glenn Thomas (May 20, 2008 at 16:01 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Thanks for the insight Mark we have an excellent idea documented for what your requesting regarding the character models. We discovered the pain of modeling, rigging, and skinning in college and this is one burden we plan on lifting. As far as character animations we have an excellent tool to help crank out very realistic animations but need to know what animations are needed most out side the basics.

Brian: I went through some family turmoil during the contest and had left no one to run the contest in case of an emergency which unfortunetly happened. I do want to create another contest though and the next time around if the people at Garage Games let me will have alterntive POC's and Moderaters.

Tony Richards (May 20, 2008 at 19:39 GMT)

@Mark - What you're talking about, with the easily customizable models, is a small part of what I've been dubbing "Indie 2.0"

Of course, Indie 2.0 is a whole lot more than just a new style of content packs...

I gave a decent presentation at IMGDC this past year about it and I attempted to get into Austin GDC as a speaker to speak more about it, but no dice... oh well maybe some other time.

You could drop by IndieZen for some of my blogs that I've been making on the topic, and also check out IndieZen's Open Source community.

We're still at least a year away from having our modeling package commercially available, but in the mean time we expect to be releasing several content packs in a few months.... currently we're targeting September, but that's a fairly rough estimate.

What kind of content were you specifically wanting? My last Garage Games blogs gave a few details on the content packs we're targeting... hopefully one of those will suit your needs.
Edited on May 20, 2008 19:39 GMT

Glenn Thomas (Jun 04, 2008 at 13:48 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Thanks for the great feedback, we have taken your considerations into account and have three content packs for game development in the works. Two for TGE and TGEA and one for TGB. More to come as we get further into development. We're also expanding our team and will be opening positions for pay through royalties. Enough funding hasn't come through yet to implement a payroll yet but is constantly in the works. So if your interested in joining a budding indie game company and going for the ride keep an eye out for No Comp Studios' logo, me or Johns .plan, and posts in the jobs category.

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