indieSpring, chainWorks, Syranin and Twitter!

Greetings all, first off obligatory pic:

indieSpring
The small studio I've headed up for a while now has been through a fair few iterations, but we've settled on indieSpring. I'll point you to the website for more details, but the good news is that we may be eligible for some minor funding from a regional development fund looking to promote game development in area. indieSpring are currently prototyping/mulling on two games. A quick, 2D puzzle game to get us out of the blocks, and a long term, much bigger project to be our main title.

chainWorks
An old friend. chainWorks is a game I considered when T2D was first announced and I've built a version from scratch on just about every major T2D/TGB release since, but never got round to finishing it. The game was always fun to newcomers but to me it lacked something to really push it out there. Through a bizarre chain of events I recently had the opportunity to pitch the title to a panel including two Sony executives as though I were proposing a PSN title. The objective was to receive comments and feedback on both the idea and the actual pitch technique and style. Both areas were pretty good and the comments I received has reignited the fire to get this game finished and done. I dug up an old prototype and stuck a video up on Vimeo:


I'm now announcing a code spring with chainWorks. I'm going to take all the old prototype versions, a vanilla TGB 1.7.2 and create a prototype ready to release on christmas day. Likely no-one will be interested in downloading a half baked fireworks game on xmas day, but hey! It seems like a reasonable target. More on this initiative over at the indieSpring blog.

Syranin
I wanted to take this opportunity to also announce our second project, Syranin. Screenshots have been posted here, and a few words of introduction, but no sort of formal announcement yet. So here goes:


Syranin is built on TGEA 1.8 and is exploring a new revenue model. Using cheap and efficient technologies we are creating a premium quality title, with the visuals, pace and action of a modern title. The game is an online, persistant world FPS looking to house about 500 active players at any one time. We're exploring the "realism-arcade" balance presently, but imagine targetting a combat experience similar to that of Halo, with vehicles, commander ranks and so forth.

We're building a server infrastructure built on the concept of elastic computing. As more players join our game, more servers are provisioned and added. The level server you're playing on gets more and more powerful as your friends (and enemies) join the fight. When (if?) you leave the server scales back down. Our platform can sale from 3 players to 3000 in under a minute and we only pay for the resources we consume.

We're looking at funding Syranin with ingame advertising revenue. Adverts will be integrated into our game world and will be relevent and contextual to the player. Thanks to our persistence and account system, we know the age, gender, location and playing habits of each player and can deliver ads targeted at them. Any player can run up to an ad, touch a button and the offer/details will be emailed to them so they can read it in their own time. The player gets the $5 coupon, we get the commision the company gets the sale. (They do -not- get the email address of the user). We're looking to implement this as our primary revenue stream. Downloading the game, signing up and playing is free.

Thanks, and Merry Christmas!
So thank you for reading, I hope you're intrigued by what you see. Please feel free to follow me on twitter, I tend to dump out a lot of game development/torque comments up there and it would be great to have some game guys on board, not just the web 2.0 crowd. If you've any ideas or comments, then feel free to reply here, or at the blog on indieSpring.