The Indie Xmas Calendar is an “indie xmas portal” where people can come to test new indie games - at least one new game demo/trailer/screenie shown every day. If you are not familiar with the concept, please read the initial blog post for more information.

Requirements:
The game must be indie made game. If you don’t know what that means or if you have doubts whether your game is made in “indie spirit”, then you probably won’t qualify. Indie games are accepted.

Platforms can be any: iPhone games are fine. Wii games are fine. Xbox live arcade games are fine. PC games are fine. Mac games are fine. Everything goes as long as it’s indie.

Quality control: I reserve the right to deny any game submission for whatsoever reason. For example. If it’s total crap, then it like… won’t be suitable.

Submissions are open:
Please comment this post and tell information about your game:

• Title
• Website URL
• Description or genre (in 50 characters)
• Screenshot URL
• Youtube video URL
• Download URL
• Platform(s):

Example submission:

Title: Dead Wake
Website: http://www.deadwakegame.com
Genre: Tactical zombie survival action
Screenshot URL: http://www.deadwakegame.com/downloads/images/screenie.jpg
Youtube video URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gpG-8q07sc
Download: http://www.deadwakegame.com/downloads/
Platform(s): Windows

More info:
initial blog post
more about the concept here

FAQ
Q: Can I sell my game?
A: Yep. Through your own site. In this site, gamers get to download new games every day, or watch trailers. A link to your site will be provided and you can sell your game there.

Q: I don’t have a finished game… can I participate?
A: Yes. You don’t need a finished game. You can send a trailer video instead.

Q: I don’t have youtube… but I have vimeo
A: I suppose that’s fine too, but I’d prefer to see youtube. You can go with vimeo if you want.

Q: What’s the point of this whole thing?
A: Spread the commercial spirit of xmas (=selling tons of to indie games) all over the world.

Q: How will this thing be marketed? How this works?
A: There’s some volunteers who have joined the ranks and will be helping with this. The original blog post got retweeted already many times (please do that too!) and got tons of interest. We’ll be doing press releases and Twitter marketing to get the forces going. The work that you need to do (aka submit your game) should give pretty good return-on-investment taken into account how little time this takes from you. And… of course you are free to join the party and blog about this thing! There will be more information coming in the following weeks as we prepare and launch the xmas portal.

Q: I have a question…
A: Please use this blog post to post your question

Q: I have an idea on how to do this.
A: Shoot! We are open to ideas. (But of course we gotta move on fast schedule to get things done, so don’t expect everything that’s suggested to happen)

Q: Where can I participate?
A: Make a comment on this blog post, and submit the necessary info. Thanks to Wordpress no entries can be edited later, but we’ll try to manage with this limitation somehow. :)

That’s it folks…
Submit your game please.

(I’ll leave this blog post here probably for some days now as I stay offline)

This is a scheduled post. I just want to let you guys know that I’m diving to the strange mystery world called “real life” and leaving virtual life away for a week or so. I’ll be offline until around 19th day or so.

(Unless I find network connection here and there every now and then…)

Anyway.

If you email me and don’t get a reply… it’s probably because of the move.

Some days ago one guy tested the new trial of my zombie game (community version so to speak, new upgraded “official” trial coming out after I get the move done) and he liked it. He said how barricading was fun (which is nice to hear, since that’s one major difference my game has to many other zombie games out there) and that the game is better than L4D.

I know that the guy had made this judgment after testing my game trial for like 2 minutes… but it was nice to hear anyway. I’ve always thought that in game dev, it’s good to hear lies from people - or lie to yourself when others won’t do that.

(Who knows, maybe he actually liked it.)

We’ve been packing our home (somebody should invent 7zip for physical objects as well) and today all gadgets except my computers left to the new place. My computer speakers left too. Television is gone. Radio too.

Now… the creepy thing is that it’s pretty darn silent here. And it’s creepy.

It’s amazing what void can achieve.

My “office” is moving next Tuesday and we are packing things. Like mentioned couple of days ago, I’ll be offline for about a week or so. I realize that there’s many things piling up in this time: there’s Dead Wake trial (one “candidate” version out) and Indie Xmas Calendar and a few other things as well (Insiders site re-opening and some other).

I realized that there’s no point for me to try get the real sellable trial version out before the move is done. It’s just too much hassle. I’ll also put couple of things on hold for a week or so, and will mainly focus on (1) move (no surprise) and (2) preparing the Xmas site for the launch (after all it’s only a few weeks to go).

No multitasking for me. Better do one thing at a time.

I’m putting my Dead Wake game trial out (doing a few tweaks) for sale. There’s already one trial out but it needs couple of tweaks before I do any promotion on it (now it’s internal).

Anyway.

As I was checking my game code… I noticed that the amount of code has climbed close to 300 kB. I use long variable names (I prefer variable names such as “isZombieReachedHisTargetWaypointMomentAgo” instead of variables where there’s like only letter “r”), so this makes filesizes bit longer. Feels pretty amazing anyway to think that there’s now about 300 000 bytes of text written. Each letter by me.

How much code your game has?

My office (read: corner in me home) is moving to another side of the city. We’ve started packing things (computer naturally is packed last, and unpacked first..) and the actual transport happens on 10th November.

Unfortunately our planned date was 30th, and since we got chance to move earlier, we decided to use it (it’s so much better place, with own sauna and all). Anyway. Due this change in schedule, it means that my network connection won’t be there until 19th day. That means I’ll be offline like over a week or so.

Can’t even remember when I wouldn’t have Internetz at home.

Oh well, more time to use the sauna I presume.

(I guess I’ll have to wander around the city connecting to the virtual worlds to get things moving on Indie Xmas calendar and everything.)

(This blog post intentionally left blank)

The idea about indie xmas 2009 is going forward. Here’s the thoughts I have about this:

I recommend checking out that blog post - it explains what this is in a detail. Those of you who haven’t heard about this idea, then in a nutshell this is about selling tons of indie games this xmas. 100% profits go to developers.

Here’s some ideas about the site concept:

• It’s an indie Xmas calendar website
• 24 “doors” to open, as in Christmas calendars.
• Each door (slot/hatch/windows/things-that-can-be-opened/whatever you guys call them) reveals (1) an indie game trailer (youtube/vimeo) and/or (2) screenshot and (3) link to game website and possibly (4) link to downloadable demo.
• Art style is xmas red… we’d need some sort of logo and a nice background. At minimum from some clip art place if there’s no time for something else.
• Each game’s placement is random (1-24), and the games are equally spread among doors (so, if we get like 24 games, then we have one game per day. If there’s 100 games, then we have 4 games per day).
• Each day, people get to visit the site and open new doors that reveal new (to them) indie goodies.

I’ll write more about this soon. Comment on this blog post if you got interested.

I’ve thought that I’m the kind of guy who gets excited about new things… but then drops motivation quite soon. I might impulse buy stuff that doesn’t get used. At least sometimes.

But… in game development, I find it pretty interesting that this doesn’t seem to be the case.

I developed Edoiki game for couple of calendar years (after which I cancelled it, but I wouldn’t call it lack of motivation - it was more like “too large project” thinking) and now after doing of couple of calendar years Dead Wake I still like to code it (which I now got to IGF and out for sale pretty much tomorrow day after that this week?).

I wonder how it’s been possible to keep the motivation when I’m doing things pretty much solo - with some help of course. I have managed to stay motivated pretty much all the time. Maybe it’s because that for the game project is something that simply keeps me motivated. I’m as excited about the progress of Dead Wake as I was on day 1. (At least if I remember correctly)

What about you? How motivated you are to work on your game? Do you lose your motivation? How you get yourself back to working? Is it easy? Tough?

Share your thoughts please.