Since I feel the XNA indie thread is mostly ignored.
Arkedo is one of two groups of folks that seem to be trying to carve out sort of a Pixel Junk role on XNA indie games. The other being Half Brick who have also gone on to putting their games out as PSP Minis.
The Arkedo games so far have been pretty simple but with a very nice art style. Previous releases were Jump! an old school platformer and Swap! a pretty standard puzzle league type game. Pixel! is their latest release and IMO the best so far. It’s another platformer, but with some pixel hunting twists.
Some shots of their games below but also check out Pixel in motion here
Think they are all up at 240pts which works out to $3 each.
I’m with you dude, the Arkedo games are definitely worth the asking price. Is Pixel already available? If so I am definitely blowing a few bucks, they haven’t let me down yet.
Yeah, Indie Games are not available in all regions. I think the supported Countries are: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States.
Hi, this is Pharoah from Arkedo, long time lurker :)
Thanks for the kind words, really. I have no idea where this Arkedo Series is going to lead us, but this little experiment of “one game a month” is really exciting and we are having a lot of fun. I guess we’ll think about this when we will have pushed enough games, probably after Arkedo Series - 04 SLASH!
Concerning your questioning why XBL Indie is not available everywhere, our guess is has to do with how Microsoft handles IP on this particular case, and what makes the platform amazing:
no dedicated devkit,
no need to be official studio for the platform,
no concept approval a priori for the games,
and no lotcheck a posteriori.
I guess Microsoft managed to go through all the legal hurdles for this, by finding a way where they are not responsible for the content, while allowing the indie devs to have access to a lot of 360s. And it makes sense. There would not be 10% of what we see now (approx 600 and counting) if concepts were to be approved beforehand, for instance.
So it is very much possible that they need to check where they stand on specific IP protection country by country before deploying the service to a new place.
For the moment, and Brakara is right, they have been able to make it possible in the following countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States.
All three games are fantastic, really. I am sad that I have to have my 360 connected to Live–which it typically is not–to play an Xbox Indie Game, though, do you know of any plans of this to change?
But my guess is that they have been looking for a way to secure everything, and give devs a space where they could safely play, without having to keep an eye on them all the time. The whole idea is to have the whole system automatic for them, so they can keep the admission price low.
So, just to be sure, they put a compulsory, generic, lengthy online DRM check each time you enter the Indie zone (which I find rather amuzing, but hey).
And you know what? It’s a bit brutal, but it seems to work: lots of Indies in the playground, no need for a lot of people within Microsoft to look after them :)
Just a quick word to tell you SEGA signed our last game, currently called Project Hell Yeah!. I believe the project is aptly named, after all ^^
Our Arkedo Series allowed us to show publishers (also: ourselves) we could fill a bigger screen than those of the DS. Not sure we could have connected the dots all the way to Project Hell Yeah! without them.
Not much info to share for the moment (we are still busy making the game, currently on Zone 7), but for those interested, we have set up a devblog at projecthellyeah.com
