Games like Minecraft and Braid have proven that there is money to be made in the indie game marketplace, which means more and more designers are following suit, one being Zeboyd Games. The two-man indie design team released two excellent JRPG spoofs on the Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) Marketplace in 2010: Breath of Death VII ($1) and Cthulhu Saves the World ($3). Both have been well-reviewed and spent time near the top of the XBLIG sales charts, but its success couldn't be rivaled by what wa...
Introduction PostgreSQL is a very popular Open-Source database management system. It competes heavily with many proprietary and commercial database management systems. More information on what it is and it's history can be found here and here.
http://www.volusion.com/search-engine... - In this episode, Matt Winn discusses some great tips to boost your SEO using new content. If you have keywords you are interested on ranking for but have no content; creating landing pages specifically for these target keywords and optimizing them in a very natural way, will help you increase your SEO visibility. Create content that is useful for your viewers so that they can help you in the distribution and promotion of your pages. Don't forget to c...
There’s no point to playing all of the different tower defense games available today. Most adhere to the original formula, so playing 2 or 3 really good ones (like those mentioned in my previous post) would be more efficient.
Believe it or not, there are some older iPhones still in use out there, and they're not going away anytime soon. Sure, Apple would prefer you to upgrade your device to the latest and greatest models, which are compatible with iOS 5. Those models include all of the following:
Let's face it, CDs and DVDs are a thing of the past. We no longer use them as a storage medium because they are slow, prone to failure in burning, and non-reusable. The future is flash memory. Flash memory is cheap, fast, and efficient. Eventually, flash drives might even replace discs as the preferred prerecorded selling format for movies.
The NPD Group is a market research firm that issues the most trusted sales numbers for video games. They just released their second quarter 2011 report, and the trends it reveals confirm much of what we here have been speculating here at Indie Games Ichiban (and what we've been hoping for): downloadable games have risen, while full-box retail games have fallen—that is in the US, at least.
Thanks to all who participated in our inaugural IGI Contest. Our goal was to come up with a new word for medium-priced downloadable games, and we have done just that. After reviewing the flurry of last-minute submissions, a winner has emerged. Congratulations, Mike Grimaldi! We will contact you to determine how you would like to receive your $10.
What would happen if a working disposable camera were to travel from Massachusetts to Hawaii via first-class mail, with explicit instructions for its handlers to take photographs?
Video games have been a purely digital medium for some decades now. They exist in the electronic nether, embedded on discs and projected on screens. Since digital distribution has gained popularity, even the physical manifestation of the game disc is going away, leaving games (especially digitally distributed indie games) more ethereal than ever before. It is unclear whether this slightly unsettling fact was on the minds of the three people who made Receipt Racer, but regardless, it stands as...
Human anatomy is something every physician must undergo as a medical student. Some move on to become great doctors, some move on to become great artists, helping to better educate students and improve upon many illustrated representations of the human body since the days of medieval medicine. But thankfully, you don't have to be in the medical profession to enjoy the beautiful art of the human body created for teaching purposes.
As many of you Null Byters may know, I was planning on writing this article a week or two ago. Better late than never! So, let's get right to it then—choosing the right Linux distro for your needs.
Watch out Instagram, there's a new free, sociable photography filter app that hit the iTunes App Store recently, and it just might be some good competition. It's called PicYou and might sound familiar to some of you photo sharing fiends out there. That's because it's been a successful web-based alternative to Instagram for about six months now.
Cheating. It happens everywhere. From scientists faking human ears on mice, to Hollywood thirty-somethings cheating on their quadragenarian wives, to chess players accusing supercomputers of fraud. There's no game or profession out there that doesn't have a cheater or two, but the bigger nuisance is probably those people who accuse others of cheating.
Big news from the world of game development engines. For several years, Unity3D has been the free 3D game development engine of choice for aspiring and indie game designers around the world. While it isn't as powerful as Unreal Engine 3 or CryEngine, it's free and much easier to use. Now, according to an announcement made by Unity yesterday, Unity 3D is about to unleash a huge weapon that neither of those other engines can claim: Flash compatibility.
Flash video. It's what all smartphone users have been waiting for. Why has it taken sooo long? And why is Apple still resistant?
JUAREZ. PH33R. SUX0R. If you know what these mean, then you probably spend way too much time on the internet. If you're as bewildered as I was, these words actually mean something in leetspeak.
Having a custom Linux distro can be the coolest thing ever. Most of you will probably be satisfied with any particular Linux distribution, but I know I'm not the only one out there who wants it to have custom configurations and programs preloaded while leaving the bloatware behind.
The end game is a very important aspect of playing Scrabble. If you have just a few letters left on your rack and there are none left in the draw bag, but you're currently losing the game, you still might have a chance to win if you play your cards (er… tiles) right. No matter if you're playing a casual game at home with a friend or competing against diehards in club or tournament games, the scoring process at the end provides the same results.
I'm a desert island pizza person, meaning, I pretty much never get sick of pizza. When it comes to other favorite cuisines, I operate in cycles - indulge often, grow tired of them, take a break and re-visit in time. But when it comes to pizza, I could eat it every night of the week. I typically practice enough self-control to override this desire, but luckily for me, I made a special concession this past week while creating this article.
Since the beginning of last year, every six months or so the fine folks at Wolfire Games have gathered indie developers together to release a combo gaming pack called Humble Indie Bundle. Not only are the included games good, but the way one buys them is what makes Humble Indie Bundle one of the coolest products in games. Even better, Humble Indie Bundle #3 just came out last Tuesday and is available here for two weeks only.
Making a video game requires an incredible amount of work. It requires people skilled in many disciplines to work together for thousands of hours merging visual art, computer programming, game design, sound design, and music composition into a fun game. The Indie Stone is a Scottish indie development studio started, like so many others, by industry vets who were tired of corporate restrictions and wanted to make the crazy games they had always imagined.
Carpe Fulgur translates to something along the lines of "Seize the Lightning" in Latin. Sometimes that is enacted with golf clubs by idiots. But the three intrepid indie video game localizers who work under that name are trying to do it the right way: metaphorically. They are translating and publishing Japanese games for the Americans market—games that have seldom been seen before because every other company thinks it's mad to release them here.
+Tom Anderson of MySpace has been very active on Google+ over the first week, and he's not shy with his thoughts on the evolution of the industry he once owned. Here's his take on this morning's Facebook announcement and Mark Zuckerberg's response when asked about Google+.
In the mid '90s, there was no such thing as a widely available indie video game. Brick-and-mortar stores were the only places for consumers to buy games, and magazines were the only outlets to hear about them. For video game creators, the need for a publisher to market and distribute was logistically essential to attract players.
Videos Marketing is always going to grab a hold of any individuals interest and attention a good deal faster and more effectively in comparison with any kind of written copy or even photographs would or could.
The concept of Scrabble and Words with Friends is the same—play words, score points, win. But the games require different strategy in terms of letter placement, premium squares, tile point values and word choices. Here's the main differences between the two games.
Kurt Harris, MD, writes about paleolithic nutrition at his highly recommended blog, www.paleonu.com.
We have long admired the imaginative energy of IndyMogul. A new generation of filmmakers empowered by affordable filmmaking technology and free distribution.
You walk over to your laptop, wiggle your mouse to wake up the screen, then fire up your browser to come visit Null Byte. Catching the article about Anonymous and how they presumably will not take down the Internet, you find yourself wondering... how would someone take down the Internet? Could they even do it?
No doubt you've seen some of the hack logs being released. One part that stands out over and over again is the heavy database usage. It used to be early on that virus and hackers would destroy data, usually just for lulz. However, with the explosive commercial growth of the Internet, the real target is turning into data theft. You should learn how this happens so you can protect yourself accordingly. Let's take a look at what makes this possible and dare I say, easy.
Social engineering is described as the clever manipulation of the natural tendency of human trust. All of the passwords, locks, and encryption in the entire world are useless against a good social engineer who can charm or trick you into giving it up.
Many windows users, if not all, run into a virus infection once in a while. This is unavoidable when using Microsoft's operating system. Without digressing too much, the fact that Windows is such a popular OS with no controlled software sources makes it easy for viruses and malware to spread. And while there's a plethora of antivirus tools for Windows, sometimes infections (such as certain scareware) can disable the install and/or use of antivirus systems and render your OS unusable until cle...
Hello everyone. As many of you know, we've successfully launched the Null Byte Suite for our wonderful community. In addition to the prepackaged tools, there is a dedicated GitHub repository where tools submitted by the community will be pushed to for distribution in the suite. There have only been a couple submissions, and out of them, only one fit the requirements. So, out of anticipation, we've added it to the suite!
This is a game played by 2 players. It cannot be played by more than 2 players and is played using 30 cards. Regular jokers have no role here. However there are 2 additional jokers, the seven of hearts which is the big joker and the seven of spades which is the small joker.
Socket programming in Unix allows multiple computer programs to "talk" to each other in the form of open "pipes". This is used in many popular programs for the Linux system (see any distribution). This how-to is created to understand the simple creation of a socket and what the various parts of the call mean.
