Sony US have announced that FluffyLogic’s hit monster game Eat Them! was is in the top-selling indie PSN games of 2011.

With the 2011 coming to a close, we also wanted to highlight some of the most successful indie game development efforts on the year. If you haven’t already, give these games a shot during your holiday vacation.

To help keep the indie spirit vibrant, we also incubate some indie developers to give them access to our resources, enabling them to realize their full artistic vision while being able to tap into the expertise and experience of SCEAs World Wide Studios development ecosystem.

Read the full article here: blog.us.playstation.com/2011/12/13/celebrating-psns-top-selling-indie-games-of-2011/

In Novemeber Develop Online ran a feature by Armin Elsaesser, the sound designer for UrZoo. In the article he asks: Does working for free devalue the game audio profession? Is it detrimental to game composers? Is music you get for free not as good as music you pay for?

So does giving away your music for free devalue it? You could argue that if you gave all of your work away for free as you would never make a living. That is pretty obvious. But if you ask most well-established composers both within the games industry, and outside, how they got noticed, the answer that comes back is unsurprisingly that they gave their music away for nothing. In doing so they found that producers who liked what they heard called them back and offered them paid work.
 On the flip side, nothing could come of giving your music away for free. But if you don’t give it a go, you will never find out.

Read the full article here: develop-online.net/features/1486/Paid-the-price82328232

You can listen to some of Armin’s video game music here: soundcloud.com/arminelsaesser

by John

One of the earliest challenges came in deciding which foods the animals would eat. It was clear that they couldn’t have their real diets since this would complicate the game unneccessarily, not to mention leave us with an unmanagably large number of food types! At the same time, whilst it was obvious I would have to take some liberties with reality, it would be nice to get each animal eating at least one food that it would really eat.

After much cross-referencing with wikipedia and various other webpages, I managed to come up with a list of 20 foods that would give each animal at least one food they would really eat. A further food type was added for convenience, which all animals would be content with and thus allow the player to quickly get all their animals full up again before getting back into all the individual micro-managing.

Later on down the line, this would aid in solving a problem that had been looming for a while – namely, the introduction of strategy.

The problem from the beginning has been in our attempt to make UrZoo a game with something for everyone. A noble goal to be sure, but how to cater for the more casual player as well as a keen strategist was a puzzle to say the least. A breakthrough came when I split the foods up into different food groups. By then splitting the animals up in a similar way according to the different food groups, I was able to solve the initial problem and introduce a further level of depth all at the same time. Of course, it isn’t as simple as each animal being linked to a corresponding food group, but you’ll have to play to find that out for yourselves =).

By creating the groupings I had, I was now able to accomodate players that would want to play for varying amounts of time (e.g. a longer time in one sitting, or a short burst every now and then) thus making it easy to play casually, whilst also containing a layer of strategy which a keen player could exploit to their advantage. Success!

Of course, there was much more to consider besides what the animals would eat, but you’re just going to have to wait and see what else is in store when the game is released =).