independent developers

Touted as raising the bar for all independent games, Aquaria has recently won top honors at the 2007 Independent Games Festival, taking home the best game of the year award.

The basic storyline is that you are the magical being Naija who must travel through the depths of the ocean to find her family. The game is a 2D sidescroller that has a mix of exploration, battling, puzzle solving and crafting.

Currently the game is only PC but developer Bit Blot have said they are working with Ambrosia Software on a Mac version. Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for them to consider an Xbox Live release either.

Check back as we plan to do a review very soon.

via Joystiq

There is good news for cash strapped independent developers with the launch of MochiAds, an ad network that caters for advertising in independent games. Already supporting over 1000 developers, MochiAds allows them to insert advertising into their game. The games are then virally distributed across blogs, social networks and other sites by consumers.

There are two types of advertising, pre-game and interlevel. They are both designed to not interrupt gameplay and developers are allowed flexibility where the ads show, and are allowed to remove them if they wish. There are no contracts for developers and they can join and leave MochiAds as they wish.

The company was received $4 million in financing from Accel Partners this summer and was founded by Jameson Hsu and Bob Ippolito. Jameson Hsu had this to say about their company:

“We want to support the game development community, and we’re excited to share this opportunity with more people. Our goal is to make our system as easy and useful as possible, so developers can focus on what they love.”

via Gamasutra