The Giant of The River Thames is now officially on Kickstarter.com! For those who don’t know, Kickstarter is a place where people can fund ideas and creative projects. You make a pledge to a project to help getting it completed, in return, the creator will give you some rewards for your help.

We are trying to raise $3456.00 to help pay for art works and software licenses, and we only have 28 days left to make this happen! Take a look at the project on this project page and let me know what you think. We are very glad that the kind folks at Kickstart have put this project in the “recommended” page. Please help us make our pledge goal of $3456.00, spread the word and let your friends know about this project! Every bit of support will help us get closer to bringing the project to reality.

Project Page: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pepwuper/the-giant-of-the-river-thames-little-megans-giant

Thank you!

New survey in UK says,

64% Game Developers self-publish, of which 96% are independent studios.

52% on iPhone platform
38% on PC
36% on PSN
16% on Xbox Live

And for those who self-publish, 72% digitally distribute their games.

In conclusion, if you want your games to be discs selling at retail shops, most would go with a publisher. And digital distribution helps game studios self-publish. Nothing new here, but lovely stats for a nice Tuesday morning.

Unity Web Player Hardware Statistics

• 2010 2nd quarter
• 2010 1st quarter
• 2009 4th quarter
• 2009 3rd quarter
• 2009 2nd quarter
• 2009 1st quarter
• 2008 4th quarter
• 2008 3rd quarter
• 2008 2nd quarter
• 2008 1st quarter
• All-time statistics

(blogged for future reference)

If your Unity 3D game is going to be mainly played on the browser, you should pay attention to this data on user hardware.

from http://unity3d.com/webplayer/hardware-stats

found via @mrchrisallen

It took Pixar 25 years (and a million talents) to get to where they are today. If you live near Oakland, you need to go see this and be inspired.

from Juxtapoz: A Pixar: 25 Years of Animation preview at Oakland Museum of California

This is one of the best tools I’ve found lately. Snippely is basically an organized notepad, allowing you to store bits of codes that you use over and over again. So instead of going back to the textbook or searching the reference website, you can quickly copy and paste codes you’ve written before and simply modify them to fit your new needs.

For example, I stored a two line code for one script to refer to another script on a different object. I use this code quite often for interaction in between the player, the enemies, and the items, and I simply copy and paste this code from Snippely each time I need to do it.

Smart and handy, give it a try!

Download from http://code.google.com/p/snippely/

I spent hours finding a great font two weeks ago. If only I saw this list earlier! There are some really great looking fonts here. I was surprised by how much better the game looked after a font “upgrade”. Don’t ignore the quality of your fonts, especially if your game has a lot of text on the screen.

From 65 Beautiful Free Fonts for Web and Graphic Designers. (Remember to always check the license info before use.)

The Greatest Game Ever, based on the cutting-edge social-ready free-to-free True Imagination Engine.

from Don Dimanlig

Have you heard? Monkey Island 2 is the greatest game ever made.

Full article at Untold Entertainment.

Here are six of the most commonly used ways to tell stories in video games. If you’ve played any games with a narrative element, you’ve probably seen at least one of these. You can see how the story-telling in games have evolved over time, and while not listed here, the interactive methods of telling stories in games (eg. Uncharted 1 and 2, Heavy Rain, Half-Life 1 and 2…) have also provided additional tools for game developers to shape the experience of players.

Interactive story telling and story telling in an interactive medium. I sense continuous innovation in this area in video games. And yes please at least play the Heavy Rain demo on the PS3 if you haven’t done so. While the heavily scripted story might not be for everyone, it is a new way of combining gameplay with narratives, and it served the game very well.

Again the full article is at Untold Entertainment:untoldentertainment.com » Six Ways to Tell Stories in Video Games.