#indie expo

[vulcan-moon]

cringetober day 6: neko (or another animal features). who would i be if i didn't make another catfolk named after a crime for an upcoming pathfinder game

[nickpeppermint]

To get a Nendoroid is the highest honour creator can receive

And correct me if i'm wrong, but it might be the very first one based on indie animation

Only two episodes, and Digital Circus gained more support than one could ever predict

Indie is THRIVING these days and it's amazing!

[ruemxu]

Guess WHO is going to Small Press Expo this weekend in Maryland!

Ru! \o/

If you're in the area, be sure to swing by Table D3B!

[fizdryypz]

Anime Expo Day 1: Serial Designation V!

[blazehedgehog]

After watching SAGE's 2024 trailer, you ever get the feeling that most people want to be making indie games instead of fan games nowadays,? Every year there's been less and less fan works there.

This is the first year I've really felt it in any meaningful way.

There have been attempts for more than a decade to rename SAGE to drop the "Sonic" part. I've always pushed back against that and at this point the branding is too strong to give up, I think. People know about and come to SAGE because the brand is strong. Renaming it would be a death sentence.

Taking off my business hat, it's a bummer to see fangames in the minority here. Everybody wants to hop on that indie game gravy train and chase the success of Pizza Tower (seriously, count how many Pizza Tower clones are in the trailer this year) or Freedom Planet or Spark the Electric Jester or whatever.

And it's easy to congratulate people for striking out on their own and making original games. I was one of the many voices urging Sabrina to divorce Freedom Planet from the Sonic franchise and make it into an original game she could sell. So she ran a crowdfunding campaign (multiple, actually), was successful, and now we have two Freedom Planet games. And that's great!

But... does that mean all fangames should go away forever?

The example I lean on the hardest is comic books.

A lot of the guys who created the biggest super heroes aren't around anymore. They gave up control long ago or are straight up dead now. These books are effectively officialized fanfiction now, as are the $300,000,000 movies based on them. An ever-increasing number of people writing, drawing and directing these characters today were not alive when they were originally created.

But people still keep writing Batman stories, officially or otherwise. Because there are some stories you can only tell with Batman. Now, you could break off and make your own character that's similar to Batman, build up this history for him, and then finally tell your original story with that character. And maybe that's satisfying, to have built something of your own like that.

But for one: that's a lot of work. Batman is interesting because he has decades (almost a century now) of history behind him to play off of and work with. There are people out there who will tell you to just start writing your dream story and forget about building up to it first, but that's more about motivation and confidence than the idea that stories don't need historical context.

And two: that's already been done.

There's a good chance you know who Rob Liefeld is from his, uh, "distinctive" art style. He also created Deadpool, a katana-wielding mercenary assassin that dresses in red and black, whose real name is Wade Wilson. But before Deadpool, he created Deathstroke, a katana-wielding mercenary assassin that dresses in orange and black, whose real name is Slade Wilson.

Here is a guy who has built a career on copying his own work (and the work of others) over and over and over again.

Did it make Rob Liefeld rich and famous? Technically yes, but he kind of got rich because other people made better work using his characters, and he's famous for being kind of a hack.

So which is better?

Creative output you can do right here, right now, today, but is considered "fanfiction" or "fanart" or a "fangame", which may or may not lead to you being the person handling the official thing at some point down the road...

Or spending years of your life toiling to bring an original concept to life, and even if you struggle through all of the boredom and hardship of getting your original product out the door, it gets lost in the noise of now-million other creators trying to do the exact same thing. And then, at the end of your launch, after 2, 3, even 5 years of working and working and working, you've only made enough money to cover rent on your apartment for a month and a half.

Or, to put it another way:

Are you ditching fangame development because you have a legitimately great story you want to tell, or are you just doing it because you can't make money on a fangame?

Are you just creating another Bloodstrike?

As someone who has struggled to justify putting lots of hard work into a fangame myself, and have both made very popular fangames and some not-so-great original games, I don't know if I have a definitive answer for you. But I do wish there were more fangames at the fangaming event, and I will say, as always, if I could get paid a livable wage for making fangames, I would drop everything and do it in a heartbeat.

[midautumngame]

Game Devs of Color Expo is next week and we're participating! We'll be doing a Final Boss Reveal!

[blerdyotome]

Game Devs of Color Expo Steam Sale Offers Incredible Discounts on Indie Games

The ninth Game Devs of Color Expo is in full swing, spotlighting the unique voices of diverse creators within the games industry. The expo kicked off with a showcase of indie games from some amazing game devs of color! During the direct there were a few exclusive announcements so be sure to check out the full showcase below. In conjunction with the Expo, the Game Devs of Color Expo Sale is now…

[terrible-eel]

My comic, 'Let Her Be Evil' is up for Outstanding Anthology at the 2024 Ignatz Awards!

To request a ballot and vote for me and the many other hard-working co-creators, click here.

There are tons of amazing writers and illustrators from all walks of life, doing their best to create stories with unapologetically evil female characters.

I personally was able to add my own experience as a queer writer with my story about a child's discontentment with their gender identity and the monsters that drove them to seek their own path in adulthood.

I was welcomed happily into this anthology by Cassandra, who pushed to maintain my voice throughout the editing process.

Its been a wonderful experience and it would mean so much if we could win this prize and bring more attention to these unique stories.

[newdmodel]

Pics from my workshop with @dcorsetto this past weekend at the Small Press Expo!

[airitree]

Hey guys! I’m gonna be at Small Press Expo 2024, in Booth K9!

I’ll be selling prints of Lamb at Arms Interior pages, King Lindworm Reprints, buttons, and more!

See you there :-)

[misterygx]

The SAGE '24 demo of my new game, Worlde Lande Countrie, is out now!

Download it here: https://sonicfangameshq.com/forums/showcase/worlde-lande-countrie-sage-24-demo.2098/

[fawnduu]

I'm tabling at my local indie comic expo TOMORROW!!

I'm so stoked ill be there all day with my books AND i will have louie and dani plushies for sale as well!

[hypnospiralcomics]

My new mini-comic got reviewed by #MLGC !

⁩If you want a FREE copy of "Mae the Master," Ill be giving them out at SPX (https://www.smallpressexpo.com/) in Bethesda, MD the weekend of Sept 14-15.

[molegato]

Small reminder that you can actually play a demo for Frogun Encore in this link! It's got three levels, plus playing it and telling me about it would make me very happy 🐸‼️

[blazehedgehog]

Do you think there might be some problems that could develop with SAGE showcasing indie games? SAGE was created as an event for the Sonic fandom to make fan games, but now indie games have become part of it. Nothing against it on principle, but what about the legal area? SAGE is still tied to Sonic's image, would it count as using Sonic to sell other products? Or would it be a Chip 'n Dale's Movie Sonic case?

Top comment on the showcase trailer video:

If there were problems, Sega would be the ones causing them, and that's the official Sonic brand account giving their sign of approval.

SAGE was created, speaking as the creator of SAGE here, to demystify fangaming and show the world it had a positive effect on the world. Fangames were seen as illegal bootlegs when I started the event, and I sought to change that perception.

Now, yes, generally speaking, I think if you're trying to stay on the up and up, disconnecting your fangame from commercial promotion as much as humanly possible is the best way to keep your nose clean. Don't run ads on your website, don't run ads on gameplay footage, DEFINITELY do not in any way even LOOK at crowdfunding or paying employees. Stay away from any and all money I/O. Which is very difficult if not impossible because even hosting a website means you are exchanging money with someone in order to distribute your game.

So you have to decide an acceptable level to compromise your morals if you hope to put your game out there, and how much risk that creates for you depends on the company in question, I guess.

Hosting your game on Itch.io? Well, as long as you create a standalone account separate from any real monetized game creation you plan on doing, that might be okay. They don't run ads on Itch.io that I know about.

Hosting your game on Game Jolt? Slightly more risky, because Game Jolt serves ads on their download page.

Mediafire? More risky, because I feel like Mediafire shows extra invasive ads, including, last I heard, those ads that have fake download buttons on them. So not only is Mediafire making money, they are engaging in active deception.

Hosting it on a Patreon? Way more risky. Even if you have the post set to $0, you are bringing people to a page where they can give you money for your services.

I technically do this with some of my very old game projects, but none of those are anywhere close to finished games, and they are all almost universally just fragments of unimportant side projects. For example, I do not have builds of TFH up there, or MarioWeen. It's mostly just software I started and did not finish, mixed in with a couple of like, early alpha engine tests if I remember right.

I've also thought about just straight up taking them down and hosting them somewhere else (the itch.io archive might be my best bet, or even archive.org). It does make me uncomfortable to have them up there, but it was a stable, clean place to host things like that when I first launched that Patreon, like, what, 8 years ago? Now they're buried at the very very very bottom of my post list and I'm probably the only person who remembers that they're there.

Anyway, if it was a problem, I think Sega would let us know. And I say "let us know" instead of, say, just stomping their boot all over SAGE and killing it without recourse. I think, given what a positive force it is not just in the community, but in the indie gaming space, if it was a problem, they could talk it out with whoever is running the show that year.

But this is a place to cultivate future game developers. It is good for the game industry. And I've said it here, or maybe other places, but I've often wondered if Steam's multiple demo events they host every year was inspired by something like SAGE. It's kind of become a big deal, and it keeps growing to be a bigger deal every year, and at least so far, nobody's abused or exploited it yet.

Not that they even could -- SAGE is curated. Not a lot, but enough that I know there were booths rejected for 2024. You can be, and people have been, kicked out of SAGE for being abusive. Participating in SAGE is a privilege, not a public service.

So I think everything will be fine.

[midautumngame]

Midautumn is NOW ON SALE for the first time ever as part of this year's Game Devs of Color Expo Steam Sale!

You can get Midautumn for 20% off from now through the 30th on Steam or Itch.io so if you were waiting to grab it up, now is the perfect time! Also check out all the other amazing games that are apart of the event!