Hey, check it out, we made a free game!
indiecitycoop.com/InternSaga.html
It’s available for Android and is coming soon to iOS.
Candy Jam
This game was made for the Candy Jam. I recommend going and looking at the site to see what it’s all about but a good summary is as such: “The Candy Jam is a protest against both the system (Trademarks) and those abusing it: King. Ethics matter!”
Trademark Saga
What’s all the ruckus over trademark? Well there are lots of places to read about it. But the long and short of it, the way I see it as a developer, is that the current trademark system is being abused by companies with the money to do so. King.com is trademarking the words “Candy” and “Saga” (as opposed to the full title of their game “Candy Crush Saga.”) and are using this to “prevent others from benefiting off their brand.” While I could sympathize with that… I cannot for a company like King.com who wholesale steal popular games. Due to the fucked up United State Patent & Trademark Office, they have to enforce their trademark even when it doesn’t make sense. For example: they have tried to block The Banner Saga from being trademarked to “prevent consumer confusion.” It’s absurd. It’s unethical. And it’s potentially expensive for smaller developers.
Anyway. We made a game to vent our frustrations.
Development
An unexpected surprise while making that game was that our random game generator was really fun to play with. So we’ve added a few modes and social media doodads to make sharing the silly randomly generated games. For anyone curious how we did it. It’s painfully simple (which is why many games are nonsense.) We just use as list of over 10,000 words, broken up into adjectives, nouns and verbs. The interesting bit is probably the game descriptions. There are over 100 mad libs style descriptions we use that populate from our word list. There are about 6-8 per genre. We have 62 generic icons we randomly pick from an colorize to make the icons. And finally we have a handful of genres and fake studio names as well.
This game was a blast to make and I can’t wait to see how long it takes to upset someone or to get pulled from the app stores. Hopefully, it gets to exist peacefully, but I know Apple does not like being criticized.
Thanks for playing!