AvaGlide - Xbox Indie Game

Hey fella's! It's been a long while! I feel bad showing up after such a long while with, surprise surprise, something to pimp out, but maybe that's better than a random "hi" with nothing to show? Either way, I hope you won't mind too much

Some of you might remember that I released a game on Xbox Indies called Crate Expectations late last year. Well myself and the other 2 guys at Haiku Interactive have just let our 2nd game loose on the world!

This time around we decided to make a game to fill a niche that doesn't get filled too often, and with so many people clamouring after a new Pilotwings title we figured hang gliding was a good bet. We also wanted to make a game that was relaxing and approachable for people of all gaming skill, but still presented a good challenge and good competitive potential through online scoreboards. Finally, we wanted to make a game that uses the Xbox Avatars, because we don't have an in house artist to make our characters and we're not blind to the fact that the market on the Xbox Indies channel seem to love Avatar games

So we present AvaGlide! An avatar-based hang gliding game featuring 4 game modes, 3 levels, selectable time of day variants, online scoreboards, medals to earn, local multiplayer, 2 control styles, and...well I guess that's about it actually But hey, it's only $1!

TRAILER...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

Warby: It's pretty easy to get into mate! For making Xbox Indie Games all you need is a retail Xbox 360, and Xbox LIVE Gold Account (£40 per year) and a subscription to the Creator's Club (£60 per year IIRC). After that you can use Visual C# Express for free to do your programming, and whatever tools you normally do for your asset creation. XNA is a pretty powerful platform for developing but it's also really easy to use as programming APIs go. Getting your games published on the indie games marketplace is as easy as passing through a peer review system, and provided you do you then get 70% of any sales that your game makes. It's still a bit too small a market to reliably make good money off - most games sell between 100 at the most disappointing and 10,000 if they do well (the top sellers are around 100,000) - but it's definitely one of the more interesting markets around at the moment.

dux: I had to look up Wetrix, looks fun though, so who knows We've a few projects up our sleeves that we'd like to work on, but for the time being we're taking a wee break as one of the team has just gotten married and is off on his honeymoon. I'll be sure to let you guys know what's next when it's nearly done

Thanks for the kind words guys, hope anybody who tries it out likes it, though let me know if you have any thoughts as we're always happy for some constructive criticism!