Indie Game News: Meet the Team

Meet the Team

The team on Indie Game News currently consists of:

CaptainD - site owner, editor of this blog / site, runs several other blogs and a couple of sites. Far too useless to actually manage to create a game himself, he contents himself with writing about other people's, particularly on his PC Gaming Blog, Retro Gaming Blog and Wii Gaming Blog. He also sometimes has a strange habit of talking about himself in the third person, though this usually only happens when he is writing "Meet the Team" pages on blogs.

Simon Read - runs indie company New Star Software, creator of several excellent sports titles for the PC/Mac. New Star Tennis, New Star Grand Prix and the now legendary New Star Soccer series owe their existence to Simon and the team behind Blitz Basic (the programming language of choice for quite a few independent gaming folk).

Simone Bevilacqua - he of the unpronounceable surname created the well-received retro-style game BOH, which runs on a ridiculous number of different operating systems. (BOH runs natively on AmigaOS, AROS, Linux, MacOS an Windows.) BOH was voted best game at the Amiga Games Award 2009 - though as someone who owned a glorious Atari ST and not a hated Commodore Amiga, I of course treat this award with disdain :-D

Chris Park - owner of Arcen Games, creator of the immensely popular real-time strategy game AI War: Fleet Command, has several games planned as well as further developing updates and expansions to AI War (The Zenneth Remnant, AI War's first expansion pack. was released in January 2010). Having taken artificial intelligence to a new level, next year he plans on putting a new twist on the tower defence game genre, along with other surprises along the way no doubt...

Peter Cox - a self-proclaimed genius and, since he's the creator of Awesome Soccer, I'm not arguing with his opinion. He runs the cryptically named Red27 Studios, which is presumably a reference to a Manchester United player as Peter is a great fan of that team. Despite that he seems to be a nice guy!

Janet Smith - this Yorkshire lass who's spent time in Boston and Los Angeles works at The Code Monkeys, who've done various projects on behalf of other companies on a number of systems, but thanks to the wonder of WiiWare are also publishing their own games now, with the first one being the enjoyable banana-throwing Manic Monkey Mayhem.

Joseph Lieberman - works at Amaranth Games, producers of many fine RPGs. I'm sure I'm not the only one who fondly remembers the very first RPGMaker 2000 version of Ahriman's Prophecy, but not only was that game updated with RPG Maker 2003, but a whole whost of games in the Aveyond series (made with RPG Maker XP this time) have been made and received critical praise from all over the place.

Mark Featherstone - runs Moonpod Games and makes PC download games: Starscape, MrRobot and Pirate Princess. (so far...) He's a Yorkshire lad (which along with our Yorkshire Lass Janet gives us a decidedly Northern flavour!) who used to work in the mainstream game development industry, but decided to jack it all in for the glamorous life of an indie. Moonpod's slogan is "No gimmicks, just gameplay" - which probably sums up the indie gaming industry as a whole really.

Daniel Newey – One half of the two man team at John Wizard Games, aka a couple of guys from Australia who make RPGs. His games, Dawn’s Light and Lilly and Sasha, have been widely praised for their well written dialogue and memorable characters. Future games will attempt to provide even more excitement, while minimizing the grind that RPGs tend to be known for.

Mr Slate (not his real name... just in case you wondered!) is owner of Gravel Train, and working on the cryptically titled "RPG2". Gravel Train's slogan is "Old School just got a little older" and their first game is due out sometime in Autumn 2010... it will be very interesting to see what RPG2 turns out like, and whether it will get a proper name! :-D

If you're an indie game publisher and would like to join the team, please email me for more details.