Lighthouse Games Studio
Hi,
only just found out about this site a few days ago, It's been great to see all the games made in SA, so figured we would post a bit about ourselves and a few of our games as well.
We are a small 2 man team based in Durban, and have been developing Indie games full time for the last 4 years now and have sold over 1 million games.
Some of our games (currently available on XBLIG):
Shark Attack Deathmatch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7LsC7Q6jXQ
Avatar Deathmatch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znrdL9w_Ow8
Also done a few Windows Phone 8 games, our most recent & on-going project is Greed City a location based real world Monopoly style game.
It's free and has no Adverts, we use IAP, and currently have around 40 000 players, we could do with some more South African players:
http://www.windowsphone.com/en-gb/store/app/greed-city/25a78a47-3e6c-447c-b3d8-4db7af4bd966
Cheers.
only just found out about this site a few days ago, It's been great to see all the games made in SA, so figured we would post a bit about ourselves and a few of our games as well.
We are a small 2 man team based in Durban, and have been developing Indie games full time for the last 4 years now and have sold over 1 million games.
Some of our games (currently available on XBLIG):
Shark Attack Deathmatch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7LsC7Q6jXQ
Avatar Deathmatch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znrdL9w_Ow8
Also done a few Windows Phone 8 games, our most recent & on-going project is Greed City a location based real world Monopoly style game.
It's free and has no Adverts, we use IAP, and currently have around 40 000 players, we could do with some more South African players:
http://www.windowsphone.com/en-gb/store/app/greed-city/25a78a47-3e6c-447c-b3d8-4db7af4bd966
Cheers.
Comments
Love the zombie sharks :)
That Shark Attack looks pretty cool, I dig it :D Wonder if you had any animal rights activists dig at you guys :)
That 40 000 player base for Greed City is interesting! I'm personally not on WP8, and I guess that's the story pretty much 90% of the time. It would be interesting to hear more about how these games came about!
More specifically, why the decision to make games for WP8 platform instead of iOS or Android, was there some kind of support externally?
WP8
- The best tools (as far as im aware)
- Great emulator
- C#
- Less competition in the Marketplace
It's also a great place to start and get the game to a great state before bringing it across to bigger platforms.
Revenue wise the IAP have been great, making hundreds of dollars a day.
We've just started to learn Unity, so we will be releasing games on other platforms soon.
About Windows 8 as a viable opportunity.
Here is an article from Forbes about mobile games and profitability. Win8 is actually looking pretty good in some aspects. Especially if it continues to grow at the speed it has been. Also notable on the platform is you gain access to all the Windows 8 desktop users at the same time.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tristanlouis/2013/08/10/how-much-do-average-apps-make/
That having been said honestly the summary of the article is not inspiring for doing any mobile dev no matter the platform. Averages are awful, I guess you have to try be one of the exceptions on any platform.
Your games look awesome, by the way!
Wrote it in XNA using our own engine & shaders, we very happy with the way it turned out, but a little disappointed in the download numbers, we thought sharks would have a better pulling power to get downloads than they actually did.
In between updates we have been working on small test projects and mainly tech tests.
We've just released a new game (it's still in review) it's basically a new level for Avatar Deathmatch with a few minor tweaks.
Our focus is shifting more towards Unity now which has been great as it allows us to prototype gameplay in just a day or two as opposed to a week or so in XNA. Also allows us to add that extra level of polish that back in XNA would be pretty time consuming.
Also hoping to be part of the first round of Indie devs on Xbox One, just waiting on Microsoft now to let us know if we have been accepted or not into the first batch.
@garethf Hey fellow Durban & Derivco'nite, how things going with the indie scene on your end?
"YOU WERE MURDERED BY SHARKS"
This phrase literally inspired a game of ours called "Murder Island" which won the OUYA game jam challenge for us. So thank you!
Also, congrats, freakin SeaNanners did a video of your game! (Who is arguably the world's greatest games Youtuber)
You guys are badass!
It seems to me that with all the youtube coverage it got you would have been able to make a substantial amount of money (Not vast perhaps, but it would probably have been more than the porting costs)
Like what Viscera Cleanup Duty did:
http://www.runestorm.com/viscera
http://makegamessa.com/discussion/777/viscera-cleanup-detail/
Rune Storm (who make Viscera Cleanup Duty) are also in Durban. Even if it is just for beers, you guys should probably meet up (hanging out with other game developers is kewl and inspiring)
Good to see Durban devs making a splash in the game dev world.
I did play with MonoGame a while ago and got the basic scene of Shark Attack loading on Windows 8 Metro app, was relatively straight forward, mainly just changes with the Effect files. Might take another look at it again for Shark Attack when they release the next update for MonoGame.
Our meetups in Cape Town are badass, and I think mostly useful to everyone involved.
And the Joburg meetups are prolly okay if you're into that kind of thing : P