Today we are announcing a fund that provides very good terms for talented indie developers working on high-quality games.  Our terms are much friendlier than what publishers offer.  Our goal is to help indies become stronger while retaining their independence.

The past couple of years have been good for independent game developers.  Through download services like Xbox Live Arcade, the PlayStation Network, WiiWare, and Steam, independent developers have found a very large audience.  Some of us have been lucky enough to develop hit indie games that were very financially successful.

Braid was one of those games.  The success of Braid has allowed me to undertake more-ambitious projects like The Witness.  At the same time, I felt that I wanted to do something with the profits that would help other indies with their own games.  More recently, while talking to publishers about The Witness, I felt that the business climate around publishing and funding these smaller games had not caught up with reality: it’s a model where the standard terms are tuned for budgets in the tens of millions of dollars.  Because publishers want to stick to this model even for low-budget games, it was very hard for indie developers to get a fair deal.

It turns out that other successful indies felt the same way, so we have pooled our resources and launched this fund.  We will be announcing further details soon.  At the GDC, Ron Carmel will be giving a talk about the problems that exist in the current publishing model for indie-budget games.

We’ve had the timing of this announcement planned for a while, but it seems like some kind of strange synchronicity that we’re revealing our existence just as all this trouble is happening at Infinity Ward.  When you’re a mainstream developer, and you’ve made one of the most successful and profitable games of all time, and then just a few months later your publisher and parent company is willing to so bald-facedly mutilate your company, well, what conclusions can be drawn from that?  If publishers of that size are so megalomaniacal as to be incapable of seeing the importance of a developer’s talent — instead believing that the game’s success is somehow due primarily to their brilliant marketing strategy or their CEO’s charming personality — then how will this ever change?

If Infinity Ward can’t be treated with respect, then who can?

Independent developers can.  That’s one answer, at least.  Indie Fund is here to help make that independent existence a reality for as many talented developers as we can.

Here’s a link to the main Indie Fund site, with an email you can use to contact us.

(Cross-posted from The Witness Development Blog.)

We’ve posted an explanation on the site, along with details about the future.

It’s a little bit sad, as this is the first time in 10 years we haven’t done it, but it’s all good!

We’ve created a development blog for The Witness, the new game being designed by Jonathan Blow. Here’s the link to the front page of the site, and here’s a direct link to the blog.

Not much information about the game has been made public yet. Well… here is some. More to come!

The speech is called “Games as Instruments for Observing Our Universe”, given by Jonathan Blow at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont in February 2010.

The talk is short — about 20 minutes — followed by about an hour Q&A (in a separate file). Slides in ppt format are included.

Here’s a bundle containing those files.

The next day, we did a conversational interview at the Firehouse Gallery in Burlington. This started with a short introduction about Braid and my next game, followed by some questions by Chris Thompson, and then questions from the audience. Here’s the audio for that session. (You can right-click and pick Save As… if this opens in your browser in an obnoxious way.)

I’ve just gotten word that Braid will be available on the PlayStation Network in Benelux and Russia on February 4th.

You have our apologies for the delay!

If you liked Braid, you may enjoy Terry Cavanaugh’s game VVVVVV. It’s also a platformer that is built around one core interaction, iterating on that piece of gameplay and exploring variations. In VVVVVV you will die a lot, but the penalty for death is extremely low, so it’s no big deal.

There’s a free demo (in downloadable and web-based versions). Here’s the link again.

If you are a designer of interesting/experimental/different games, and you’d like to present a game to a large audience that’s excited by new and challenging work, you’ve got just about 1 week to send in your submission. Here’s a link for more information. We look forward to seeing your stuff!

If you live in Europe and have a PlayStation 3, you’ll be able to play Braid on it starting December 17th.

The price is €9.99.

The Experimental Gameplay Workshop is an annual event at the Game Developers Conference where we show a selection of cutting-edge game designs. Each designer gives a 10-to-15-minute presentation.

We encourage all designers who are actively working on new and different design ideas to apply. Here’s a link for more information.

The deadline is January 26, 2010. (We had erroneously listed the date as February 16.)

… in America. We’ll keep you posted on releases in other territories.

If you’re having trouble figuring out any particularly hard puzzles, the Game Helpin’ Squad has you covered… they’ve recently published a video walkthrough of the game.

Of course, there’s also our Official Walkthrough, for those who prefer boring old text and pictures!