Levelling The Playing Field
Rami Ismail (Vlambeer co-founder) on indie game dev business, design, and creative leadership.
ltpf.ramiismail.comLevelling The Playing Field is an independent blog covering game development and programming. It is no longer actively publishing, though its archive remains worth exploring.
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That Tricky Platformer About Climbing Mt. Anxiety But That's Not The Name Of The Mountain
Years ago, at the annual Penny Arcade Expo games convention, I was showing off an advanced prototype of Vlambeer's Ridiculous Fishing. As part of the early organisational crew of Indie MEGABOOTH, I was running back and forth between the Vlambeer booth & my other responsibilities - which made me oddly anonymous as a developer to entire groups of people. We hadn't quite figured out how to talk about Ridiculous Fishing, an enticing yet odd remake of an odd Flash game we'd made ye...
New Beginnings
The cliché says the end of every story is the beginning of another. This was true back in 2010, when my school career ended and Jan Willem Nijman and I started a little indie studio by the name of Vlambeer. It was also true in 2020, when Jan Willem & I decided to shut Vlambeer down after agreeing Vlambeer had achieved its goals, and the two of us had diverging paths.Vlambeer never quite fully “shut down” though - you can’t just walk away from a decade of your life a...
Ask Rami: Prototyping Pros
"Programmer here - I have read your posts on prototyping and I agree but I have a question. I want to do more design work, but I always get lost in tweaking values. How can you avoid that?"Hey there slow prototyper,I started as a programmer too, and learned to become a game designer later on in life. This is very much a common programmers' dilemma, and one I talk about with programmers in my consultancy practice - or with team leads that are struggling to get an engineer to protot...
On Bluf, and writing copy
Throughout our life, we're taught to structure arguments like a school essay: you set up your case, discuss the arguments, and conclude with the findings - the so called 'bottom line'. It makes for a very solid structure if your reader is volunteering to read your writing - like for example, in an article like this one. Using writing structures we're taught in school, the reader eases into the text, and gets to spend some time coming to agreement with your positioning. It giv...
Ask Rami: The Ten-Thousands Rule
Hi Rami, thanks for doing these and for the newsletter! We're a new studio in South America, and your lessons have helped us a lot to get to publisher negotiations. We even have more than one interested publisher! We read your article about the way publisher funding works with the Recoups and Upfronts, and it has helped a lot, but we still have one big question: is it OK for us to negotiate with the amount of money we're getting, and how much can we negotiate without angering the publi...
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