Charles Randall is someone I consider to be an internet friend. He is making this game. I am very excited by it and you should be, too.

Oh, and he said this:

Below has no text, no dialogue, no hints, and no hand-holding.

— Charles Randall (@charlesrandall) June 13, 2013

Sign me up.

And the music is perfect.

Mr. Miyamoto meant it when he said he wanted In-N-Out! pic.twitter.com/6JR1PuCiXH

— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) June 13, 2013

When we released our very first game, Game Dev Tycoon (for Mac, Windows and Linux) yesterday, we did something unusual and as far as I know unique. We released a cracked version of the game ourselves, minutes after opening our Store.

I uploaded the torrent to the number one torrent sharing site, gave it a description imitating the scene and asked a few friends to help seed it.

Fascinating story about what a game dev learned through intentional piracy of their product, notable at least for this chart:

Over 93.6% of players stole the game. We know this because our game contains some code to send anonymous-usage data to our server.

Rather unfortunately, piracy appears to be a problem with indies just as much as with big-name publishers. And these guys even did the right thing and released the game without DRM. If you wonder why game publishers refuse to abandon DRM as a concept, look no further.

This is also why games are moving towards always-connected and pay-to-play; it avoids this problem altogether. If you don’t like that trend (and you shouldn’t), buy the games you play. Support developers.

The collection is SNK-heavy, but it illustrates the artistry that came from making something that has to sit in the background, yet be memorable. I have a particular fondness for the stages from The Last Blade.

Dealing with constraints does cool things to art.