"Wouldn't it be great if there were a video game that simulated the experience of building and managing a Linux Distribution?" muses 2299 developer Bryan Lunduke. "That is a question that nobody on the planet has ever asked. But they should have because, as it turns out, it's a great basis for a game. And now that game exists."

Indeed it does! Linux Tycoon purports to be the only Linux distro simulation game in existence, and I'm inclined to believe such a claim.

In Linux Tycoon, players are tasked with fixing bugs, choosing software packages, and keeping file sizes low in a Linux distribution package that will be evalutated and rated by your peers. This is all handled in simple, management-focused gameplay that simulates the fun parts of building a distro, however -- no actual programming is involved.

Linux Tycoon is available for Linux and MacOS X, with a Windows version in the works. The game is currently in beta, and can be purchased directly from Lunduke's site for $4.

And what better way to kick this series of posts off than by suggesting you have a look at the excellent Twine? None really...

Twine is a tool for creating interactive stories, pieces of interactive fiction that play a lot like those choose-your-own-adventure books of yore and can easily be posted online. It has already given us an eclectic variety of gems and has been widely used by such game designers as Anna Anthropy, Zenobi's John Wilson and Jonas Kyratzes.

Happily, this handy tool requires absolutely no programming or even scripting skills and is incredibly easy to use. No, really. It took me roughly 30 minutes from the moment I decided to download it till my very first (and very small) game was finished and ready to be posted online. Twine, you see, ultimately creates elegant HTML files than can be uploaded and played anywhere and is absolutely worth a try; especially if you are keen on sharing your stories.

Indie Fund has so far supported the development of seven independent projects, many of them recipients of prominent awards. Antichamber previously won the Technical Excellence category at the Independent Games Festival, the grand prize at the Make Something Unreal Contest, and many other accolades.

Other award-winning titles Indie Fund has backed include Facepalm Games' The Swapper, Pocketwatch Games' Monaco, Toxic Games' Q.U.B.E., and Thechineseroom's Dear Esther -- the latter two have already released and recouped their Indie Fund investments not long after their debuts.

A news post published on Indie Fund's site reads, "We've played the game multiple times over the last few years, at various states of completion, and each time the design and feel of the game shifts, and feels more refined. Kudos to Alex for iterating on his work and incubating it until it's really ready."

[This article was written by Eric Caoili on sister site Gamasutra.]

Infinity Danger and Little Racers: Street developer Milkstone Studios tackles the tower defense genre with its latest Xbox Live Indie Games release, Red Invasion.

Boasting some rather nice visuals, Red Invasion equips players with 8 tower types across 30 missions. One interesting feature: if being able to pan and zoom the 3D camera proves overwhelming for you, the game includes a "retro camera mode," which locks the view to an isometric perspective.

Red Invasion is priced at 80 Microsoft points ($1).

After rumors were spread this weekend with an exposed Steam registry photo, IndieGames confirms that Sword & Sworcery EP is coming to PC and Mac. As evident in this trailer, the release date will be April 16 on Steam.

Sword & Sworcery recently celebrated its one-year anniversary late last month. Press and fans alike have even more reason to swarm Capy's booth at PAX East 2012 now, in addition to having the first chance to play Super Time Force.

By their powers combined, sixteen indie developers will host the fearsome, unstoppable Indie MEGABOOTH at PAX East this weekend in Boston.

The co-op multi-booth, located at the center of the convention, will showcase 20 games, including several debuts. Featured developers include Dejobaan Games, Retro Affect, Ska Studios, Capybara Games, and a dozen more. Convention attendees will be able to chat with a smattering of developers in attendance as they sample their wares.

I'm impressed! And a little frightened. Click below for the full list of featured titles!

The booth will additionally feature a "bonus 21st game," Joe Danger: The Movie, developed by Hello Games.

While salaries remained virtually flat for the mainstream U.S. game industry last year, individual indie developers more than doubled their average earning from $11,379 in 2010 to $23,549 in 2011.

Members of independent developer teams also made significantly more in 2011, bringing in an average of $38,239, compared to $26,780 in the previous year. Independent contractors averaged $56,282 in 2011 (up $800 from 2010).

Those numbers might not look great to a senior developer accustomed to triple-A salaries, but if you're tired of working on sequels or just looking to break in the industry, there are more avenues available for you than ever before.

Despite independent developers making more money in 2011, the indie industry appears to be consolidating somewhat. Compared to 2010, fewer developers said they went into indie development after getting laid off, and more indie developers are working in teams rather than going solo.

More information on the survey is available in the April 2012 issue of Game Developer magazine, and worldwide paper-based subscriptions to Game Developer magazine are currently available at the official magazine website. The Game Developer Digital version of the issue is available for iPad now, and will be available to purchase online later this week.

[This article was originally written on sister site Gamasutra.]

This audio game requires the player to strap on a bizarre mask, which may be fashioned after a diving mask, an executioner's mask, or Jeff Goldblum in The Fly -- it's hard to tell. The purpose of the mask is to scare you. The player cannot see. Their breathing is limited. And they can only hear the cries of an angry beast at the bottom of the ocean.

Deep Sea is the work of Robin Arnott, an Austin-based independent developer, who had a streak of pink color in his hair when we spoke via Skype. Arnott -- sound designer on Alexander Bruce's Antichamber loves a good scare, his thoughts and inspirations go beyond horror flicks. We discussed the psychology of fear, the "anti-social kind of creativity" of programming, and the importance of flow, both for the player and the creator.

People seem really freaked out by it. At E3 2011, I remember seeing someone coming out of it ... whose hands were shaking. He didn't want to talk because he was kind of freaked out by it. People don't always get freaked out, of course. It doesn't have a 100% success rate. But when it works, it really works.

What scares them the most about it?

Intense feelings of claustrophobia. It's not the fear of drowning. I had a friend play it and he described really intense Cthulhu-esque monsters. That's not in the game. It's in his imagination. It's never the game itself. It's always imagination. I guess that's what fear is.

Do you enjoy scaring people?

When someone comes out of Deep Sea, still feeling the raw physical sensation of being inside, and showing the symptoms that come with fear: shaking hands, sweating, and a stumbling voice. That means the experiment was a success. Deep Sea works from negative emotions. Most people have a really intense negative experience. It's not a lasting negative experience though. If it were, I wouldn't feel so good about that. But like a good horror film, one reflects on it positively in hindsight. Hopefully, it winds up being positive.

Why did you choose to work with fear?

The decision to make a game based on fear came out of necessity. I wanted to experiment with immersion. I wanted to get the player to translate their own identity into the game narrative. We have an intense relationship with fear. Even more than love and anger, fear has a way of taking over our entire consciousness.

We still have lizard brains. Take the case of a primordial man. If he sees the grass rustle and assumes it is a snake, and he is afraid of it, that person is going to survive to reproduce. We wouldn't be alive if we weren't overly scared of things -- if we didn't let our imagination take control of us. Of course, fear isn't so relevant anymore, now that we have big houses to protect us, and police that will shoot down any mountain lion that comes into our big city. But it's still there, and it can be taken advantage of. It works incredibly well. It's pretty creepy how quickly your response to something fearful will overtake your entire body.

How did you go about engineering the scares?

Most of the testing came from watching people play Deep Sea in public, seeing it totally not work, and refining it until it did. When I first debuted it at the NYU Game Center, it was not a terrifying experience for most people. For about 1 or 2 out of 10 people, it was; but for the rest, it didn't really work. I found the less that players were thinking about the game, the more it had an opportunity to touch the player without them noticing.

So I simplified the interaction. I took out the scoring system. Score doesn't matter to the experience. Why should I even have that? Deep Sea isn't a game that you play to know how well you did afterward. It's a game that you submit yourself to. Realizing that forced me to refine a lot of things. I made the game less confusing, just to turn off the brain. I did anything I could to make the brain stop thinking, stop questioning, and just to accept things.

Does Deep Sea scare you?

No. Not at all. There's no room for my imagination to take over and scare the living daylights out of me because I am acquainted with everything. I hear the "Grooouueeeuuu" of a monster, and all that is to me is recording myself with a microphone hooked up to my throat. The challenge about making an emotional game is that you can never measure the reaction yourself. All the math that makes it happen, and the bits and bobs behind the craft, sanitizes the experience. It makes it more of an intellectual engagement and less of an emotional engagement.

What do you lose with that type of indirect engagement?

One of the communities I take part in, here in Austin, is fire spinning. There is a big circus arts community here. I don't spin myself, but I'm friends with people who do. I go to the events. They have a concept of flow. To them, flow is when you are in a state of perfect, continuous creativity through your art.

It's something you get in the performing arts that is missing in digital arts and prepared arts. When I'm making a video game, I'm not interacting directly with the player. I'm creating something that will communicate and interact with the player for me, hopefully creating a profound experience. But it's not me scaring the player. It's this thing I've made.

As a designer of an interactive experience, instead of a performer of an interactive experience, I don't get to have that one-on-one communication with the player. I don't get that conversation with the audience that a performer has. A performance like fire-spinning is very much a conversation. But I can't go back and forth with the audience.

When I see a player coming out of Deep Sea and taking deep breaths, it's satisfying because it is the part of the conversation that I am otherwise missing. It is seeing the player respond to my work. That gives me a delayed sense of flow--a feeling that pushes me to keep going and to do better things.

Do you plan to keep scaring people in the future?

Actually, no. What I'm really interested in now is using everything I learned from Deep Sea -- about how to put players into an emotional state--and using it to produce positive experiences. For Burning Man 2011, I made a project called Synapse, that also played at IndieCade, that is euphoric and takes advantage of the player's creativity and flow. It all comes back to flow--giving the player a tool to find flow, and to feel creatively empowered. I think that's more beautiful than scaring somebody.

(Photo by Matthew Wegner)

[Written by Jason Johnson on sister site Gamasutra.]

Robot Entertainment, formed in 2009 by a number of veterans from Age of Empires developer Ensemble Studios, has announced a sequel to its popular strategy game Orcs Must Die!

Orcs Must Die! 2 follows on from the story of the original, and will feature much of the same gameplay as the first release, with a new campaign and new content. Orcs Must Die! was one of Gamasutra's top games of 2011.

The sequel is due to be released for Windows PC this summer via Steam and other digital distribution platforms. Robot Entertainment will have a playable version of Orcs Must Die! 2 at booth 1172 during PAX East, which runs from April 6th to 8th in Boston, Massachusetts.

[Newsbrief from Mike Rose on sister site Gamasutra, trailer from Robot Entertainment.]

Last month, we caught up with attendees of the 2012 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to hear what they have gained from the experience. Scott Anderson, Marc ten Bosch, Rami Ismail, Doseone, Dajana Dimovska and Lau Korsgaard join us to share their thoughts on the GDC takeaway.

Scott Anderson
Lead programmer, Shadow Physics

When I first started going to GDC, it was a networking thing. Since I've been going for so many years, worked in different places in the industry and met so many people, it's interesting to see all these people that I haven't seen in years and catch up with them. Now the main focus for me is as a social event. I can discuss with people what's new in games and where they should be headed.

In your talk on Shadow Physics, did you feel the need to balance politics with frankness?

I didn't want to be overly political, because it's already such a consumer-focused industry, with so many PR people blocking you from saying things. I was in the unique situation of being able to say how I really felt. The reason I didn't take that opportunity to burn bridges and throw people under the bus was that I feel that's not constructive. It was important to me to look critically: at myself, my team members, and the project. The feedback that I got on my talk was that people liked it, but felt it was very harsh, very real. That's what I was going for.

Making sure you work well with the people you work with is very important, especially on small indie teams. If you're not already sure of that, you can run into problems later on that you might not have expected. Also, managing scope and managing expectations on the project is important. Obviously we tried to do that, but I realize now its importance more than I did then.

Baiyon, Richard Lamarchand and Phil Fish at the Venus Patrol party

Rich Grillotti
Game designer, Pixeljam

What will you take away from GDC 2012?

Getting to know fellow indie devs better, deepening relationships and forming new ones with some really great people. I think the greatest value of GDC is being around our peers and discovering what comes from spending time with such a great group.

This time I enjoyed the "failure workshop," and feel that Pixeljam could have presented at that one. We've certainly started our fair share of games that never saw the light of day. Talking about problems helps to break the strange neurotic bubble that happens when things start going wrong on a project. You can tend to forget that this is not just a personal failing but a common part of development. It was nice to see that being discussed by all these studios that you think of as having got it together. You get to hear things like, "We had to stumble a lot, and at times it really hurt."

What are the objectives behind your planned Pixeljam woodland retreat?

This will be a couple hours outside of Ashville, North Carolina, somewhere in a cabin in the forest for a couple of nights. Miles Tilmann lives in North Carolina, while I'm in Eugene, Oregon and Mark DeNardo's in Brooklyn, New York. That can make working together difficult, especially because we all used to live in the same area in Chicago and had so much face time. We haven't had the opportunity to go out and do things together in a really long time. This seemed like a good idea for reconnecting as friends and seeing what happens creatively.

What's on the horizon for Pixeljam?

We're working on the iOS releases of Dino Run and Gamma Bros. Glorkian Warrior is still in the works. It's been awhile since the Kickstarter, but we don't want to rush it. There's a miniature project called Glorkbot's Mini Adventure, based on the pixel aspect of the game, that we want to get done first. The relationship with James Kochalka is really good, and I was a fan for eight years before Mark met him at a show and we got in touch with him that way. Also, Pixeljam is contributing to Queasy Games' Sound Shapes for the PS Vita. It's taken some time, but it's going really well, and it was fun to go to Toronto and meet with those guys.

Filmmaker Lisanne Pajot at the Independent Games Festival awards

Marc ten Bosch
Designer, Miegakure

Seeing what types of game are selected for the IGF and what wins is really interesting. Also, for one week it's a chance to see all of my friends in the indie community and hang out. Each year there seems to be a good indie party at some point where I can meet awesome people and show them my game. When you receive support from your peers, who are successful in their own right, that's ideal.

What benefits are there to you as an indie developer in attending GDC parties outside of the formal conference setting?

Games that require you to think are not a good fit for a trade show. People will not have the time or mental energy to spend on a game like Miegakure. They're tired or they've got to run to another talk. But at a party you have more time to explain to them things they might not understand and it's a much more personal interaction. There are opportunities for real connections, making friends, almost in the sense that you are using the game as a discussion topic.

Having spoken at IndieCade in Culver City, how would you compare the relative merits of the two festivals?

IndieCade is all indie, so there are many people who are passionate about what they do. There's little in the way of marketing speech. GDC has a lot of mainstream industry topics and concerns, which is interesting, but there's a nice warm, fuzzy feeling being just in that indie crowd.

Rami Ismail
Developer, Vlambeer

During your talk at GDC on having had a game of yours cloned, what perspective on the issue did you wish to communicate to an audience of independent developers that might find themselves in similar circumstances?

We did a talk on cloning because of the Ninja Fishing thing. GDC is, of course, the best venue to reach developers, and your talk becomes archived in the GDC Vault. We tried to be objective and explain to people that cloning is a risk for a creative industry.

Prior to being cloned, we never knew there was already a discussion going on about cloning. Then we were suddenly dropped into the middle of this discussion, having a fresh view on it, and discovered that none of the arguments made any sense. They were unrelated, unimportant or just plain false. Our point was that developers should not be defending cloning as an "acceptable part of our industry" or "the only alternative to software patterns." We should be promoting original games and trying to make clones irrelevant.

What purpose does an evening event like the Venus Patrol party serve for you?

GDC can be seen as a bunch of lectures, the expo hall and all of that, but in the end the real important stuff happens in the walkways and at the parties. They're more relaxed places to talk, and that allows you to discuss things that you wouldn't bring up at the conference. Chatting to a random developer who has run into the same kinds of problems you've had can only be done properly outside of the official events.

What the Venus Patrol party did really well was capture the culture around indie games in a playful manner. They had Hokra, a four-player tournament game by Ramiro Corbetta. They had Johann Sebastian Joust. Also that amazing game with the pedal, [Uprok]. There was great music by Phil Fish, Richard Lamarchan and Baiyon. I actually saw a few game developers kind of trying to dance... that's hilarious, man. You don't get to see that anywhere else.

Douglas Wilson of J.S. Joust and Rami Ismail of Ridiculous Fishing

Lau Korsgaard and Dajana Dimovska
KnapNok Games

DD: As a small studio in Copenhagen, doing things that are not super commercially oriented, we can come to GDC and say, "Hey I come from KnapNok Games and we published B.U.T.T.O.N.." Lately there's been interest from publishers to go to these GDC parties to hear who's doing what, and they find out about our games.

LK: We are making games that are really fit for parties, so it's important to show them in that context. Right now we're prototyping on a Kinect project called Slowmo Showdown. It's a slow-motion, split-screen dueling game. We want to make a game about that fighting scene from the Matrix between Neo and Smith. It's two people standing in front of each other and dueling in slow motion. You look ridiculous, but it also feels really awesome. People complain that Kinect can feel imprecise or laggy, but when you move in slow-motion, lag doesn't matter. That's the philosophy behind it.

How do you see KnapNok's place in the industry in terms of developing a unique identity as game creators?

LK: Four years ago we formed the Copenhagen Game Collective, focusing on creating a network of interesting people. We wanted to make a scene, rather than just sitting at home in a basement making a game. Building relationships with other people is important because it helps you get noticed. And being from Denmark, luckily there's governmental support for creative businesses.

DD: That's something that encourages you to form a business. When they offer you the grant, they don't own your project, but they do push you to have a vision: Who's going to play it? How many people will actually experience it? A lot of people have played our games, though not necessarily bought them. They've been showcased a lot of places, so now more people know about Danish game developers, and are open to hearing about the culture, where we come from.

Doseone
Co-founder, Anticon Records

How did you find performing music and sharing the stage with Baiyon at the Venus Patrol party?

It was a wonderful experience. There was a radius of smiles around Joust, around Girp and Proteus. Even the people that weren't playing were enjoying it... and I don't think it was the bourbon doing that. You think of games as being an alternative to some form of nightlife. Like, "Nah, I'll sit at home and eat pizza, and play this game alone." But the party was a perfect exhibition of the opposite being true.

I've known Baiyon for almost a decade now. I met him when he was an art student when he brought me out to do a show in Japan. I had not seen him in six years.

Music in the videogame world is often viewed as a last layer. But it adds a great amount of detail and reality to your world, whether you're making something real or unreal. It's nice that GDC allows the musicians to bump into each other, when some of us are in Japan and others in Oakland.

What would be your ideal game audio project to embark upon in the future?

Making music can be addictive. You can begin a song, go to work, and you think about that song in the middle of the day, wanting to add more to it. I think allowing something like that to be in people's lives would be really interesting.

Whatever comes next, I'm enjoying how shapeless it is now. Games like Joust allow me to take a step back and think about sound in games again.

Musicians Doseone and David Kanaga during GDC 2012

For further images from the 2012 Game Developers Conference, see our flickr photo set. Connect with Scott Anderson, Marc ten Bosch, Rami Ismail, Doseone, Dajana Dimovska and Lau Korsgaard online. See our previous GDC post, GDC 2012: What Brings You Here, for interviews with Robin Arnott, Simon Flesser, Ichiro Lambe, Jaime Woo and Mattias Häggström Gerdt. Photos by Jeriaska.

Different Pixel, creator of the charming PC puzzler Vizati, announced that its next release is Dary's Legend, a roguelike dungeon crawler for Windows.

Boasting some nice-looking hand-drawn art, Dary's Legend is being developed using a custom engine, and is created by the same two-person team behind Vizati. A handful of screenshots can be seen here.

Different Pixel's official release date for Dary's Legend is "when it's done."