Miracles Do Happen (for Indies)

(Cross posted from my personal dev blog site)

I have some very exciting news to share!  Not being able to talk about it has been killing me for the last four weeks—but now the contract is signed, and I can (finally) scream from the top of my lungs. Are you ready?

In my first dev blog, I shared my personal journey and why I was moving from mobile to PC game development. It kind of took off. The article was #1 on Gamasutra for 3 days straight and soon blew past 100 comments. (It now sits at a little over 200.)

Yeah, I still can't believe I beat out that Blizzard article.  And I LIKED their article.

Michael Dell read my post, too.  Yes—that Michael Dell.  The founder of Dell Inc.  He passed it on to the senior management of Alienware (Dell's premium gaming computer line), and they reached out to me and asked, "How can we help make Archmage Rises a reality?"

I was speechless.

As I talked with them more, I realized that Alienware is by gamers for gamers.  They aren't stuffy corporate types—just cool, real people who love games.  I told them that Archmage Rises is more about substance than GPU-pushing eye candy.  They said this is totally cool, they love all kinds of games, and Archmage Rises looks like a really good RPG they want to partner with.

So we signed a partnership deal last Friday. I'll briefly mention just two benefits:

1) They will be helping get Archmage Rises out to millions of fans through their social media and AlienwareArena.com website.  The game will have a featured section on their website as soon as I get them all the art assets.

2) Alienware is providing me with the latest hardware to develop the game.

This partnership enables me to implement AlienFX.  If you aren't familiar with AlienFx, it’s a special lighting system built in under the keyboards of Alienware laptops and the cases of Alienware desktops.  The game is able to make the light appear in different colors and patterns.  So in a dark room the AlienFx enhances your physical space as you play the game, which really helps with immersion.  I look forward to working some "magic" with AlienFx and the spell casting of Archmage Rises. (The bad puns end here, I promise).

Never in a million years would I have thought I would be able to say this, but:

Archmage Rises runs best on Alienware!

Now if that isn't exciting enough, I have a special gift to commemorate the 10^th dev blog: The first Archmage Rises desktop background.

Rogier has been working on this Inn scene for a while.  When I saw the first proofs, I thought it was incredible--so I wanted to share it with all of you!  Here is a link to various resolutions.

If you are on the Archmage Rises newsletter or a member of the Dragonlance Adventures Facebook group, I've created a special limited edition version with an homage to Raistlin Majere. After all, he's the original inspiration for Archmage Rises.

So overall, this has been a very exciting week in the development of Archmage Rises!

SDG!

You can follow the game I'm working on, Archmage Rises, by joining the newsletter or chatting with me about it on the Facebook page. You can tweet me @LordYabo