Indie Game: The Beard

Celebrating facial hair in indie game development

Who is this? Kris Piotrowski, creative director and co-founder of CAPY, an indie game studio in Toronto, Canada. They made Sword & Sworcery with Superbrothers.
Who is this? Chris, Brad Nicholson, Blake Patterson and Jared “The Bearded One” Nelson of Touch Arcade all sporting hair on their chins. The whole Touch Arcade team is a big supporter of the indie scene as the leading and most critical reviewers of iOS games.
Who is this? Marcel Pace, Sound Designer and owner at Aduge Studio, indie game dev from Brasil. Currently working on Qasir Al-Wasat, which tells the story of an invisible and frail creature which is summoned on 12th century Syria for a mission of infiltration and assassination, where it discovers the secrets of a wondrous palace and a trap that was set for it. The game employs simple mechanics and conceptual sounds and visuals. Drummer, designer, into experimental interactive arts and entrepreneurship, have an arts&technology collective and a post math samba rock something band. /marcelpace, @marcelpace, yadda yadda… ;]
Who is this? Dr. Green from No More Pie. Long-time game developer who recently went indie to setup No More Pie. The beard now enjoys the freedom and grows bigger and bushier every day!
Who is this? Untold Entertainment president Ryan Henson Creighton’s Movember 2010 creation, “The Blustery Day”.
Who is this? Josh Schonstal of Incredible Ape. Developer of PewPewPewPewPewPewPewPewPew, / ESCAPE \ , and other games. Kongregate web developer. Beard aficionado.
Who is this? “I’ve never met a game designer whose only interest is games.” Daniel Cook of Spry Fox, mostly known for his epic essays on gaming at his webpage Lost Garden. The quote and the image are from a trailer of a documentary on game development called US AND THE GAME INDUSTRY. So we have not one, but TWO gamedev documentaries to look forward to this year. Well, at least if this one makes it. It looks great and has amazing (unfortunately beardless) devs such as Jenova Chen and Jason Rohrer in it, so back those guys up!
Who is this? Greg Wohlwend & Mike Boxleiter of Mikengreg Games Co. They made Solipskier and Greg’s also doing the awesome art for Vlambeer’s Ridiculous Fishing, lately nominated for Best Mobile Game at IGF 2012. Photo by Indiecade
Who is this? Henrik Pettersson a.k.a. Carnalizer is the 2D artist on Mojang’s next game Scrolls. Yes, they are the one that made Minecraft. No, Scrolls will be nothing like Minecraft. The image is from a documentary by 2 Player Production, which just happen to be the guys also filming the production of Double Fine Adventure. And Mojang is this weekend doing a charity game jam over at Humble Bundle, which was created by Wolfire where John Graham works. Small indie beard world, huh?
Who is this? I was rewatching Double Fine Adventure pitch video, now released on YouTube, when I realized: Tim Schafer totally has a beard and he totally is indie. Both independent as in owning his studio and now also back to indie as in I’ll make whatever dying genre game I want. Shove that adventure-games-don’t-sell up your asses, publishers! The image is one of Brandon Boyer’s slides for his talk. Brandon, of course, is no stranger to this blog. Beards gotta stick together.