The Xbox Live Indie Games Summer Uprising begins in August

The Winter Uprising successfully brought a lot of mainstream attention to the Xbox Live Indie Games scene, but all of that attention didn’t necessarily translate into Scrooge McDuck-sized piles of gold for the developers. That hasn’t deterred the organizers of a new Summer Uprising promotion, who are looking to showcase the best new indie games later this summer.

The new promotion will run between August 22 and September 12 – conveniently following the Summer of Arcade and around when the Dream.Build.Play finalists will be revealed – and aims to shine the blazing spotlight of the summer sun on 8 to 10 of the most promising indie games. The organizers are currently accepting submissions from developers who would like their game considered for the Summer Uprising. Submissions can be either new releases or substantial updates to existing titles. The deadline is June 27.

Winter Uprising masterminds Robert Boyd and Ian Stocker are not involved with the new event, which is being organized by Kris Steele (Fun Infused Games) and Dave Voyles (former Managing Editor of some site called Armless Octopus).

“I believe the Uprising is important because Xbox Live Indie Games is full of many great games and yet many gamers either don’t know about the channel or avoid it because of a perceived lack of quality games. The goal of the Uprising is to get gamers to take notice of the great titles available on XBLIG,” said Steele.

Boyd did give the event his blessing on the App Hub Forums and has been contributing advice and feedback. Stocker was also supportive and is planning on submitting his newest retro indie, Escape Goat.

“The first one was a big experiment and I think we all learned a lot from it, so it’s great to see some new approaches taken with this event,” said Stocker.

One new approach the Summer Uprising can take is actually creating an established release schedule, potentially solving one of the Winter Uprising’s most debilitating flaws. Until recently, indie games entered the Marketplace as soon as they passed peer review; if the game failed the review process for any reason, the developer had to wait a week before resubmitting. That process made it impossible to predict a release date or even launch week for a game. The result was that the Winter Uprising, an event initially intended to take place over one week, languished over the entire month of December with games appearing at random intervals on the Marketplace.

“This way we can lock down dates, and KNOW that a game is finished and the developer is just sitting on it before their titles launches…You don’t need to worry about missed release dates, which is what happened at the last event,” said Voyles.

He also said he hoped to improve on the original Uprising by marketing more, expanding the website to include a page for each game, and ensuring that games are playable prior to the voting process. The details regarding the selection process are still in flux, but some possibilities include developer voting or even fan voting. Steele hopes his own game, Volchaos, will make the promotion, but it will be subject to the same voting process as every other game.

Developers who are interested in submitting their game for consideration visit the Summer Uprising website.

Update: The website linked above is only a temporary one while the actual Summer Uprising site is updated.

By Mike Wall at July 31, 2011.

About Mike Wall

Mike grew up and lives near Philadelphia and has been intrigued with games ever since his parents preached that they rotted his brain. He studied journalism at Penn State and got his master's degree in secondary education before realizing that not even summers off would make that job palatable. He now works in marketing and is trying to find time to continue writing a book about zombies, aliens, vampires, the end of the world, and a talking cat.