Still indies and smaller studios doing things like iOS ofc.
Pretty much. I think Crossy Road was Australian. Then you have Witch Beam (Assault Andriod Cactus), Halfbrick (Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride), I'm going to pretend that Frogshark are Australian despite being from NZ (Swordy)... uh. The Crawl guys.
In terms of big boy personality indies, Ben Foddy (QWOP / Super Poleriders) has
something to do with Australia, be it he was born here or he occasionally lives here. Then there's... Alexander Bruce (Antichamber) who's probably the biggest name we have.
Do we still have that Sega studio in QLD? They put out one of the London 2012 olympics games but I'm not sure what they've done since.
That cricket game from two years ago that won Giantbomb.com's Best Apology award was from a melbourne based studio. I remember those guys had job postings for unity multiplayer programmers
three months before that game "shipped" before being the first game I've ever seen be cancelled
after it had come out.
Tasmania has Secret Lab, of course, but those guys seem to stick to their government edutainment games. They're working on some weird gnome murdering thing at the moment? Or they're just going to write more Cocos2d books. Who knows!
I think there's a good 30 or so small indie studios in Melbourne alone, all doing their own thing. So there's certainly a scene still going, but it's a scene we're going to have to maintain ourselves. There's enough fresh faces being pumped out of schools with degrees specifically in making games, and I think the reality is that either you make a name for yourself, or you get a regular ass job like normal programmers and make webpages for a living.
Halfbrick's here, but even we're still small compared to when Krome and Pandemic were stupid big.
my impression is that you guys are still expanding, though. Every few months I see a programmer / designer / manager role pop up from halfbrick. So it's nice to know iOS is working out for some teams.
