Gamasutra Expert Blogs: From design feedback to indie spirit

In highlights from Gamasutra's Expert Blogs, industry notables write about diverse topics, including how to keep an indie marketing voice when you're working with a publisher, game design feedback, and more. In our weekly Best of Expert Blogs column, we showcase notable pieces of writing from members of the game development community who maintain Expert Blogs on Gamasutra. Member Blogs -- also highlighted weekly -- can be maintained by any registered Gamasutra user, while the invitation-only Expert Blogs are written by development professionals with a wealth of experience to share. We hope that both sections can provide useful and interesting viewpoints on our industry. For more information about the blogs, check out the latest official posting guidelines. Here are the top blogs for the week: This Week's Standout Expert Blogs Made in the indie spirit: How to keep an indie marketing voice while working with a traditional publisher (Kate Mann) After working with a AAA publisher it can be hard to convince people that your game was developed entirely within the walls of an indie studio and not in a mansion filled with robot butlers. Kate Mann shares how Owlchemy kept its indie voice strong using unique marketing. By the light of the silvery moon (Jon Brown) Before he was a game designer, Jon Brown was a tester. He's been mulling over the idea of writing up his memoirs of those long days of testing. In this chapter, Brown writes about the time a programmer went mad... What the video game industry needs now is fewer but stronger platforms (Luc Bourcier) Luc Bourcier argues that this industry has to deal with a distribution issue, and the marketplace needs to see the emergence of strong, stable platforms offering a quality service to end-users and able to manage a true publishing strategy. Design axioms for game UI – Part II: Feedback (Dirk Knemeyer) Dirk Knemeyer looks at issues relating to feedback: how people can best impact the evolution of a design. Unlike some other aspects, feedback is most likely to be overlooked by the most talented and natural designers. Randomness and Quarriors (Jon Shafer) Jon Shafer examines randomness in the context of the tabletop game Quarriors and other deck-builders.