In March next year the Independent Games Festival will award a few independently produced games some awards and raise the profile of those titles. A few in the past like Minecraft, Limbo and Mechinarim have had extra promotion which has helped the developers sell more units and raise their profile.
Next year has an interesting entry, the Pirate Kart. This is a single IGF entry of (at time of writing) 321 games.
A download link to the 1.4GB pack is on the Front Page if you feel like playing some very random games.
Showing posts with label Independent. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Independent. Show all posts
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Sunday, February 06, 2011
Saturday, January 03, 2009
The Manipulator
There is this game I have been playing called The Manipulator, it is a platformer with puzzle elements. You play a Manipulator, someone who can take controle of a person's mind, read their mind and even kill them with your power of through. It reminds me of Scanners in this respects, but also Metal Gear as you have to sneak around guards and take them out before they realise you are there.
The Manipulator will take about an hour for a complete play through, but you can't save your game (this is deliberate). The thing I like most about the game is that none of the puzzles solutions are obscure, or at least I found all the solutions myself through experimentation. There also isn't a tutorial, just some simple text queues for the controls.
The Manipulator is a surprisingly mature game with many lessons for budding game designers (note the narration, visual setting, environmental setting along with the audio and the simple control scheme).
If you are quite smitten by The Manipulator, you might want to try Messiah (David Perry, 2000) or Oddworld Abe's Oddysee (1997), which have a very similar gameplay concept of playing a weak character with the ability of possession to solve progression obstacles.
The Manipulator will take about an hour for a complete play through, but you can't save your game (this is deliberate). The thing I like most about the game is that none of the puzzles solutions are obscure, or at least I found all the solutions myself through experimentation. There also isn't a tutorial, just some simple text queues for the controls.
The Manipulator is a surprisingly mature game with many lessons for budding game designers (note the narration, visual setting, environmental setting along with the audio and the simple control scheme).
If you are quite smitten by The Manipulator, you might want to try Messiah (David Perry, 2000) or Oddworld Abe's Oddysee (1997), which have a very similar gameplay concept of playing a weak character with the ability of possession to solve progression obstacles.
Saturday, March 01, 2008
Programmer Puzzle Games
There is a subset of puzzle games which for the purposes of this post I am calling programming puzzle games. The basic idea is that there is a level and you have a guy that you can control to complete whatever the objective is in the level to progress, but you can only control him by giving him a set of rules to follow by programming him (empowering him with a rule based AI). I love these things, but only independent developers seem to be doing anything with them.
Currently the best set of these games is made by Epsitec Games with their CeeBot series. In the case of CeeBot there is a programming language for the player to learn. This sounds hard, but it is aimed at a 5+ age range audience so everything is explained gradually with each level building on the lesson of the last and you can only progress once you have understood the concept the level is teaching. The game even comes with a better debugging tool than what most Java and C++ developers use today, so when your programs start to get large the game emergent teaches about logic errors without ever explicitly covering them.
Anyway today I played Spuds another Programmer Puzzle game that uses pictures to do the programming with. It was made by two brothers and apart from being a little overpriced ($19.95) and forcing the player to sit through a long tutorial, it's very interesting.
Again these games might sound boring, but I suffer from timeloss whenever I play them.
Currently the best set of these games is made by Epsitec Games with their CeeBot series. In the case of CeeBot there is a programming language for the player to learn. This sounds hard, but it is aimed at a 5+ age range audience so everything is explained gradually with each level building on the lesson of the last and you can only progress once you have understood the concept the level is teaching. The game even comes with a better debugging tool than what most Java and C++ developers use today, so when your programs start to get large the game emergent teaches about logic errors without ever explicitly covering them.
Anyway today I played Spuds another Programmer Puzzle game that uses pictures to do the programming with. It was made by two brothers and apart from being a little overpriced ($19.95) and forcing the player to sit through a long tutorial, it's very interesting.
Again these games might sound boring, but I suffer from timeloss whenever I play them.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Audiosurf
I was going through the Independant Games Festival Contenders for this year's Audience Choice Award (only now do they have download links up) and one of the games I tried was Audiosurf, a game that I had heard previously about, but thought the developer was doing the whole 'we are awesome speel' that seems to come out of the mouth of every sane developer in the industry (it is getting harder and harder to tell when they are talking BS or not). But in this case Audiosurf is awesome, and everything it was said to be.
You start by selecting an audio file on your computer, Audiosurf identifies the various musical aspects of the file, generates a level and then you play in that level while the music you selected is playing. You play the game either with a mouse or 360 controller by trying to connect coloured blocks on a grid while avoiding gray blocks.
It is awesome and supposedly out at the very end of next month, possibly through STEAM. But until then I highly recommend the Demo, even if it does yank the game from under you after a few songs.
You start by selecting an audio file on your computer, Audiosurf identifies the various musical aspects of the file, generates a level and then you play in that level while the music you selected is playing. You play the game either with a mouse or 360 controller by trying to connect coloured blocks on a grid while avoiding gray blocks.
It is awesome and supposedly out at the very end of next month, possibly through STEAM. But until then I highly recommend the Demo, even if it does yank the game from under you after a few songs.
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