Archive for the ‘indie’ tag
Posted at 10:43 by Joe Martin with 2 comments
Gravity Bone is by Brendon Chung, an indie developer I’ve long been a fan of and who has made some of my favourite indie games ever.
Gravity Bone is his most recent and complete game, as well as the most stylised and striking.
Like most of Chung’s games,
Gravity Bone exists without any exposition or context. It just is and everything in it relies on inference, with explicit instructions being very rare and a streamlined level design ethic ensuring the common sense is all you need to play the game. Every game also contains a wicked sense of wit that makes them worth playing even if you hate everything else.
Gravity Bone is about a hitman or a spy, who goes around doing spy-type stuff. There’s but two missions in the game, which takes about ten minutes to finish. The first is a straightforward introduction with no real challenges. The second is where all the gameplay is, but I won’t spoil why.
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Posted at 08:25 by Joe Martin with 1 comments
Black Shades isn’t a new game, it’s just a free game that I really like. It’s basically the opposite of
Hitman, but reduced down to twitch shooter basics and presented in a typically indie way.
Rather than playing as a hitman,
Black Shades casts you as a bodyguard for a VIP who's wandering aimlessly through a crowded city. It’s your job to protect him from the increasing number of assailants who will try to kill him.
What distinguishes
Black Shades from that old trope of the FPS escort mission is that the VIP is pursuing a random path through a city which is basically an infinite grid of buildings. Also, the assassins who come from him are randomly generated and will use a variety of weapons and approaches. Oh, and nearly everyone in the city looks alike too – grey and white polygon figures.
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Posted at 12:21 by Joe Martin with 12 comments
Another short post for another short game –
Home is a tiny pixel-art game from
Increpare about what it’s like to fall apart, bit by bit.
There isn’t a huge amount to say about this game as the entire experience lasts just five minutes at most and the artwork and mechanics on show have been streamlined to the extreme. Everything in the game has been trimmed down until all that’s left is a clunky orange graphic that would look outdated on a Spectrum.
The idea is simple: your name is Charles and you’ve just been put into an old people’s home. Your life is simple and easy, which is good because you’re not really capable of much. All you have to do is manage your four simple needs; food, friendship, going to the toilet and getting a good night's rest. Simple.
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Posted at 11:51 by Joe Martin with 12 comments
This blog post will be, like the game it’s about,
small. I don’t really have a huge amount to say about
Small Worlds, which was developed for a recent Casual Games Competition with the theme 'Explore', other than that it’s a remarkably elegant and effective piece of pixel-art brilliance.
A game which only ever alludes to having a deeper plot,
Small Worlds opens with a single line before jumping to the gameplay – “
There is too much noise”.
The gameplay itself is simple. At the start of each of the five levels the viewpoint is zoomed in on you – a small red line with a pale face and zero animation. The aim of each level is then to find the exit, which returns you to a hub level before you move on to the next world. There’s no fighting, no skill trees and no enemies. It’s just a gentle and rather lovely paced matter of exploration.
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Posted at 15:16 by Joe Martin with 36 comments
I don’t have children, but I do have a lot of younger siblings and nephews and nieces, and we've played a lot of computer games together. A lot of the experiences we’ve shared have been through the medium of joysticks and mouse clicks.
Looking back on that recently I’ve come to think that parents should definitely play computer games with their kids, even though a lot of parents are of the opinion that "games are bad for you" and "all games are violent". Absolute rubbish, every word of it.
Of course, some games are violent and there’s a huge amount of games out there which aren’t at all suitable for children – but violence, if handled responsibly, isn’t always bad and there are a lot of games that are good for kids. My parents had an inkling of this and I spent a lot of time playing either with my Dad or talking about it with him. It’s something I plan to do with my children too, heaven forbid, and something I reflect on every time I go into a shop and see a parent blindly buying Grand Theft Auto for their seven year old. Grrr.
This isn’t new thinking obviously – any number of child-rearing programs or handbooks will tell you it’s important to get involved and find experiences you can share with your children. The problem though is that if you’re not someone who’s ‘into PCs’ and your kid is then it can be hard going. Thus, here are some recommendations for games that are suitable for most children and which open themselves up to this kind of activity.
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Posted at 08:29 by Joe Martin with 8 comments
This blogpost was
supposed to be about
my adventures in Baldur’s Gate as a completionist wizard, but that plan was ruined by the fact that my copy of
Throne of Bhaal has yet to arrive because of various mail-related issues and my refusal to start until I’ve got the entire collection. And also you might have noticed I'm in Cologne, Germany for the big
GamesCom 2009 show.
So, instead I thought it would be a good chance to get some feedback on a little change I’ve introduced to the latest issue of Custom PC and which, if it goes down well, I’ll keep going. If you’ve got Issue 73 to hand (it's out in the shops today) then you can see what I’m talking about on pages 26 and 27 – the ‘Games Etc’ spread.
Basically, I’ve replaced the usual batch of four or five gaming news items with a hand-picked of really good free games from the last month which we think people will like. There’s some free flash adventure games there, some mods and some downloadable indie games – something for everyone and I’d like to do this every month instead of using that space for gaming news.
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Posted at 11:17 by Introversion Software with 4 comments
“If something you do costs you money it’s a hobby, if something you do makes you money it’s a business.” These were very comforting words to me during the early years of Introversion. Back then we were a small operation – three people, no office, I was working only part-time, and I spent a lot of my time worried and embarrassed that we weren’t a “proper business”.
We had been lucky with our first game release, Uplink, and had made (almost) enough cash to drive us forward and make our second game Darwinia. Darwinia then won a number of awards at the IGF in 2006, and we rapidly followed up with DEFCON which has been our strongest seller to date. Looking back, I guess there was a certain sense of invincibility within the firm, coupled with a sense of arrogance that somehow we just “knew better” about what to do and how to do it.
It was May 2007 and I had grown tired of living and working in the same space – working from home sounds like a good idea, but I found I could never switch off and it was slowly driving me crazy. We rented a town house in Bermondsey and for the first time ever Introversion had an office. This certainly felt like a major step forward, but it didn’t really change the way we worked or behaved. We were working on Multiwinia at the time and the game design was really coming together well, the X360 port of Darwinia was in full swing and we had made the decision that Multiwinia would be Introversion’s fourth major game launch.
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Posted at 13:41 by Introversion Software with 0 comments
Despite a much-welcomed revival of indie gaming talent recently, and the increasing prominence of events like the IGF awards at GDC, the games industry has not always been a friendly place for independents. Introversion was founded in 2001, a particularly difficult time, when publishing giants and their game franchises battled it out for limited retail space and front-page magazine adverts. This was just before the age of digital distribution really got underway, and the top 10 charts were constant reworkings of IP dug up from yesteryear. As a result people are often surprised to learn that Introversion will be celebrating its 8th birthday this year.
Despite these unfavourable climates and some admittedly rocky times, Introversion has steadily grown and evolved, and we’re often asked at trade events to shed a little light on how we did it. We’re asked to advice on subjects as diverse as which publishers to work with, how to finding a good lawyer and how to plan game launches. From a personal point of view I used to get pretty worried when advice was sought about our marketing strategy – it rather implied that we had things sussed; that marketing for us was an exact science, with a goal, strategy and a measurable outcome. In reality, it felt that more often than not, we owed our successes to haphazard experimentation, chance encounters and one-off pot luck, than any formal marketing strategies, or colour-coded launch plans.
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Posted at 11:09 by Cliff Harris with 16 comments
One day, the cheapest laptop will have a quantum graphics computer that can render pixel perfect photorealistic images at 70 frames per second with infinite complexity.
Until that happens, games programmers will do bodges, cheats and sneaky optimisations that you probably don't notice.
I remember a comedy sketch from years ago that ridiculed the kids puppet show Stingray for having a character in a high-tech wheelchair-style device that he slid around on. The joke was that this made him easier to film as a puppet, because it was always the walking that looked rubbish. Game developers do the same thing all the time.
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Posted at 13:23 by Introversion Software with 9 comments
The Curse of Darwinia, as it has become known at Introversion, actually began way before we ever got near the Xbox Live Arcade deal with Microsoft three years ago. So before we delve headlong into a discussion about the murky world of commercial independent game development, let me give you a quick recap for those unfamiliar with Introversion and the infamous Darwinia.
Darwinia was released on PC back in March 2005. It got a lot of critical acclaim, but suffered from a bit of a botched retail launch (our fault for over-pricing it), and seemingly had only a small hard core following online. That all changed in late 2005 when Darwinia was released on Steam as only the second non-Valve game on the platform. Sales shot through the roof, and almost seemingly overnight everyone knew about the game and Introversion.
After that we got an email from CMP, the folks who run the GDC games conference. They suggested that we'd be eligible for the Independent Games Festival which was running at the next GDC in March 2006. We entered and waited. Sure enough, we soon found that we'd made it to the short-list of games and received some complimentary invites to the conference which was being held in San Jose. Yay!
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