I trekked over to Jeff Lindsay’s place in sunny San Jose and we
gave a little more love to The Indie Game Database.
Browsing! Jeff put in all kinds of filters that you can now use for browsing! Everything from genre to game engine can now be searched by. Do you want to find all MacOSX platform games for under $20? Now you can! Or maybe you want to look for all the Game Maker games released in 2005 with a minimum community rating of 3? Here it is!
Most of the descriptive elements on a game’s page have been converted to links that use this feature. If you’re looking at a game, just click its release date, genre, platform, or whatever to find more of the same. From there you can make your search even more specific.
You can also sort these results by name, rating, price, or date of release.
Tags. A lot of little bugs with tags have been fixed, but more importantly, you can use them in conjunction with filters. Meaning it’s really easy to look for things like “all browser-based dinosaur games.” Other fun tags to try:
200+ Games! I added a bunch of games this week, from the front page, from your suggestions, and from the B-Game Competition. Check them out, rate them, tag them, enjoy them.
Now that these important browsing features have been added, the next step will be to beef up the community aspect of the site by implementing user reviews, user profiles, and very possibly also user submissions. I’m really looking forward to that.
As always, please give us your feedback and let us know how we could improve the db.
For the weekend, I leave you with the inaugural episode of RSVP, 1up’s new series of intimate game designer round-tables. Mark MacDonald chats with Valve’s Eric Wolpaw, Q-Games’ Dylan Cuthbert, and Everyday Shooter creator Jonathan Mak in the infamous “Sake Room” at Ozumo restaurant in San Francisco (I went there once and ate a cow with a name). It’s long, and I haven’t watched the whole thing. But I’m hoping for a makeout session at the end.
Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female Justice of the United States Supreme Court and all-around badass (now retired as the former), was the keynote speaker yesterday at Games For Change, a three-day festival for “social impact” games held at Parsons The New School For Design (that is an awkward name) in New York City. In her keynote, O’Connor revealed a project she’s working on – Our Courts, an “interactive online civics curriculum” (otherwise known as “games”) that will educate students about the United States’ legal and judiciary systems by letting them tackle real world problems. The project will launch in 2009.
When asked what her favorite video game was, O’Connor paused very briefly before closing her eyes, leaning into the mic, and whispering, “Cave Story.”
(Just kidding, but that’s still pretty cool, innit?)
Now Mac users can also have some Phun (groan)! That’s right, everyone’s favorite sandbox physics simulator has been ported to the Macintosh.
Also, Monster’s Den, the Flash-based dungeon crawl, has received an upgrade. Called Monster’s Den: Book of Dread (Kongregate), the game features new graphics, classes, items, monsters, and quests. And the addition of a shop. Or “shoppe” if you want to get all medieval.
And speaking of dungeon crawls, the roguelike Incursion has not only been updated to a much-more-stable version 0.6.9, but it also recently received a Mac port. So rejoice, Mac users!
Game|Life’s Chris Kohler has written an interesting article in which he discusses Microsoft’s plan to cut low-performing games on XBLA, the proverbial Long Tail of their product line.
“Screw our heritage,” seems to be the new motto. Whitten says that Microsoft will begin to delete games that have a Metacritic score of less than 65, a demo-to-full-version conversion rate of less than 6%, and have been on the service for over six months.
While this does potentially mean that Yaris might finally meet its grisly end, what with its dismal Metacritic rating of 17, Chris points out that it’s also a illogical solution to XBLA’s real problem – that the interface for finding games is God-awful. And Microsoft’s rubric for deciding which games stay and which games go most definitely does not benefit either the game developers (who could easily be surviving as part of the Long Tail), or game players, who are suffering from a poor interface rather than having too many choices.
Oxeye Studios shows us that TIGSource compos are serious business. And so is being Swedish.
The Procedural Generation Competition has been going on for three weeks, and now there’s only one left! But it’s still plenty of time to implement a fancy new algorithm or two (or three hundred). There was an awesome turnout for this compo, natch. I’m happy to announce that you people hit the giant enemy crab for massive talents (what?).
It’s Memorial Day in the U.S. today. Happy it! Enjoy life!
Fact: indie game developers enjoy games so much that they will try to put games anywhere, even where they “don’t belong” (which, of course, is nowhere). Case in point, apparently there’s been some headway made in putting games on the most corporate of software environments, the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
I guess it really began with Microsoft itself, whose wily programmer’s embedded a 3d “game” into Excel ‘95 called The Hall of Tortured Souls. Although technically not made with Excel itself, it may have planted the seeds that have since sprouted into the Excel game development community as we know it today. It also gets bonus points for helping prove that Bill Gates is really the Anti-Christ.
Gamasutra put out a feature a couple months ago that touts Excel as “the next revolutionary 3d engine,” and makes a compelling case for it. The article highlights Excel’s arithmetical facilities, rendering environments, and non-traditional approaches to source code and debugging. Here it is in action:
But yes, leave it to the Japanese to start putting some actual games on this unconventional platform. Chikada’s VBA Action Game website has dozens of Excel games – everything from arcade remakes to shoot ‘em ups to dungeon crawlers to fighting games. The menu at the top of the site lets you browse the collection by genre.
(Note: You will have to let macros run freely in Excel to play most of these games. A lot of them didn’t work for me, either.)
DEX-EV (pictured at the top of this post) is one of the more impressive shoot ‘em ups on Chikada’s site. And Shadow Slash, the creator, is a prominent Excel developer who keeps a series of 73 Excel game development articles on his blog. If you can read Japanese, check it out. There are also two Japanese books (one and two) on game development using VBA, the Visual-Basic based macro programming language included with Excel.
Next up: a heart-warming story about a man who put DOOM on his grandpa’s pacemaker and prevented a heart attack by killing the Cyberdemon.
Did you guys love the music from Noitu Love 2 as much as I did? If so, be sure to check out Joakim’s website for the original soundtrack! It includes all the songs that were in the game, plus 8 bonus tracks that didn’t make the cut.
In case you were wondering, Joakim composed the songs himself, because, like all good Swedes, he drank magic Swedish elf water when he was growing up. It makes you incredibly talented at developing video games. (Although one in ten Swedes who drink magic Swedish elf water turn into Finnish Trolls... which are able to develop video games but ironically will explode if they try to play them. A sad fate for a Swede.)
DrPetter, the brilliant mind behind sfxr, was inspired by the awesome Unfinished Game Demo/Dump thread on TIGForums and decided to contribute a mosaic of 116 of his own unfinished creations.
The games listed span from 1995 to 2008, which I guess corresponds to half my life (born 1982).
You can see the full image here (3 mb) – wow, is that ever fun to look at! DrPetter has also written short descriptions for each of the games (some of which can be played at his website)!
Definitely check out the rest of the dumps, too. You might not think it, but it’s quite inspiring (and entertaining) to see people’s unfinished work. I’m considering contributing some games to it myself!
Jeff and I spent another day and a half hacking away at the The Indie Game Database. A lot of smallish changes, but they are significant:
Tags. Users can now add tags to games (e.g. abstract, music, dinosaurs, stealth, co-op). It’s mostly a novelty right now, but once filters are in place it will be a great way to search the database.
Note: tagging is still slightly buggy.
Site Layout. The site has been widened, which makes screenshots look much better, and also gives us more room to play with. A number of small cosmetic tweaks have been made to the layout as well.
Basic Browsing. Jeff has added support for browsing. Right now you can either flip through the pages of the master list of games, or flip through the same list sorted by rank.
The major additions to the site will come in another few weeks or so, when we add user reviews (yep!) and also filters, which, when added to what we’ve done this weekend, will let you browse games in a fairly advanced way.
In the meantime, I entreat you to rate games, add tags, and have fun perusing the site! Comments and suggestions are still very welcome.
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