Posted by Derek Yu
Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:51:00 GMT
And the winner of our supremely awesometastic Procedural Generation Competition is nenad, with Rescue: The Beagles! I can say without hesitation that this game is destined to be a classic – I love traversing the three-tiered abstract landscape and mapping out the best routes. Every part of the game feels very thoughtfully put in place. (Plus, I get fuzzy feelings from rescuing those cute beagles and hearing them yip with joy.)
In a very close second place is Dyson, the stunning “life” and colonization game by Alex “haowan” May, Rudolf “Borsato” Kremers, and Brian Grainger. And in third place is Self Destruct, a fast-paced procedurally generated shoot ‘em up from the indie gaming dream team of Terry Cavanagh and Annabelle Kennedy.
But as always, all of the (60!) entrants deserve a hearty round of beer and ‘grats. There were so many great ideas that came out of this compo that we should have called it the “Great Idea Competition.” But then it would be so hard to distinguish from the other TIGSource competitions… seriously, you all are blowing minds!
So be sure to play every game, if you can, if only to participate in Melly’s Players Choice Awards! The fun don’t stop.
Thanks again to everyone who made a game, played a game, gave feedback, voted, provided mirrors, and/or devoted any small amount of time to making this happen. See you next compo! It will be a doozy.
Posted in Features, Community, Developers, Competitions | 18 comments
Posted by Derek Yu
Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:27:00 GMT
Ladies and gentlemen, voting for the Procedural Generation Competition has begun! You can check out and download all the entries here.
There were 60 entries to this competition, which is by far the most we’ve ever had. Really, really incredible turn-out – I’m still making my way through all the games, which are about as varied as you can imagine. There’s obviously a lot you can do with this theme, and you guys didn’t disappoint!
So yeah, vote, vote! Start voting! Congratulations to all the competitors!
Posted in Features, Community, Developers | 10 comments
Posted by Derek Yu
Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:51:00 GMT
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:
- female protagonists
- ragdolls
- grayscale
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.
Posted in Features, Community | 23 comments
Posted by Derek Yu
Mon, 05 May 2008 04:06:00 GMT
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.
Posted in Features, Community | 7 comments
Posted by Derek Yu
Sun, 04 May 2008 13:42:00 GMT
Procedural content generation has been applied to video games forever to create random content and to reduce the space requirements for games. Roguelikes are a genre that generally depend on procedural generation for level creation. And recently, Will Wright’s Spore has put this idea in the spotlight, since the game is mostly procedurally-generated.
But all in all, I think this is a concept that is still relatively unexplored, and it could be applied creatively to every part of a game to do some really neat stuff! The focus of this competition is to develop a 4-week game that uses PCG to create compelling, new content every time the player starts a game.
Posted in Features, Community, Developers, Competitions | 32 comments
Posted by Derek Yu
Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:06:00 GMT
The results are in! Voting for The VGNG Competition is now over, and our buddy Farbs caught 16% of the vote with his really-rather-brilliant ROM CHECK FAIL, followed close behind by Farmergnome’s excellent My First Skydiving Academy. All in all, the VGNG Compo was a huge success. It’s been said before, but all the entrants should be really proud of themselves for participating, and making some really good shit!
Regarding the next competition… keep your eyeballs peeled. You never know when or how it’s going to hit. But you can expect that it’s going to be a lot of fun!
Congratulations, Farbs, and all the entrants!
Posted in Features, Community, Developers, Competitions | Tags Farbs, Farmergnome | 42 comments
Posted by Derek Yu
Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:00:00 GMT
San Francisco, CA – April 1, 2008 – Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS) announced today that it has bought The Independent Gaming Source, putting the (sometimes) respectable independent video game community/news site in its trophy case alongside acquisitions such as MaxisTM, developers of the best-selling PC video game series The SimsTM.
Derek Yu, Editor-in-Chief of The Independent Gaming Source, stated (while swimming in a pool filled with hundred dollar bills): “This is a pivotal event in the continuing transformation of the independent gaming industry. Electronic Arts is the leader in video games and their expertise in this field will undoubtedly bring great things to this community, especially in the area of 3d sweat physics. Also, I am so goddamned happy right now!”
John Pleasants, President and COO of Electronic Arts, stated: “I dunno, I was bored and we had a spare billion lying around.”
Please visit Electronic Arts’ press site www.info.ea.com for more information about the company and its games.
Read more...
Posted in Features, Community | Tags ElectronicArts | 90 comments
Posted by Derek Yu
Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:32:00 GMT
Wow, amazing turnout for the Video Game Name Generator Competition – we have 48 hot hot entries for you to rub up against! A new record!
The quality and variety of the games is really just inspiring. I had a blast watching the development goin’ on, and the results met and exceeded expectations. I’m alternately excited and fearful by the prospect of later competitions – on the one hand, you guys are obviously honing your game-making skills like crazy… on the other hand, that means I’ll probably have to spend the rest of my life compiling the great games that are going to come out of the next compo!
I was also really happy to see so many new faces in the forums. Even if you joined just to participate in the compo, it was great to have you guys around, and I hope you stay!
Well, my blathering on isn’t really doing anyone any good. Just check out the games. And for everyone who participated, you should give yourselves a hearty clap on the back. This is legendary stuffs.
Special thanks to the creator(s) of the VGNG, ‘cause that thing rocks, and also to moi, who compiled the final list of games and made my life a lot easier.
Don’t forget to vote!
EDIT: Fixed Time Shark’s link and added BaronCid’s Super Mario Versus Programming in China to the list (it’s a pen and paper game!). Sorry about that, guys!
Posted in Features, Community, Developers, Competitions | 20 comments
Posted by Derek Yu
Mon, 24 Mar 2008 06:36:00 GMT
Hey, guys, I’m happy to announce a new addition to the TIGSource family: TIGdb, the indie game database! It’s a searchable, sortable compendium of independent games and independent developers.
Jeff and I have been talking about this for a while, and this weekend we finally got together and just set the damn thing up. 14 hours of video game music, disgusting energy drinks, and designing/hacking later, we came up with what you see here!
One thing that’s pretty cool is that we have a rating system. Anyone can sign up for an account and start rating games (out of five stars). Eventually, these accounts will let you do more, like keep track of your favorite games or submit games to the database. The task of populating the database is a monumental one, so it’d be great to crowd-source this… but until we have some controls in place, me and Terry (and perhaps a few other people) will be adding the games. I will, however, take submissions/suggestions very seriously! See this thread for details.
So yeah, this is a very early version of the site, but it’s a great start, I think. Once the site levels up a bit, there are a lot of things we could do with it. In an earlier post, we briefly discussed the idea of alternative business models for indies… well, once we have them all organized and sorted in one place, I’m sure there’s a lot you could do to that end…
But for now – sign up, rate games, and excuse any errors, unfinished bits. It was kind of a mad rush today to get the current 40 games/26 developers up so we could make the site public. I hope you like it!
Posted in Features, Community, Developers | 88 comments
Posted by Derek Yu
Sun, 02 Mar 2008 05:31:00 GMT
Posted in Features, Unicorns, Competitions | 34 comments
