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.
The Chronicles of Doryen is an experimental roguelike-in-development that touts “real-time gameplay” and “2.5d perspective” (i.e. limited z-axis) as two of its biggest features. While some might argue over whether the game’s real-time gameplay discounts the game as a roguelike… well, who really cares! The important thing is that the characters in the game are represented by (very colorful and pretty) letters, numbers, and the ever-present ”@” symbol.
There’s no playable version yet, but you can see a video of the game in action, or follow the blog (which is updated fairly regularly). The developer, J.C. Wilk, has also released a sub-game, called The Doryen Arena, that lets you test out Doryen’s combat system in a gladiatorial setting. In the arena you face off against waves of increasingly stronger opponents until you meet an appropriately grisly demise.
As simple as it is (and still v0.5), TDA definitely shows off some of the potential of the real-time thing. It still feels like a roguelike despite having a basic, timing-based combo system(!). I’m interested to see where it goes from here! A multiplayer roguelike with this system seems like it could work!
(C/C++ roguelike developers may also be interested in The Doryen Library.)
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?)
Apparently it’s impossible to be a webcomic in the 21st century without having your own video game to go along with it. The newest in this growing breed is the game from Least I Could Do which is an entirely awesome comic based around the adventures of Rayne Summers as he teaches us about life, laughter, sex, trying to become pope, adopting street urchins to build you pidgeon launching catapaults and of course, x%xing a bicycle.
It’s still VERY early stages, as you’ll see from the animations above, and apparently it’ll be an old school action-platformer whilst being a strong parody of the original Super Mario Bros. I’m a little cautious about it myself, as it is much too early to really say how it’ll turn out. Of course, that’s where you guys can come in! The author ‘Ryan Sohmer’ is currently looking for people with video game/flash programming experience to help out on the project, so if you feel up to it just hit up the forum and fire him off an email. Who knows, you may just save Christmas.
UPDATE: Apparently I missed out that a Looking for Group is also in the making and the same request for help applies to that too. So you no longer have to choose between sex and elves. Good times…
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!
In case you missed it, Ikiki has released two new games this year, and they’re both pretty nifty! The first is Tobioriya, an archery game where you have to shoot people jumping out of a building (naked, obviously). Hold down the mouse button and release to shoot. Try to aim the cursor on the jumpers as the arrow travels nearly instantaneously.
In the second game, Curryki, you have to put curry on rice. The rice appears on the left side, and you have to squirt the curry on the right. Then the machine will flip the right side onto the left (like a page in a book). So the goal is to place the curry so that it ends up in the right place! It’s quite tricky!
Really like both of these, especially Curryki, which I think is pretty novel. You can download them both from Ikiki’s games page. Curryki is at the top, and Tobioriya is the next one down.
(Source: LaughingCrow, via Lithium Leaf. Sweet blog, dude!)
Somewhere out there, a U.S. Senator is earning his or her wings.
But really, what I like about Torture Game 2 is not so much that it lets you hurt a guy with nails, rope, spikes, a chainsaw, etc. – the actual gore is pretty campy, in my opinion. No, what I like is that you can use his body to make macabre art! The game even provides a little paintbrush for you to paint on him with.
For example, check out what the creative folks at Sensible Erection (NSFWish) have done with the game.
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.
Or: “A man and his phallic symbol embark on a fantasy adventure.”
GINORMO SWORD (full title: “Long and Thick My Ginormo”) is a new Flash game from Barbarageo, creators of the fairly mediocre but similarly awesome-sounding UCHUFORCE 2 (Gesundheit!). It’s a simple hack n’ slash fantasy game – your character follows the mouse cursor and you can attack by clicking the left mouse button. The aim of each area is to uncover the various hidden battle zones, defeat the monsters within, and eventually defeat the boss of the area, allowing you to move on.
Along the way you’ll encounter helpful townspeople and mages who will let you upgrade your sword and learn magicks. One such character is the blacksmith, who, along with leveling your weapon, will let you increase the “length” and “thickness” of your sword. As far as I can tell, these size increases are mostly cosmetic, but then again, isn’t just having a longer and thicker “sword” enough?
It’s actually a pretty entertaining game, though. Fun graphics, too. Just be prepared to slam your left-mouse button a few thousand times to get through.
