I am so sad I’m not at GDC Austin right now. Brandon Boyer’s New Indie Hotness session alone would have been worth the trip. (Not to mention the indie love explosion that’s undoubtedly going on this very minute!)
Fortunately, the unstoppable Simon Carless is doing his best to cover the event. Keep an eye on GameSetWatch as the week goes on.
Simon has already posted his wrap-up of day one, with pretty thorough articles on many of the sessions. It’s like you’re right there!
BIT.TRIP VOID, the third entry in the series of groovy, retro arcade games from Gaijin Games (the previous two being CORE and BEAT), is coming to WiiWare later this year. VOID seems to be less rhythmic than its predecessors, and more like a shooter, which is okay by me. I’m pretty bad at the BIT.TRIP games generally, but I just can’t seem to resist forking over my Wii Points for them…
Distractionware’s Terry Cavanagh has released this trailer for his upcoming gravity-shifting platformer/exploration game VVVVVV. (Yes, VVVVVV.) Initially a small “design exercise,” VVVVVV has evolved into Terry’s biggest game yet. A few months and nearly 200 screens later, it’s looking great.
Head over to Terry’s dev log for more details and screens. And look for VVVVVV to be released “in the next few weeks.” (Hopefully!)
You may have already heard this news, but I think it’s prudent to post it again: The fourth iteration of the previously Montreal-based indie game exposition / dance party, Gamma, will now be held at this year’s GDC in San Francisco. While I’m sad to not have an excuse to take the train up to Montreal this year, I’m thrilled to see Gamma return bigger than ever.
Read Simon’s announcement post for all the details. (Or if this is the first time you’ve heard of Gamma!)
Kokoromi will reveal this year’s theme and open submissions in November, so stay tuned!
For anyone hungry for Fez content, as I know many of you are, Polytron recently posted Two Years of Fez (or Two Years of Fail), a little retrospective highlighting some of the delightful ways development of the game has gone wrong over the past couple years. Check it out here.
We originally posted the preview of this a month ago, but Hideous and Andy Wolff’s Let’s Jump is finally ready for consumption using the eyes and ears on your head and the fingers on your hands.
You control a sky diver by firing in the opposite direction to the one you want to travel in, pushing yourself with the blasts. Score as much as you can before your altitude hits 0m and above all just enjoy the sights and sounds of this sweet sojourn in the sky!
The results of the Adult/Educational Competition are in (and have been for a while now, sorry about that)! This was a super-close race between Edmund and Back Door Man, with the former winning by two votes. Congratulations to Farmergnome for winning the grand prize with his controversial game.
You can find the full breakdown here. Once again, please be aware that some of these games depict graphic pixel-on-pixel intercourse and are possibly inappropriate for young children, depending on how tight-assed their parents are. Make note of what category the game belongs to before you play.
Does anyone love stats? Here are some: of the top 10 games, 8 were of adult nature, 1 was educational, and 1 was both. Proving once again that people enjoy sex more than they enjoy learning. But everyone loves video games.
Thanks to all the participants! This was a crazy one, and the next one might be crazier. See you next time!
Admittedly somewhat of a wry smile, but then I imagine that’s just how you would smile when you’ve just allocated half of your £4.5 million budget on british indie games. Alice Taylor is the Education Commissioner for Channel 4 as that linked interview reports, Channel 4 being a UK TV network already responsible for funding the BAFTA winning web-game Bow Steet Runner, which is a stunning FMV-Adventure style georgian crime drama. And really quite good.
A somewhat worrying figure in the interview is that the scheme will be supporting projects which currently have a budget of up to £800,000. Braid is one of the more recent examples I can think of where a large price-tag was admitted by the author, somewhere around $200,000 dollars, so the idea of helping out £800,000 productions is kind of confusing. The people I think it could help out most are the ones working for a hundreth of that sum, if not less. Still, if there is that much money around and brit-indies are confident in asking far less than that amount in terms of support then I’d be cautiously optimistic for them. Maybe I’m just intimidated by anyone with that much money.
What’re peoples immediate reactions? Are they any british developers who’ll be looking into this as a source of funding?
Chris Heckerhas announced that he’s been laid off from Maxis, where he was a major contributor to Spore. In the announcement Chris reveals that he’ll be working on Spy Party, a game which he demoed at this year’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop. In the game you play a sniper watching a cocktail party from another building, trying to figure out which of the partygoers is the spy by looking for various tells. I saw it at EGW and it’s a cool take on the spy genre.
Chris isn’t new to indie games by any means, having helped organize the Indie Game Jam and The Experimental Gameplay Workshop for several years. He also infamously ranted about the Nintendo Wii at GDC 2007, which – even though he was speaking for himself – ended up becoming the rather lurid headline “Spore Developer Calls Wii a Piece of Shit.” Good times!
It’ll be exciting to see what Chris comes up with now that he’s gone ronin! Good luck, man!
