indie games

Light of Altair

RinkuHero — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:38:48 -0700

Light of Altair is an indie game (by a fellow developer I know and his brother) which fans of Immortal Defense may enjoy. It plays much like Sid Meier's game Civilization, except it's in space and you can colonize planets and asteroids across solar systems. It's also fun zooming in and out just watching the solar systems do their things: planets and asteroid belts moving by as you watch. It's very pretty, and rotating around the worlds and just looking at stuff was my favorite part. I had a lot of fun playing through it. Go check it out if you have some time.

Download | Order ($14.95)*

* Note: this is there affiliate link, if you use it 30% of the sale price goes to support our games, the other 70% to them. If you don't like us prefer for it to go all to them, you can always buy it on their site of course. :)

The Problem with Retro Games

RinkuHero — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:34:21 -0700

There was an interesting discussion about retro games over in the TIGSource forum. I'd like to quote Chris Whitman's post about it, an opinion I strongly agree with, and then one of my own, because I feel that this is an important subject. Here's Chris's:

Personally, I don't mind if someone decides to knock out a retro game now and then. It's nostalgic and fun, and I don't have a problem with that.

Besides the nostalgia factor, many mainstream games were, in fact, better then (although we tend to ignore the majority of SNES movie license platformers, for example). There are a variety of reasons why this was so. For one thing, if a game was focused around action and reflexes, typically you actually got to play the damn game instead of having a cutscene rammed down your throat every ten minutes.

HOWEVER:

The problem is that it has become a superstition, really. I mean, say you need rain to water your crops, so you do a dance and it rains. From then on whenever you need rain, you just do the dance. Sometimes it rains when you do the dance, so you figure that you did the dance particularly well that day and got some rain.

The endless tide of retro platformers are a bit like the rain dance. Old platform games were awesome (sometimes), so people hope that if they make something with lo-fi graphics, they'll get something great too. Except that it wasn't the lo-fi graphics that made the games great (after all, those graphics were usually cutting edge at the time), it was gameplay and fun and the desire to make a well-crafted game.

But for many people it's a crutch. Instead of analysing what makes a game 'good' (for whatever your personal definition of good is), people just adopt the entire mantle of retro platforming, taking both the good and the bad things, and end up with yet another identical game to be thrown on the enormous pile of retro crap. So no one ever expands their horizons, no one ever tries to make the best art they can muster, no one ever really does anything but make the same thing again and again, constantly hoping it will, in a manner of speaking, rain. I don't mind it when someone does a well-thought out, retro styled platformer once in a while, but I do mind it when everyone does poorly planned, hopelessly derivative retro-styled platformers all the time.

Just... game design-wise we are still depending on very basic, well-established methods of creating interest. Almost all games cast you as a little man who has to fight guys. I think that there is definitely a place for that. I enjoy action-platformers and I don't want to see them go away any time soon. However, I can't help but feel that the whole community would be better if people put more effort into branching out and trying to create things which were important and perhaps spanned at least somewhat more of the enormous gamut of human experience.

And here's mine:

Although it's true that it's not the low-fi graphics and scanlines that made the games good, I feel that the brain is a malleable thing, and sometimes things which are not inherently pleasurable can become inherently pleasurable through association with pleasurable things. This is a standard idea in behaviorism, with the bell creating the saliva and all that. Fetishes also work in that way. The brain's weird like that.

So I think that has also happened in many people, and that the retro game elements themselves have become inherently pleasurable in many people just through association with pleasurable games, so games which nostalgically contain retro elements and nothing else can give pleasure through association to people who have become wired that way. And I think making games which appeal to that is fairly limiting, because they often aren't pleasurable in themselves, they are mainly pleasurable because they remind people of old games. I mean some games are literally just retro graphics and sounds and have nothing else of value, and people eat it up because of pleasure by association.

Knytt Stories Analysis

RinkuHero — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 13:00:57 -0700

A came across this review of Knytt Stories, one of my favorite indie games. I think his video does a good job of analyzing the game, so if any of you haven't tried this wonderful game out yet maybe his video will convince you :)

One thing I felt he didn't touch on but which was really important to me while playing Knytt Stories was how well that game used color balance. Anyone who wants to see really wonderful color balance in a game should learn from that game.

The You Testament

RinkuHero — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 12:03:49 -0700

MDickie has released his final game, The You Testament, a retelling of the Jesus story in game form. This is really his final game, he has vowed never to make another game after this one. I haven't played it yet, but this video is awesome.

Check it out: http://mdickie.com/

Exposure for Indie Games

RinkuHero — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 18:38:19 -0700

I also wrote this in Tim W's wonderful blog, but I thought it was also worth posting here. There was an article about why some indie games get more reviews in the mainstream press than others do, and I said I think the main reasons are:

- Graphics. The reason Darwinia and Braid and World of Goo get coverage and The Spirit Engine etc. do not is probably primarily graphics. That might be shallow, but it's true, nobody wants to review a game that looks like it was made of clip-art, no matter how good the gameplay is.

- Previews: Games that come out of nowhere aren't as appealing to review as games which have been highly anticipated and have a lot of hype prior to release. For about three years we kept seeing new previews of Braid (and to a lesser extent games like Aquaria, The Underside, etc.). I actually think previews matter far more than reviews in terms of getting exposure. You know a game will get a lot of reviews when you see it being previewed every few months or so.

- Reputation. You're more likely to get a game reviewed if you've made a lot of previous games that also got reviewed by the same site / person. First-games have a much harder time getting reviewed or previewed, since nobody has heard of the author before. A new cactus game, no matter how bad or good it is, will probably be downloaded thousands of times on its release, just based on his reputation.

(So, I guess, if you want your indie games to get good press coverage, give them good graphics, submit them for previews, and release a lot of games.)

Oh, and the image used in this entry is a preview image of the cast of Saturated Dreamers. Just thought I'd follow my own advice and start to preview my game a bit here. :)

Live Like Jason Rohrer

RinkuHero — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 20:12:45 -0700

Esquire posted a great article on indie games, focusing on Jason Rohrer. I recommend reading it, and trying out his games if you haven't. I'd love to live like he does one day!

J Force Games vs GyroVorbis

RinkuHero — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 01:59:53 -0700

For an interesting bit of indie game developer drama, notorious braggarts J Force Games challenged some indie group named GyroVorbis (?) to a contest: which of their current in-production games will get a higher average review score after release?

GyroVorbis was having none of it though, and perhaps wisely refused the challenge, instead making ~~a small game mocking~~ part of their game mock JForce Games.

The videos are entertaining to watch, especially if you've heard of J Force before. I think people tend to take J Force too seriously, GyroVorbis included. They're just kids having fun and making games, nothing you should hate them over.

I talked to their marketing guy over instant message today and he's much nicer and less arrogant in person than he is in his videos. And he does seem to know a lot about marketing, so he's not all just hot air.

All in all, I'm happy J Force Games exists, they liven up the indie game community.