Fantastic Arcade

By: Derek Yu

On: September 25th, 2010

Hey, guys! Apologies for the lack of updates. Aside from bein’ busy game-makin’, I’ve been moving around a bit. This week I’m in Austin, attending Fantastic Arcade, a video game spin-off of Fantastic Fest, the horror/fantasy/sci-fi/cult movie festival that takes place here every year. True to its name, Fantastic Arcade does feature an awesome indie game arcade with custom-built cabinets for games like Enviro-Bear 2000, Norrland, NIDHOGG, Every Day the Same Dream, and Monaco. The cabs have some great details – the Enviro-Bear machine pictured at right rocks a pretty funny fur-lined control panel installed with a trackball.

There’re also some great events going on, like panels and tournaments (Canabalt, NIDHOGG). Yesterday, for example, I had the fortune of (nervously!) moderating an interesting discussion between Jonathan Blow and filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo, who seems to have a surprisingly good understanding of video games. Despite the fact that the attendance of some of the panels has been modest, I think Fantastic Arcade shows a lot of potential for cross-over between fans of indie games and genre films. In any case, it’s a pretty sweet production all the way around.

Anyway! There are still two days left of Fantastic Arcade, but I was having trouble sleeping and wanted to express some of my excitement for the festival as well as commiserate with you all about the sparse updates on the front page. We do have some cool things we’re working on for TIGSource and I’m also looking forward to posting some more games.

Posted in Community

Carr

I disagree completely. Most people made several games before finishing one, so a lot of people's first complete game might or might not be good, but it doesn't mean it's the first time they attempted at making a game. Of course, people with some experience have a bigger chance at releasing a good game, but it's no exact science. Who had heard of Jon Blow before Braid ? Pixel before Cave Story ? I could be here all day naming other widely known developers whose first actual game was a success.
rinkuhero

are you seriously asking who heard of blow before braid? he was all over the indie game news sphere for years before braid was released. pixel also made ikachan, which was a very popular game long before cave story came out. braid wasn't blow's first game either. if you can, please name some more besides those two, because those two aren't very good examples (in fact they're staggeringly bad examples). just because you don't know what games they made before their most popular games doesn't mean they didn't put in the years of self-training required making games before they made a successful one.

anyway it's okay to disagree, but you're still wrong in my experience. i've been making indie games for 15 years and been helping others make games and participating in the indie game community and reviewing indie games for almost as long, so i'm just speaking out of my experience.
Carr

rinkuhero: And during those 15 years of experience what have you done that could be deemed popular ?

You kind of missed my point, just after I just said that experience is a bonus, even though it's no rocket science that just because I did something good in the past doesn't mean I will start shitting golden eggs from then on.

What I meant by “first actual games” I meant first (at least remotely) popular games. Ikachan wasn't widely known before Cave Story was released and what popular games Jon Blow did before Braid ? I can't name a single game he made, let alone a popular one.

Not that it should matter anyway, but some more examples on top of my head right now would be Introversion's Uplink, Ace team's Zeno Clash, La Mulana and Nigoro (if you exclude some short flash games he made before, if I'm not mistaken) or if you consider Ikachan to be that popular, you could include it in that list.

But well, I don't really get your point. So before releasing a good game you need to have made another good game before ?
If so, how would that first good game exist ?
http://twitter.com/HeroOfTheFSA Joseph Gibson

He had a haircut by popular demand. Meet me in the ring.
rinkuhero

“And during those 15 years of experience what have you done that could be deemed popular ?”

well, i made immortal defense, which is probably one of the most popular tower defense games, and was strategy game of the year for game tunnel in 2007, and has sold thousands of copies. other games i've worked on include fedora spade, alphasix (a freeware game which won a cage match award and has been downloaded over 150,000 times), wingedmene, missing, etc. etc. — just google me if you want the full list. i'm also an editor here and on other places which review indie games. i'm not in the top 10 of most famous indies or anything, but probably in the top 100.

your argument now seems to be that people don't have to have made popular games before they release their first popular game. that's a tautology, obviously. the progression is from no games, to unpopular example games, to popular games. a process which takes years. it usually goes in that order, although there are exceptions.

the developers of uplink, zeno clash, and la mulana did made games before those games. they didn't do so under those company names in all cases, though. do you seriously think that the first time those guys sat down to make a game they came up with something as advanced as zeno clash or uplink or la mulana? those games were the culmination of many years of experience and training.

i do think you're missing what i mean, though. my point is simply this: that it takes time and experience to get good at making games. no more, no less. and during that time, one usually builds up a small body of work, example games for instance. so, when someone's game is reviewed here, i like to mention their earlier games.

to take an example, look at the top 10 games i posted on oct 1. most of the developers there made games before those games. but those games weren't necessarily good or popular, nonetheless they deserve to be mentioned.

what i think is wrong with your evaluation is that you think that if i mention a game that someone has made that you assume it was a popular game and that that person is a famous or known indie, that isn't the case at all. very few oof the game developers i've reviewed the games of in the weekly top 10's are popular by any stretch of the imagination. but all are experienced, and most have made a few games in the past which a few people very into indie games remember, and it's those games that i mention.

in other words, you believe that if i mention someone, they're popular, and then complain that i mention only popular people. but most of the people i've been mentioning *have never been mentioned on the frontpage before*.
Carr

Dude, for fuck's sake, you are still missing or pretending to be missing my point completely.

I don't want to you to post everyone's first games. I just happen to dislike “here's game X from creator Y who did Z” kind of posts.

I said this over and over again, is it that hard to understand ?

“your argument now seems to be that people don't have to have made popular games before they release their first popular game. that's a tautology, obviously. the progression is from no games, to unpopular example games, to popular games. a process which takes years. it usually goes in that order, although there are exceptions.”
wtf ? That goes to prove you completely misunderstood me.

“the developers of uplink, zeno clash, and la mulana did made games before those games. ” No shit… Where any of those games popular ? THAT'S THE POINT

As for your games, I googled a bit and found your site, and no offense but I never heard about any of them. Anyway that's beside the point, I don't even know why I brought this up in the first place.

“what i think is wrong with your evaluation is that you think that if i mention a game that someone has made that you assume it was a popular game and that that person is a famous or known indie, that isn't the case at all. very few oof the game developers i've reviewed the games of in the weekly top 10's are popular by any stretch of the imagination. but all are experienced, and most have made a few games in the past which a few people very into indie games remember, and it's those games that i mention.”
Now I agree, and that's probably where the whole confusion started, though I was under the impression that could be true , hence I said you shouldn't worry about what I first said.

“so seriously, you're operating and making conclusions under limited information (you don't seem to know which indie developers are popular and which aren't, for instance)”
That's basically calling me ignorant which is not only uncalled for, but I also believe I know a thing or two as I've been following the indie gaming scene for over 10 years, even before the term “indie” was coined.

My definition of popular is definitely different from yours and other people's, and that's why I assumed you were mentioning “popular” creators, not that I had ever heard of them, but because they had the “from creator X who did Y and Z” bit of text in the post. Does that make ignorant ?

“i've been intentionally avoiding reviewing games of popular indies, and still you claim that i'm only reviewing games of popular indies, simply on the basis that the people i've reviewed the games of have made games before and that it isn't their first game ever that is getting posted.”

Wrong and untrue on so many levels, it's almost funny. Seriously man, you should read my posts at least twice before making any sort of judgement like that.

Anyway, I hope you got my point, finally, it's getting tiring to repeat my posts over and over again with different wording and defending myself of your “you're ignorant” arguments.