GDC 2010: No More Giggles

By: Derek Yu

On: March 19th, 2010

A week after Tommy Refenes (Super Meat Boy) declared the Apple App Store to be the Tiger Electronics handheld of this generation (part of the Indie Game Maker Rant session), Apple has removed his zit-popping game Zits & Giggles from the App Store. As an experiment, Tommy raised the price tier every time someone bought Zits & Giggles, with people eventually buying the game for $300. He concluded that the iPhone audience was not primarily gamers and that games like Street Fighter, Assassin’s Creed, and Mega Man, which play poorly on the iPhone (like games ported to the Tiger Electronic Handheld), are nothing more than a way to sell a brand.

Apple has not responded, so it’s unclear whether they are retaliating against Tommy’s rant or his price-raising experiment. Or both.

IGF Award Winners

By: Derek Yu

On: March 12th, 2010

Former IGF Awards host Andy Schatz (pictured above) got to take the stage again tonight, only this time it was to accept both the Seumas McNally award and the Excellence in Design Award for his 4-player co-op stealth game Monaco. Other winning games included the long-lost Limbo, which won awards for Visual Art and Technical Excellence, Closure, which won Audio, and cactus’s Tuning, which won the Nuovo Award.

You can view the entire show here.

Seumas McNally Grand Prize:

• Joe Danger
• Monaco
• Rocketbirds: Revolution!
• Super Meat Boy!
• Trauma

Excellence in Visual Art:

• Limbo
• Owlboy
• Rocketbirds: Revolution!
• Shank
• Trauma

Excellence in Audio:

• Closure
• Rocketbirds: Revolution!
• Shatter
• Super Meat Boy!
• Trauma

Excellence in Design:

• AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard For Gravity
• Cogs
• Miegakure
• Monaco
• Star Guard

Nuovo Award:

• A Slow Year
• Closure
• Enviro-Bear 2000
• Today I Die
• Tuning

Technical Excellence:

• Closure
• Limbo
• Heroes of Newerth
• Joe Danger
• Vessel

Student Showcase:

• Boryokudan Rue
• Continuity
• Devils Tuning Fork
• Dreamside Maroon Student Version
• Igneous
• Paper Cakes
• Puddle
• Puzzle Bloom
• Spectre
• Ulitsa Dimitrova

Cactus gave the best IGF acceptance speech I’ve ever heard!

IGS Photos

By: ARelativelyHotGirl

On: March 9th, 2010

Coming in live…

Let’s Win Forever

By: fuzz

On: March 4th, 2010

“Mouse click on gerbils to shoot them, get scores, youre winning, YOU ARE WINNING FOREVER”

Let’s Win Forever is the latest creation of Amon26, from whom sprang the wonderful Au Sable series and a number of other short, humorous titles. In Let’s Win Forever, the player aims their crosshair at the members of a large crowd of colourful gerbils. Shooting them results in their gaining jetpacks and a seemingly arbitrary number being added to the player’s score. There’s not really any objective or purpose to the game, but that’s okay since it allows you to WIN FOREVER (!). The music is quite brilliant, as always with Amon’s work. If you enjoy this, it’s also worth checking out the more experimental Let’s Win Everything.

Download Let’s Win Forever here; get Amon26 merchandise (including art-books and a CD of Au Sable/AOOFAD) here.

Hit the jump for an interview with Amon26:

TIGSource: What
does the pseudonym “Amon26” mean?

Amon26: I was fourteen when I found the name. Amon was short for Amontillado, and in junior high my friends and I talked about each other and our crushes in-code so that our peers wouldn’t find out our secrets. There was Eduardo, Oxy, Aim, Julius, Pizarro, and me, Amontillado. The 26 came in when I was tired of everybody using the same boring numbers like 69, or 666, 13, or 420. It seemed every number had some kind of special meaning. I couldn’t find any special meaning to the number 26 so I chose it to represent me. I let it become my ‘holy number’ I guess you could say.

TIGS: While you’re best known for your games, you’re also a prolific musician, visual artist, and occasional writer. How do you balance your multiple artistic interests?

Amon26: I don’t worry that much about balancing it out. For a long time I’ve liked the idea of trying to bring multiple elements to bear in a way that excites an audience. So sometimes I’ll write a story that becomes a picture, or I’ll design a picture that becomes a short film. I tend to think in fractals, so everything could be easily transformed into another media for me. AOOFAD could be a board game, or a 200 page poem, or a coffee table art-book. It just happened to come out shaped like a game. :)

TIGS: Where do you think games stand as a medium? Do you consider Anna Anthropy’s concept of games being primarily about creator-audience interaction to be worthwhile, or do you tend to focus more on your own individual expression?

Amon26: I think each game should be measured by its own merit. Boardgames for example: Mahjong can’t be compared to Brenda Brathwaite’s Train, or vice-versa even even though they’re both boardgames. Sometimes a game is meant to tell a story or have a message, sometimes a game is meant to realistically simulate an event, other times its just meant to look and feel cool with little or no substance and meaning. The whole “games as/are art” debate is hard for me to understand. The concept of what makes art art is so hard to pin down as it is. I think what matters more is setting out to try and accomplish something good, regardless of what it may be considered in the end

TIGS: All of the games set in the world of Au Sable are in traditional genres, as either run-and-gun or first person shooter. Is this due to a design philosophy that one can most easily distort what is already well known, or simply from the route of attempting to marry gameplay to aesthetic in a way that doesn’t require a great deal of coding?

Amon26: At first it was my way to make sure I wasn’t overstepping my bounds. I re-purposed a free, open source platformer example for GameMaker and didn’t want to design a game that had goals more complex than I knew I could accomplish with what limited skill I had. Now that I’ve learned more, I could try something less conventional but I’ve always been
fond of John Carmack‘s concept of simplicity. You can play Doom1 with a couple keys and the mouse, that’s all you need.

TIGS: What are a few of your major influences, in any medium?

Amon26: Hm, Castlevania II really helped me see potential in making lo-fi graphics unsettling, the whole game gives this stark sense of loneliness even when you’re in a populated town. Same with Wizards and Warriors 2. Silent Hill/Fatal Frame were good examples of creating a vulnerable player; someone who wasn’t good with guns or combat. As far as books go, I used Ray Bradbury’s “Death Is a Lonely Business” as inspiration for creating an eerie mood from what would otherwise be
considered mundane. Also “House Of Leaves” created an illusion that the book was shredding itself apart as you progressed. I listen to a
lot of music all over the board, from Lilly Allen to Soul Coughing. I modeled AOOfAD/AuSable’s music after Throbbing Gristle, and the
ambient tracks off of the Quake1 CD written by Trent Reznor.

TIGS: Your games tend to employ a glitch aesthetic in that there’s no definite reality that is readily understood by the player, making them unsure of their abilities and goals. To what extent is this
intentional, rather than accidental as a result of your unfamiliarity with your tools?

Amon26: Well a lot of those glitch and scratch concepts come from “manufactured accidents” during the development process. I.E the Eyes in Ausable. I wanted them to do something other than hover in a
fully predictable pattern, so I made attempts to break the game on purpose with lots of random integers, particles, distortions. Once I found something that looked good, I toned it down to a point that kept the game playable, but reflected that sense of nearly crashing. That’s pretty much how I do everything.

TIGS: Collaboration is obviously something that you’re familiar with, as you’ve done the music for both Anna Anthropy‘s and Jazzuo’s games. To what extent has this been a positive influence on your own work?

Amon26: Mighty JillOff and Sexy Hiking have been two heavily played games among my local friends and I for years. We’d spend hours at all-night diners trying to work our way over that damn tree, or up the impossible tower. So when I was invited to compose music for Jazzuo/Anna/Kepa I nearly wet myself! Now, a year later, I’ve learned about who they are, and what they enjoy doing beyond what brought us together. Their friendships have been the most valuable outcome from all of this. I’ve met Anna in person and someday I would like to fly over and visit Jazzuo so we could do a live performance of the DildoTank theme song. I think we would obliterate all of Eurasia with
its greatness. (And some of Denmark)

TIGS: One of the defining features of games as opposed to other artistic mediums is the possibility of a social aspect; this is present even in single player games, as you’ve mentioned in relation to your experiences with The Mighty Jill Off and Sexy Hiking. Do you plan on ever creating a game that focuses as much on human interaction as atmosphere, a la Anna Anthropy’s Octopounce?

Amon26: I have this really crazy idea for a 2 player game that actually encourages failure to some degree. I loved how the later ps2 Burnout games rewarded you with super-dramatic visuals when you failed. I want to recreate that same sense of “oh man, I lost the round but look how amazing my failure was!”

TIGS: Do you have any tips for complete beginners to Game Maker or independent game development in general?

Amon26: hmm.. well it applies to more than just GameMaker, but; Make lots and lots and lots of mistakes. Visit forums, grab examples and code and just rip them apart. Even if you dont know what you’re doing, you’re still doing something. Eventually it gets clearer.

its not effective for people who want to go from zero-to-awesome in a day, but its really rewarding

also, make friends with other small devs, cultivate meaning partnerships with other fledgling designers and share your experiments between eachother.

if it wasn’t for the help of glyph, the A.I in AuSable would be little more than bouncing do-nothings.

TIGS: I see that’s worked out very well for you and Anna Anthropy.

Amon26: exactly, she really took me under her wing and spends lots of time helping me fine-tune things. In return, I’m her “piano monkey” writing fun music for her work.

TIGS: Are you doing the soundtrack for her new deep sea diver game, too, then?

Amon26: It’s planned, I’ve had really bad writer’s block with music lately. Winter gets me down and makes it hard for me to focus on things, but I sent her a few blurbs of music today Ages ago, now- Ed..to see what she thinks.

it’s a lot of fun, there’s stuff I cant discuss about it that really amuses me. Very much her sense of humor.

TIGS: Your Quake machinima tend to have a comical aspect not present in your games or music (aside from the Dildo Tank theme). Is it less natural for you to make humorous, rather than melancholy, creations?

Amon26: I struggle with chronic night terrors. I’ve had them since I was a child and they’re very distracting. One time I had a therapist that encouraged me to try “trapping” my horrors on canvas but It
didn’t work out really well. The pictures didn’t make me feel any better. But it all changed the moment I personified a nightmare as an NPC, took aim, and killed it.

In my ordinary waking-life I tend to be very light hearted, positive and quirky. I avoid over-exposing myself to negative things, I don’t read the news or watch TV. So when I’m in the spirit and feel it’s time to tell a really good joke, I do it by whatever means necessary. I look forward to creating a really absurd and hilarious game in the
future. Something that I hope will equal the polish of AOOFAD/AuSable.

TIGS: Have you played any of Aliceffekt‘sgames? They’re quite reminiscent of yours, especially Cyanosis Fever.

Amon26: ooh this looks interesting (downloading valp.zp)

angon a sec, trying it

ohh MAN!

i never knew i could feel that way about a game.
valential hopes just made me keep going “YES! FASTER! YES!” then i ate some mints, and i was allright.
im not sure what its about yet, i just tried the first path

yeah, i’d really love to develop something alongside a programmer with some genuine 3d prowess. I have an idea for a flight game that I’m not nearly smart enough to make yet.
I tried unity, but it made my brain explode out my ear,

TIGS: It appears that you’ve tried to sell some of your work on CD and USB locally as well as on-line; has this been successful?

Amon26: The money I’ve made off sales doesn’t cover much more than a nice dinner or a DVD on occasion, but I don’t expect it to. It’s just my way of providing people a method to donate money and be able to get something nice in turn as my way of saying thanks. I wish I could curb production costs though, I make 2 dollars profit off a 18 dollar shirt.

TIGS: You’ve recently made the jump into 3D; how is designing for three dimensions different than designing for a spatial area seen only from one side?

Amon26: It was a nightmare at first, but I was sort of expecting that. Even though all I was doing was providing a variable for “height” along with width and length, it took a lot of re-thinking to
understand. Once I started getting the basics down It actually felt very familiar. Cactus helped me solve a problem that was a bit tedious but he really saved my ass. Without his tip, The Hunt still wouldnt run right on most PC’s. I really need to look into Unity and
see if I can make anything interesting in that next, but I’m not sure if my brain can handle it. We’ll see. If i start speaking aramaic and drawing stick figures of zalgo with my own feces, then maybe i’ll stick to 2d a little longer.

You can ask Amon26 your own questions at his Formspring.

Indie Fund

By: Derek Yu

On: March 3rd, 2010

A group of successful indie developers have started Indie Fund, a funding source for independent developers. The 7 backers of the fund (Ron Carmel, Kyle Gabler, Jonathan Blow, Kellee Santiago, Nathan Vella, Matthew Wegner, and Aaron Isaksen) are investing in indie games and supporting their development. The primary goal is to provide a way for indies to create and sell games without having to compromise their vision or legal rights to publishers. Of course, you’d also be getting the advice of some of the community’s most experienced and successful creators.

Currently, the Fund is investing in a few undisclosed indie titles, which happened “through word of mouth within the indie community”. Eventually, though, there will be a way for developers to submit their games. You can find out more about Indie Fund in this Gamasutra Q&A with Ron Carmel of 2D Boy.

Assemblee Competition: Results!

By: Derek Yu

On: February 7th, 2010

The results of the Assemblee Competition are in! The winner of Part Two is Ivan Safrin for Bitworld, a really slick action-oriented roguelike that was made in Ivan’s own development framework, Substance (still under-wraps). He made use of a number of people’s work from Part One: Oddball, Oryx, Rynen10k, Blot, Stian Stark, Saros, BigLon. A hearty congrats, dude!

As you can see here, it was a pretty close competition, with a lot of great entries. I noticed quite a few entries made it on to 1up’s 101 Free Games of 2010, among other places. Here are the top ten finishers (with brief and inadequate synopses):

1. Bitworld 72 votes (7.9%) – slick 2d/3d roguelike_
2. Dungeons of Fayte 63 votes (6.9%) – co-op action/RPG_
3. Realm of the Mad God 57 votes (6.2%) – massively multiplayer fantasy_
4. Mr. Kitty’s Quest 51 votes (5.6%) – explorey action adventure game_
5. BirdyWorld 38 votes (4.2%) – Zelda-like where players create the world as they explore_
6. Backworld 33 votes (3.6%) – platformer about painting_
7. Tiny Crawl 33 votes (3.6%) – streamlined room-based RPG
8. s h i n e 32 votes (3.5%) – survival horror
9. The King, the Queen and the Jester 29 votes (3.2%) – first person dungeon crawl
10. Great Dungeon in the Sky 27 votes (3%) – platform game with many characters

Please check out the full list of Assemblee games if you haven’t already. Lots of gems in there.

The winner of Part One was Oryx, for his Lo-Fi Fantasy Tileset, which was used in many a game (including Bitworld). As stated before, all of the art and music for Part One is now available (image-heavy) for you to use in your own (non-commercial) projects. They have been released by their creators under a Creative Commons license.

TIGForums mod and Pokemans-lover extraordinaire Melly also held a Box Art Competition after Part Two, which turned out some more cool stuff.

I loved this competition. I think it definitely proved that a two-part competition can be very successful. Logistically, I’m going to have to do more planning for large volumes of entries. I was really unprepared for all the awesome that was going to come in, and that led to some delays. Thanks to everyone who participated, and congratulations to everyone who finished artwork, music, or a game!

Xbox Live Indie Games Sales Data 2009

By: Derek Yu

On: January 28th, 2010

Gamerbytes, a downloadable game blog affiliated with Gamasutra, has an interesting report that reveals sales data for Xbox Live Indie Games titles in 2009. The data is heartening, and shows that the service can be lucrative. Hopefully these reports will drive more developers to XBLIG and start a positive cycle that will increase the quality and visibility of these games.

Also, please check out this thread on the XNA developers forums, where much of the data was gathered.

Developer Highlight: Connor Kimbrough

By: fuzz

On: January 26th, 2010

Connor Kimbrough, more commonly known as Beef or Professor Dead, is a quirky and little known game developer. A member of The Poppenkast, his games often consist of innovative or strange gameplay ideas coupled with silhouette-based, stylistic graphics. He describes himself as “a cute man with ten fingers, ten toes. lives in tulsa, oklahoma. he once had to have 5 shots for rabies.” I’d like to highlight a few of his games here so that a few more people will be able to enjoy them.

All of Connor’s games use a Z+X+ENTER control scheme unless otherwise specified within the game.

Botulism, named after a disease causing paralysis through the infection of a wound, is a platformer that is frustrating not so much in being technically difficult, but in its refusal to allow for human error. They player acts as a man with a machine gun, jumping on a series of platforms to reach the end of each level. On the way he encounters many running figures, who can easily be shot, but do not fight back. The background music is a dissonant drone, reinforcing the image of a cold, calculating killer. The gameplay is essential to the theme; the hero is a robot, an unemotional being of rationality who kills because he must. Therefore, the main character’s deaths must be the result of the player not being robotic enough, not carefully examining the data before them and moving based on prior experience. Through seven levels and a number of hidden counterparts to these levels, the man with the machine gun jumps through a world of silhouettes and toxicity, culminating in an enemy too strong to defeat and thus a fearful thing to run from. You become the runners that you have shot, and the post-game stats screen displays only one attribute of the playthrough: the number of deaths that you have caused.

More games after the jump:

In Hot Ninja Moon Moon, you play as a ninja slaughtering the enemies of the Motherland and preventing a peasant revolt. What makes this game stand out is its method of portraying player deaths; upon reset, all dead bodies from the player’s losses remain. The graphics are decent, although nowhere near as good as in some of Beef’s other games. The design works, but there are far too many spikes and not enough of anything else. The sound design is minimalist and atmospheric, making the frustrating portions bearable. Overall, a somewhat average platformer, with a graphical display of death similar to that in Jesse Venbrux’s Deaths. Connor is currently working on an update to this game, entitled “Hot Ninja Moon Black”, which looks like it will be a great improvement on the original.

Blazing Sadholes was made for The Poppenkast’s 2 hour “Western” competition. Unabashedly inspired by The Mighty Jill Off, Sadholes features Beef’s distinctive silhouette pixel art and a great deal of difficult, spike-laden platforming. The succinct story is communicated primarily through gameplay, although there is a short cutscene at the beginning showing the cowboy falling into a pit, horse and all. Having lost his hat, his horse, and his way, he does his best to retrieve his possessions and find his way out. The discovery of these items along the way carries the story effectively in a way that doesn’t require words; Beef tends to tell wordless stories quite well in his games and this is no exception. The game never finishes; there is a point where you can progress no further, but this is really a non-ending. The cowboy becomes stuck indefinitely in the pit and the final jump is too high for him. Likely a case of laziness, this design decision is fairly unimportant to the game. Sadholes suffers from unevenly spaced platforms, resulting in the player being forced to wait for the cowboy, who often jumps too high, to return to the ground. A well done little distraction, but there’s not much more to this one.

TimmyTimmyTimmy is a short form experimental platformer. In other words, it’s a game where you walk from one side of the screen to the other without anything notable happening. Still, it’s interesting to try to comprehend whatever obscure meaning it’s intended to have, and the art style is fairly unique. Three sentences are all that’s required to describe the entire experience:

“MONDAY” reads the game, with yellow text on a black screen. A formless white silhouette, controlled by the player, chases a black silhouette over a cliff made up of a patchwork of textures. “TUESDAY” says Timmy, and the game is over.

Saqrifize utilizes a unique gameplay mechanic, involving switching between two parallel planes that have a direct influence over each other. The two planes are viewed by either jumping or standing. Some obstacles will only appear in one plane rather than the other, so this creates some interesting challenges, although unfortunately the concept is explored very little. The graphics are again in Beef’s characteristic silhouette style. The story is vague, something about Hannibal Lecter and souls being stolen, but the real point of the game is its fascinating plane-switching mechanic.

Doom Mantra is a platform shooter entered into The Poppenkast’s No Words competition. Strange and compelling, the game utilizes its graphics as the sole means of communication with the player. A three colour scheme for the graphics ensures the clarity and precision of the art, so that a vague story is fairly easily understood even as you are bombarded with enemies.

Sad Torino Girly Harry is a collaboration between Beef and a fellow Poppenkast member, Cow. A cosmonaut’s adventure in an alien land, STGH does a great job of emulating the strangeness of an unknown planet via objects that act in ways that they aren’t expected to. Fire rotates your position on the screen rather than hurting you, eggs are teleporters, and leaving the first screen changes the cosmonaut into a pink man with a watering can. These inversions of traditional game values, as well as several others within the game, add to the general oddity of the experience. Extremely short, but a novel adventure into the mind of a lunatic.

Fuck Punishment is a tribute to Messhof‘s Punishment. Basically it’s just a two player version of Punishment, although with more of a focus on horizontal than vertical platforming. Fun for a couple of minutes, but it stops being interesting quickly as it can’t match Punishment and doesn’t introduce many original ideas of its own.

European Hand Love With Boy and its sequel were entered into increpare’s informal Love Letter contest a while back. The essential storyline is that the character’s hand has AIDS and must be saved so that he can masturbate once more. Elegant, minimalist graphics mixed with scrawled penises make for an interesting mix, and the music is really catchy and aurally interesting. The main issue with the game is that the player is forced to restart upon death, making for a limited desire to continue play until the ending.

IGF 2010 Student Showcase Winners

By: Derek Yu

On: January 18th, 2010

The winners of the IGF 2010 Student Showcase have been announced. These student games will be playable at the IGF pavilion at GDC this year, along with the rest of the IGF finalists, and will compete for the Best Student Game award. They were picked out of 190 student entries.

The winners are:

Student Showcase Winners:

• Boryokudan Rue (UCLA)
• Continuity (Chalmers University of Technology / University of Gothenburg)
• Devil’s Tuning Fork (DePaul University)
• Dreamside Maroon (DigiPen Institute Of Technology)
• Igneous (DigiPen Institute Of Technology)
• Paper Cakes (Utrecht School of the Arts & USC)
• Puddle (ENJMIN, France)
• Puzzle Bloom (DADIU, Denmark)
• Spectre (USC Interactive Media)
• Ulitsa Dimitrova (Kunsthochschule Kassel, Germany)

The judges are also recommending 10 honorable mentions:

Honorable Mention:

• ASCIIp0rtal (Utah State University)
• Conquest (Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg & University of Primorska)
• Endless Frog Kids (UC Berkeley)
• Gear (DigiPen Institute of Technology)
• Mi (Odessa National University)
• NormalTanks (Tyumen State Oil and Gas University)
• Runesinger (USC)
• Spinnr (Frostburg State University)
• Sultans Of Scratch (Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy)
• The Last Dance (IdEC UPF, Barcelona)

Congratulations to the winners!

FlashPunk

By: Derek Yu

On: January 10th, 2010

ChevyRay has created a new 2d Flash game library called FlashPunk (v0.73).

The library is released as an alternative to Adam Saltsman’s Flixel framework, which is also geared towards 2d, sprite-based Flash games. You can read a list of differences between the two libraries here, in ChevyRay’s announcement thread.

The video above depicts a game that ChevyRay is creating using his engine, called Fight! Mechanical Shooting Device. The graphics are by Pietepiet. Jumper creator and RunMan: Race Around the World co-creator Matt Thorson has also announced that Jumper 4 will be developed in FlashPunk.