61 Frames Per Second : indie dev moment

Indie Dev Moment: The Manipulator

Joe Keiser — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:00:00 GMT

The Manipulator is a smart, lo-fi platform puzzler. It also happens to be an honest-to-goodness murder simulator, like the ones you read about in the newspapers. Except it’s real.

It feels like it was smuggled under cover of night from behind the Iron Curtain, a bit of digital contraband out of a twenty-year time warp. It’s bleak--you are a Manipulator, a government agent of dubious morality tasked with infiltrating a rebel group (also of dubious morality). The graphics are strictly late 70s in design, but they’ve also been filtered so they look they’re being pumped through a decaying monochrome security monitor. It makes the whole game feel like something naughty, something you’re not supposed to be doing.

The gameplay feeds that “guilty secret” atmosphere by being entirely about the worst kind of crimes against humanity. As a Manipulator, you can only jump, climb ladders, and fire a harmless bullet. That bullet allows you to take over the mind of whoever gets in its way, which leads to all sorts of horrors. Take over a guard and you can pry into his mind for an access code, but you’ll also learn about his drug addiction and unhappy family life. You can use him to tranq his co-workers, or you can have him kill a friend as he takes a bullet for you. And when you’re done with him, you can make him a threat again by leaving his mind in peace. Or, you can kill him from the inside.

Every man you kill in this way is helpless to stop your slow, inhuman process. As you begin, a single exclamation of pain hovers on the screen. As your murder progresses, these screams fill the display, overlapping and flashing as your victim’s agony climaxes. When you’re done and the words disappear, the emptiness of your monitor lays bare your monstrous act.

The combination of abstraction and voyeurism at play here puts this atrocity right at the edge of your willingness to commit it. Although all you’re really doing is making some pixels disappear, the game has told you that these pixels have lives, that they can’t fight back, and that you could have saved them instead. You’ll probably kill them anyway, but that you were able to do so will eat at you. After the game ends, you’ll still wonder if you made the right choice, or you’ll know that you hadn’t and wonder why you did it anyway.

Related Links:

Indie Dev Moment: Blush
Indie Dev Moment: Dyson
Indie Dev Moment: Gravity Bone

The Curious Appeal of Effing Hail

Derrick Sanskrit — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Much like digital distribution on the current generation of consoles and handhelds has brought us charming, unique, and thrilling game experiences that would absolutely not survive in a retail environment, digital distribution of independant computer games allows us to become audience to gaming concepts that would likely never survive in committee. A majority of the most interesting games hitting the 'net these days are little more than proofs of concept, but of really freakin' neat concepts, and that makes all the difference. I would rather play a game in my web browser for five minutes and be left thinking about about it for hours than sink days into yet another epic console slugfest and have no idea what the point of it all is.

Case in point, I played Intuition Games' "Effing Hail" about twelve times this weekend.

"Effing Hail" is not a complex game. Presented as an isometric cross-section graphic similar to those seen in ecology text books (or the artwork to a certain rock album that helped some of us survive freshman orientation), the player controls wind gusts in order to hold the incoming hail stones in the atmosphere, accumulating greater moisture, mass, and volume, forming larger hail stones which are then flung into the unsuspecting people and constructs of the world in a vengeful God simulation.

There are only a few levels, and the only true challenge is beating the timer, but it's still a challenge and it's deceptively compelling. Still, having "beaten" the game within a half-hour of first playing it, why did I keep playing all weekend? Because I couldn't stop thinking about it! Destroying cities isn't new, we all aimed tornados at our power plants in SimCity. Controlling the wind isn't new, we've recently had console-based downloadable wind sims in LostWinds and Flower. Maybe it's the faux-scientific presentation, maybe it's the humorous and ironic nature of using Godly powers to control science and destroy humanity, or maybe it's the name "Effing Hail" and the end screen history book reporting on the record-setting hail storm of 2009.

Whatever the reason, I find "Effing Hail" a fascinating case study in everything I love about Flash games: a singular idea fleshed out just enough to prove it can be a fantastic game mechanic and then the game ends, move along to something else and tell your friends. Thank you, Intuition Games, and keep up the wild work. Click here to try out "Effing Hail."

Related articles:
The Hardcore Gothic Romance of Judith
Scarygirl is Out!
Indie Dev Moment: Jumpman

The Hardcore Gothic Romance of Judith

John Constantine — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

It was probably rash of me to accuse the new gaming romantics of pulling a beauty-for-beauty’s-sake routine. Jenova Chen, Jon Blow, and their contemporaries are the stars of the indie movement after all. Not everyone can get their game distributed on Xbox Live and Playstation Network. There are creators out there making romantic games that aren’t just pretty flowers and lost love. A perfect example is Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn’s The Path, a game that uses gorgeous color and freeform play to inform its frightening exploration of growing up.

Stephen Lavelle, aka increpare, and Terry Cavanagh of distractionware have also made their names on exploring the darker side of romanticism in games. Their latest collaboration, Judith, doesn’t fall within a classically romantic literary mode, but more to the side. Look past the game’s blocky Wolfenstein 3D-ish impressionism, and you’ll find that this ain’t romantic. It’s Gothic!

Stop rolling your eyes, I’m not talking about those kids in the black tights reading Twilight. I’m talking old school Daphne Du Maurier style business right here, a tale of forbidden love reflected in the secrets and murder of the past! Judith starts you off as a man meeting his mistress at a long abandoned castle, far from their mutual spouses. The game’s minimalist presentation is almost comical at first, but by the time you enter the castle, it’s too sinister to laugh at. After your lady love Emily disappears, the game shifts your perspective to that of the castle’s ancient resident Judith, a trophy wife who dreams of these adulterers and uncovers her husband’s dark side in the bowels of the castle. Cavanagh and Lavelle’s design sense, beyond the simplistic visuals, shares much of the tone in Chen and Blow’s most recent games. At its core, Judith is about the perils of infidelity, how secrets between lovers will ultimately destroy them. It isn’t subtle – Gothic media rarely is – but it’s impressively affecting for a game that’s barely twenty minutes long. Its most powerful moments come when it wrests control away from you; pick up an item, like a shovel to bury a dead body, and the game takes over. You’re in control of your decisions, but you can’t control their results.

Expect great things from these fellas. You can play Judith right here, fo’ free.

Related links:

Rite of Spring: Flower and What’s Lacking in the Romantic Games Movement
The Path is Real, Not A Fever Dream
Indie Dev Moment: i made this. you play this. we are enemies.
Breaking Out of Your Gaming Comfort Zone

Scarygirl is Out!

John Constantine — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Consider, for a moment, a world in which there were no consoles, no portable gaming devices, no games built specifically for the iPhone or your cell phone or your Trapper Keeper, no Steam, no games made specifically to harness a personal computer’s full power. Imagine a world where the only videogames in existence were Flash games. The genres would be familiar. You’d have platformers and shooters, puzzlers and adventures, sure. You’d never want for something new to play either. If you’ve opened a web browser in the past decade, you know as well as I do that there are thousands upon thousands of the blighters. And though there would be many things to play, there wouldn’t be much of it that was any good or artful.

In a world where all games were Flash games, Scarygirl would be a god.

In our world, Scarygirl is just exceptional. I stumbled upon Touch My Pixel’s videogame imagining of Nathan Jureviciu’s character last summer and fully expected it to be yet another promising unfinished project. Damn my cynical side! I am happy to be wrong though, since Scarygirl is now available to play right here.

It doesn’t run too well on my work computer, sadly, but it’s charming nonetheless. Great art, slick music, and a nice adventure platformer structure (think Tomba, not Super Metroid.) Check it out and marvel at what a Flash game can be.

Related links:

Donkey Kong II’s Revisionist History Rights Old Wrongs
Watcha Playing?: Spelunky
Indie Dev Moment: Blush
Indie Dev Moment: Jumpman
Indie Dev Moment: Dyson
Indie Dev Moment: Scarygirl

Donkey Kong II’s Revisionist History Rights Old Wrongs

John Constantine — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Am I the only person on the internet who didn’t know this existed? Jeff Kulczycki, proprietor of Jeff’s Romhack, made a full on sequel to Donkey Kong entitled Donkey Kong II: Jumpman Returns. The game has a little something for everybody. For the folks out there who just love the original Donkey Kong and don’t love Donkey Kong ’94, Jeff’s made four brand new levels for you to play. For the people who still consider Donkey Kong Jr’s vilification of Mario to be a grave injustice, here’s your chance to engage in soothing revisionist history. If you want to get try out Donkey Kong II, you can head over to the infamous Funspot Arcade in New Hampshire to try and earn a killscreen of your very own. If you actually happen to own a Donkey Kong cabinet, you can actually purchase a ROM upgrade and soup that baby up. If you’re merely curious, here’s a full playthrough.

Kulczycki’s original levels are well made, blending with the original four while providing pleasant upgrades. The orange-yellow color scheme is especially nice. Falling pies don’t strike me as the sort of thing you’d find a giant ape hurling off a construction site, but hey, fireballs aren’t typically sentient.

Hit up Jeff’s Romhack here.

(Link: NeoGAF)

Related links:

Licensing Tragedies: The Donkey Kong Country Cartoon
Alternate Soundtrack - Donkey Kong '94 vs. Les Savy Fav
No Alternate Soundtrack: Donkey Kong Jungle Beat
Fandom Unplugged: '80s Arcades and Hero Worship

Watcha Playing?: Spelunky

Cole Stryker — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 01:00:00 GMT

Eegra's Patrick Alexander, in a rant that I've already covered, mentioned that he really likes Spelunky a freeware adventure game that plays like a slightly and gratefully more robust La Mulana.

You play a whip-wielding adventurer in search of gold who has to avoid creepy crawlies and avoid Indiana Jones-esque deathtraps. Perhaps most interestingly, the game uses randomly generated level design, while somehow managing to retain challenge and fun. This is a common element of roguelike design, but not one that is often seen in platform games, considering how crucial level design is. But here, it works, and it makes it very replayable. The creator, Derek Yu, talks about his objectives:

My goal was to create a fast-paced platform game that had the kind of tension, re-playability, and variety of a roguelike. In roguelikes, the gameplay tells the story, and I wanted to give Spelunky that type of a feeling... but make the player rely on their reflexes rather than their brain (or knowledge of what 50 billion command keys do!). If there's a best of both worlds, that's what I was trying to go for.

It will download in a jiff, and it's definitely worth your time.

Download Spelunky here.

Related Links:

Whatcha Playing: Guadia Quest

Whatcha Playing: Far Cry 2

Whatcha Playing: Tales of Phantasia (PSX)

Indie Dev Moment: Blush

Joe Keiser — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:30:00 GMT

The lovable lunatics at Flashbang Studios have been catering to you dinosaur-loving kiddies for ages, what with their off-road velociraptor safaris and jetpack brontosauri. I didn’t care about those so much, possibly because I don’t have a soul. But I can’t ignore those guys any longer, because this week a game came out of the studio just for me.

It’s called Blush. It’s a psychedelic physics-based jellyfish simulator. It is primarily about tentacles, and the flinging about of said tentacles. That’s all I need, but I own every single underwater game that has ever been released*. Normal humans might need more explanation, but that’s fine because Blush really is rather lovely.

(You might also need a video. I’ve got that too.)

It’s also quite simple, on the surface of it. You’re a jellyfish, so you have these tentacles. They’re stingy, and by swinging them about you can kill yourself some sea life. They’re also sticky, so once you kill said sea life you can swing your tentacles about some more and collect all their delicious bits. Bring the bits back to your glowing caves and you better yourself as a jellyfish—longer tentacles, faster swim speeds, all of that.

Two things immediately complicate the collect-a-thon, however. The first is that you can lose tentacles in your fight for food, along with any stuck-on morsels that leg might have been carrying—you’ll have to go back to your cave to heal up. That wouldn’t be a problem, except for the second thing – you only have four minutes. This turns every second of wild flinging of the stingers into an extremely important tactical choice, should you desire to get all the achievements and become the uber-jelly.

You certainly don’t have to do that, though. It also works well as a relaxing, Fl0w-like experience, except the soundtrack is better and the controls are way more interesting. You can also play it ten times in a lunch break, and it’s free. So it’s a wonderful diversion, even more so if you can appreciate the fact that it only took eight weeks to build from start to finish. I do. There’s a lot I appreciate about Blush.

*: This doesn’t include the SpongeBob SquarePants games. There are limits.

Indie Dev Moment: Jumpman

Derrick Sanskrit — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Sometimes, 8 bits is just too much. When my friends were gawking at San Andreas, I whipped out my plug'n'play Atari 2600 for some Circus Atari. And it ROCKED.

So, of course, I love Jumpman, a freeware desktop game by Andrew McClure fashioned as a modern love letter to the 4 bit platformers of old. Yes, the name "Jumpman" is somewhat sacred amongst retro gamers as the original name of Mario, but trust me when I say Jumpman is flippin' sweet. Literally, the sweetness is flippin', as the major brain-bending game mechanic here is rotating the pixelated world around Jumpman to help him evade enemies and get to the exit. There's a certain slickness to the way Jumpman moves, a reduced friction not often found in such games, and though it takes some getting used to, it works wonderfully for allowing Jumpman to glide across platforms as the world rotates around him.

The other really neat bit about Jumpman's design is the ability to see the next stage or two in the background, a gentle tease of challenges to come, especially as some stages are designed explicitly to mess with your head when they're in the background. Just check out this trailer:

The challenge is high, but the learning curve is smooth and comfortable, and the game remembers which of the nine paths you were on last, so you can always pick up close to where you left off later on. You can also draw your own rooms if you want a custom challenge, and we both know you do.

Jumpman is a free download for Mac and Windows and even works in Linux under Wine (though it doesn't seem to work that well for me when I'm under wine. The colors blur and the motion just gets me queasy). Download it here right now.

Recently on Indie Dev Moment:
Dyson
Spelunky
Gravity Bone
i made this. you play this. we are enemies.

Indie Dev Moment: Dyson

Cole Stryker — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

There is a growing strain of game imagery. Not a genre, but a play style or an aesthetic. Soothing ambient music, minimalist design, simple play schemes with unintimidating adversaries, clear goals and pleasant locales. I put Flower, Flow, and Dyson in this category. Dyson is a new indie game, made in under a month for the TIGSource Procedural Generation Competition.

I'll let the developers explain it:

Dyson is an ambient real-time strategy game with abstract visuals. Remotely command semi-autonomous self-replicating mining machines to take over an entire asteroid belt.

You start off with a planet. The planet grows trees. The trees grow seeds, which are used to colonize other planets, grow more trees, and expand across the game's universe. It's a bit more complicated than that, but this is one of those zen-like games that's perfect for unwinding after work. It's minimialism is what makes it so enjoyable. Call it an apertif between Supreme Commander sessions

Download Dyson for free.

Indie Dev Moment: Gravity Bone

Indie Dev Moment: Hunted Forever

Fez May Finally Be More Than a Totally Sweet Demo

John Constantine — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

For awhile there back in 2007, it was looking like blending 2D and 3D in a single game was going to be a bonafide trend. Super Paper Mario was the highest profile experiment in dimensional puzzle solving, but it was Zoe Mode’s overlooked Crush that really demonstrated the lasting potential of the new genre. Shifting the levels between sidescrolling, overhead 2D, and full 3D made for some inspired level design and hair-pullingly difficult puzzles. When the Independent Games Festival rolled around at the beginning of 2008, it looked like the 2D-3D mash-up was finally going to have its masterpiece in Polytron’s Fez. Fez mixed the same sort environment manipulation from Crush with deliciously retro graphics and sound. It looked awesome. Then it disappeared. I was sad.

Gaming gods be praised! Fez re-emerged, like a glorious sleepy groundhog signalling an early spring of sunshine and raw joy! Polytron posted up a new screen on their homepage. As you can see, something wonderful is about to be happy and it sounds like that something wonderful is a release announcement. Not only that, but the conspicuous green A button in the message seems to indicate that Fez will be hitting Xbox Live Arcade. Nothing’s confirmed yet, but this is swell news.

I must have you and your delightful 2D-3D wares, Fez.

(Link: Infinite Lives)

Related links:

Indie Dev Moment: Gravity Bone
Indie Dev Moment: Hunted Forever
Indie Dev Moment: Virtual Silence and the Art of Discomfort
Indie Dev Moment: The Glory of Thunder Lizards, Speed, and Extinction

Derek Yu Loves/Hates You: Spelunky

John Constantine — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Written by Joe Bernardi

About a month and a half ago, the independent gaming community went ape over Spelunky, a game that elegantly combines the gallivanting of a platformer with the randomness and infuriating difficulty of a roguelike. It looks simple enough. A little Indiana Jones-looking guy wanders around an Indiana Jones-looking setting populated with a thousand different things that can kill him in a million different ways. Saves girl, steals priceless treasure, escapes deadly cave. It seems pretty boilerplate. Then you realize you’ve been playing it for six hours, swearing at the top of your lungs at the tiny, pixelated shopkeeper who just murdered you with a shotgun for trying to steal a pair of climbing gloves from his store.

The gloves, shopkeeper, shotgun and swearing are all brainchildren of Derek Yu, Spelunky’s creator. As an artist, game designer, and all-around independent game evangelist, Yu’s gained a sort of renaissance man status rarely seen in gaming. His forays into Metroidvania games put his design sense on the map, culminating in 2007’s Aquaria, a game so awesome that it featured an optionally decipherable foreign language that existed for pure atmosphere.

By parlaying his love of atmosphere and exploration into a randomized, roguelike-style adventure, Yu has created a monster. The indie scene, it could be argued, hasn’t been this unified in praise since Cave Story. Implementing user suggestions in tweaks to the game has certainly fueled the fandom-fire, but it wasn’t until a level editor was quietly included in downloads of Spelunky, that people started to really freak out about it. A list of user-made levels quickly popped up in Spelunky’s wiki, featuring difficult and clever scenarios of derring-do.

I hope Yu’s happy. The combination of a robust level editor and a random level generator has spawned a game with near-infinite replay value. If he’d be so kind as to throw in some bloated peripherals and stealth sequences, it’s possible the world would never play anything else.

Related links:

Aquaria Is Cheap. Buy It, You Bums.
Indie Dev Moment: i made this. you play this. we are enemies.
Indie Dev Moment: Gravity Bone
Indie Dev Moment: Virtual Silence and the Art of Discomfort
Life of D. Duck: Freeware on Acid

Indie Dev Moment: Gravity Bone

Joe Keiser — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

It’s not often that a completely indie game can be recommended without any sort of reservation whatsoever—how often do you hear a sentence in an indie game write-up start “yeah, it’s ugly, but” or “sure, it’s so pretentious I want to lobotomize its creator, but…”? So yes, we’re dealing with something special here in Gravity Bone.

First of all, just look at it. The whole thing glistens with a fully realized, lovely art style that is 100% appropriate for its lighthearted espionage theme. It’s beautiful, charming, and a great reminder as to why the Quake 2 engine, in which Gravity Bone is built, dominated the PC gaming landscape for so very long: because in the right hands, it can still hold up today.

The sound is just as lovely, and the gameplay itself is filled with wonderful little moments that can be hilarious, thoughtful or frightening but are always successful. And yes, it even has arthouse aspirations, with something to say about the artifice inherent in the language of gaming. You can embrace such intentions or not, but speaking as someone who is instantly repulsed by academic posturing you can rest assured there’s nothing to be put off by here.

To say more would ruin it when you could just play it—for free, during your lunch break, with a computer from 1997.

Gravity Bone was made by one Brendon Chung, who has been creating strong single-player mods for years now (go to his site and check out even his oldest works—even his stuff in the Doom engine is surprisingly well put together). Watch this guy carefully, because he’s indie gaming’s next big thing.

Related Links:

Indie Dev Moment: Scarygirl
Indie Dev Moment: Hunted Forever
Indie Dev Moment: i made this. you play this. we are enemies.

Aquaria Is Cheap. Buy It, You Bums.

Bob Mackey — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 23:00:00 GMT

I'll admit that I used to have a few gaming prejudices that now fill me with a deep shame. For instance, until I bit the bullet and plunked down fifteen bucks for Jonathan Blow's Braid, paying more than ten bones for any game available exclusively as a digital download felt wrong somehow. This is exactly why I missed out on Bit Blot's underwater adventure, Aquaria, back when it was released late last year; I'd played and loved the demo, but the full game's price of thirty dollars was just a little too rich for my blood. The sad thing is, I probably would have forgotten about Aquaria forever if the game hadn't just come out on Steam for the low, low price of sixteen dollars. Now I can make amends for my former transgressions by purchasing my own copy, and getting all of you loyal 61FPS readers to grab one as well. Here's the game's trailer, if you need some convincing:

Unfortunately, the sale on Aquaria only lasts until the end of 2008, so you'd better scrape together some spare change while you can. Protip: you know those dudes in the Santa suits, ringing bells on street corners? They're literally rolling in quarters.

Related Links:

Now At Your Local Dollar Store: Half-Life
Google to Buy Valve?
GOG is Great

A Treasure Trove of Free Japanese Goodies

Joe Keiser — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 23:00:00 GMT

It’s not often that you stumble across a find like this. Last week, while no one was looking, a fan translation group called insani held a festival titled al|together 2008. During this festival, they released no less than six fully translated, 100% free Japanese games, hand-picked from the best of the Eastern indie scene. And hoo man, some of these things are good.

I hesitate to call them “visual novels” because I know that people read that and think Anna Karenina but with giant anime eyes and clicking instead of page turning. These games are not like that (okay, there are giant anime eyes. Whatever.). The first one, From the Bottom of the Heart, is five minutes of perfect localization. The second game, Crimsoness, is three minutes of pure, delicious crazy, fairly interactive and worth playing multiple times. I can’t even describe it, you really just have to give it a go.

I’ve not even gotten to what insani calls “the crown jewel” of the festival, Moonshine. I’ve been way too immersed in all the other goodness that’s on offer. And if half a dozen games isn’t enough, the website also peers deep into the process, with notes on the original Japanese game creator, the translator that took on the project, the extensive peer review each game had to undergo. It’s all just so…passionate.

Even if you only have a few minutes, you owe it to yourself to at least check out Crimsoness—and Crimsoness is the only one that’s not compatible with Windows and Mac, so even all us Apple people can get involved. This is a labor of love here, people. And the results, they’re surprisingly grand. Go. Go now.

Indie Dev Moment: i made this. you play this. we are enemies.

John Constantine — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Jason Nelson may not be Jon Blow, but I’ve got to hand it to the man: this is a fun little platformer. i made this. you play this. we are enemies. is, in the words of its creator, “an artwork/game/digital poem/world of scribbles and ideas from back of my brain, way-way back in a storage room for contextual whims.” What it is, in practice, is a collage-based platformer built on surreal deconstructions of well trafficked web magazines, blogs, and search engine portals. imt.ypt. wae. (go ahead and steal that name, dance punk band of fifteen year-olds!) scratches a couple of my recent itches, namely forays into surrealist game design and games that hook you by making you uncomfortable (in this case through scattered imagery and discordant sound.) Is it one of the greatest achievements of mankind? Certainly not. Is it an artistic success? Not really. Its real failing is that Nelson tells you to “stop trying to ‘get it’” twice on the starting screen. Have some confidence in your creation and your audience, man!

Check it out right here.

(Link: NeoGAF)

Previously on Indie Dev Moment:

Scarygirl
Eegra Shindig Ends, No One Got Laid, Awesome Games Got Made
Virtual Silence and the Art of Discomfort
The Glory of Thunder Lizards, Speed, and Extinction
A Game a Month From Kloonigames

Indie Dev Moment: Virtual Silence and the Art of Discomfort

John Constantine — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Videogames, for however much challenge they provide, are never particularly interested in making their audience uncomfortable. Frustration is one thing, but they are almost always meant to give pleasure, any anxiety caused through failure in the game used for creating a more satisfying, euphoric success. Rare as it may be, I find discomfort a fascinating platform for play. It strips away entertainment’s first goal, to please you, and makes you re-examine why you’re engaging the work at all. It’s a central component in horror games, but almost all horror games still work on the success/reward model; eventually, when you win the game, you’ll be safe. More interesting are games like Procedural Arts’ Façade, the entirety of which is concerned with the awkward, third-wheel experience of being the sole witness to a relationship ending. Façade is quiet, the dialogue and movements of its doomed lovers Grace and Travis stilted and terse, and while the interactive drama isn’t always human, it does give a convincing impression of just how horrible it is when two people fall out of love.

Erika and Tuuka Virtanen’s Virtual Silence, released this past September, also plumbs into sorrowful human experience with its foundation of trying to coax an autistic child to speak again. But it goes one step further by making the audio/visual presentation as discomfiting as its premise. To go into too many specifics would ruin Virtual Silence’s brief experience, but outwardly the game is a simple maze/puzzle game built around color manipulation. The tinkling chiptune soundtrack is dissonant and broken sounding, the stark maze levels literally quake at the seams, black and white giving way to flashes of the primary colors that act as the basis for puzzles that stand between you and your goal. Controlling the nameless autistic child (the only character we actually see, as his mother and doctor are just bodiless voices,) through his virtual reality therapy is even awkward, smooth when moving in right angles but clumsy when quick precision is called for. While there’s no game-halting failure – “dying” in one of the game’s three stages sets you back to the beginning of the room, not the beginning of a stage or the whole game – it’s possible to actually lose even after completing the game. By challenging your emotional state more than your logic and reflex skills, Virtual Silence transcends its classicly-styled, minimalist play and becomes something far more. It becomes moving.

You can download Virtual Silence for free at Virtanen’s homepage right here.

(Link: Action Button via Murder By Baltimore)

Previously on Indie Dev Moment:

Scarygirl
Eegra Shindig Ends, No One Got Laid, Awesome Games Got Made
The Glory of Thunder Lizards, Speed, and Extinction
A Game a Month From Kloonigames

Life of D. Duck: Freeware on Acid

Bob Mackey — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This post is going to require a little background info, so let me get that out of the way first. Bjørnar B. is an Internet-meme type thing that started in the early 00s; he's a fictional Norwegian teen who creates childish-yet-nightmarish drawings of Donald Duck and his family with bizarre, barely-English captions. Don't feel too out of the loop if you don't know about him; Bjørnar B. is pretty obscure unless you've been reading Something Awful (who originally hosted his site) for a long time.

That being said, if you enjoy Bjørnar's very specific and strange sense of humor, you may also enjoy his series of point-and-click adventures games that are best described as a fever dream version of Duckburg. The sequel to the original Life of D. Duck just came out, and Bjørnar was nice enough to provide the world with a trailer:

And if you're still confused and bewildered, perhaps Bjørnar's own breakdown of the story might help?

Help D. Duck in his quest to get Dasy to marry him. D Duck must get rid of Uncle Jubalon who is eating him out of his house, also ooie lui and devie escapes and D. Duck must save them.

The game is HERE. You will download it.

Related Links

Yahtzee Says, Support Your Local Independent Developer (He's Right).
Indie Dev Moment: Eegra Shindig Ends, No One Got Laid, Awesome Games Got Made
Indie Dev Moment: The Glory of Thunder Lizards, Speed, and Extinction

Indie Dev Moment: The Glory of Thunder Lizards, Speed, and Extinction

John Constantine — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

It is rare to turn on a game and be playing within seconds of its activation. Even seemingly simple games, such as Wii Sports, place hurdles between the player and action. You must press start, then select what you wish to play, then select the number of players, your skill level, and a brief loading screen that explains how to play the game or even, in Wii Sports’ case, a screen that tells you to turn off the game and take a break. The barrier is even larger in games built on a narrative foundation, where drama and exposition need to be established alongside play. (More often than not, the two are entirely separate. Even games that meld play, tutorial, and exposition in their initial moments, like Bioshock, wrest away much of your agency to allow their inciting incident to take root.) This didn’t used to be the case. Time was, all that stood between the player and the game was two buttons: power and start. It’s easy to forget how this immediacy can elicit a profound visceral and emotional reaction from the player simultaneously.

PixelJAM Games’ Rich Grilloti, Miles Tilmann, and Mark DeNardo are in the business of making games that outwardly look like little more than simplistic retro pandering, but are, in execution, remarkable examples of immersion through immediacy. Their most recent game, Dino Run, has you running from extinction seconds after you pressing start, giving you only a momentary window to process that you must run to the right and avoid everything in your way. The bright color of the tiny dinosaur you control and his pixilated surroundings are comfortingly familiar, but the game is given urgency through music, shifts in color, and distinct visual cues. It plays on extreme emotion and reflex perfectly. The game itself is exclusively concerned with momentum; you run or you die, jumping and ducking included as mechanics not to emphasize platforming but to facilitate speed. It is an essential display of videogames’ power to engage their audience in a way no other medium can.

Many thanks to Christopher of GameSpite for pointing Dino Run out to us. Check out PixelJAM’s other games here, and be sure to also try Ratmaze which is almost as insanely gripping as Dino Run.

Previously on Indie Dev Moment:

Scarygirl
Eegra Shindig
A Game a Month From Kloonigames

Indie Dev Moment: A Game a Month From Kloonigames

John Constantine — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:00:00 GMT

I sometimes worry that even though I talk a big game about championing videogames as a creative medium, I’m full of crap. Nine times out ten, if I’m playing a game, it’s some blockbuster title or the twentieth entry in a franchise that’s been milked for more than a decade. If a game with the word Castlevania in its name is on the shelf next to, say, Rhythm Tengoku, I’m going to buy Castlevania. I’m that guy. I am part of the problem. Thankfully, there are people out there spreading the word on independent gaming’s greatest achievements.

I am indebted to Infinite Lives for spreading the word on Petri Purho. Petri has created a brand new videogame every month for the past two years, hosting them all on his blog Kloonigames. This is a remarkable feat in and of itself but many of these games are a hoot, visually rich, occasionally unsettling, and all of them smart.

Celebrate the man’s achievement by indulging in a little Humpsters (pictured) or perhaps a little Choke on my Groundhog, YOU BASTARD ROBOTS.

More Indie Dev Moment:

Scarygirl
Eegra Shindig Ends, No One Got Laid, Awesome Games Got Made

Related links:

Make the Music With Your Games, Kids!
Fun Fact: Metroid Meets Metronome

Indie Dev Moment: Eegra Shindig Ends, No One Got Laid, Awesome Games Got Made

John Constantine — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Way back in April of aught-eight, our favorite internet savages at Eegra got it in their heads to host an indie games competition. Known worldwide as the First Annual Game Makin’ Shindig, they called for strapping minds to create games based around the central theme of “colour” (the u comes from some kind of Australian brain disease I’m not familiar with.) Now, as July comes to a close, the Shindig has come to a close and, while no one involved apparently got laid, nine games have been created, all of them damn interesting. The top prize winners ColourWise, Colourblind (tied for third), the Eegra-ly titled Spectrum Spelunker: Shoot Blocks to Win the Game, Also Jump and Run: Starring Hue, and top-dog Go Beryllium are all deserving champions, excellent games made even more excellent by their abundant freeness.

Second Place: Spectrum Spelunker

First Place: Go Beryllium

Make sure to check out the runners-up, particularly Space Safari and Tinte if for no other reason than they look awesome.

61 Frames Per Second salutes our brethren across the Pacific for promoting independent games creation.

Sidenote: The Ten Orangest Game Characters of All Time, eh? We know when we’re being laughed at!

Sidenote Two: The only runners-up I actually played were Space Safari and Tinte. Mostly because they looked awesome.

Related links:

Webcomic Watch: Eegra
Indie Dev Moment: Scarygirl

Indie Dev Moment: Scarygirl

John Constantine — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Indie Dev Moment spotlights games, creators, and trends in the independent development community.

I’ve theorized in the past that some ninety-nine percent of the internet is comprised of lists. People like reading and watching things sequentially, preferably in numerical order. After rigorous testing, I’ve determined that the theory is flawed. Only about eighty-five percent of the internet is lists. The rest is flash games. Hell, you can’t spit without hitting a flash platformer (which is impressive considering they’re intangible.) Even PETA has a flash platformer! Given their ubiquity, it’s no surprise that they’re usually crap.

Touch My Pixel’s Scarygirl, based on artist Nathan Jurevicius' character of the same name, does not look like crap. Indeed, it looks spectacular, sporting the same sort of snappy post-Hannah Barbera motifs you find in a Gendy Tartakovsky cartoon. The titular scary girl’s got a cool pirate (not lame internet pirate) thing going on to boot and it looks she can platform and collect goodies with the genre’s best. Can’t wait to try it out.

Our thanks to Abbatoir Noises 2 for pointing Scarygirl out to us as well as for the kind words they offered yours truly.