i had the chance to play some new independent games today at an event called 'indiecade'.
the event showcased about half a dozen of the finalists in the 2009 indiecade awards.
shadow physics
this was a game all about shadows and perspective. you used a mouse to move a first-person camera around a small white room, while moving with the directional pad on the PC keyboard. seperate from your camera viewpoint, you can control a little shadow/ghost man that is projected from the solid shapes.
you take turns as the camera and as the man, so once you get into a good position to see where you are in relation to the star (the goal), you can stop and start using the same directional pad to move the shadows around, so the little man can jump onto other shadow platforms.
sounds remarkably similar to this game...... (which looks remarkably similar to ico & shadow of the colossus ((which looks remarkably similar to this painting by de chirico))
lost in shadow is being published for the wii, by hudson. did they just rip off shadow physics.. or, the other way round? coincidence perhaps?
anyway, from what i played it was alright. really original idea, but it failed to inspire me or really interest me. maybe being original isn't always a guarantee of an interesting or fun game.
moon stories
moon stories.. hmm. on the description (they had written text next, explaining the concept and controls on each booth) it says that this is a trilogy, so they only had one of the three games at indiecade. the one i played was not the one pictured, but i imagine they're mechanically similar.
the one i played was basically a single screen, with low-res animated pixel art, looping a scene of a bird flying across the night sky. in the background was a large moon and some stars, with some bushes/trees in the horizon. the controls were very simple; you were just a cursor, and by left-clicking on the mouse, you could take snapshot (represented by a photo) of any part of the scene, and put it somewhere else, and it would continue to animate from where you stopped it.
the blurb spent most of the sheet of A4 talking about how it was a 'poetic, emotional journey', but it was very esoteric and hard to see what the point of it was; what it was trying to say. it was hard to concentrate as well, in a cramped tent atmosphere, smelling of gamers, popcorn and coffee. i had to hurt my neck to look at some of the stuff.
i suppose it was sort of a visual narrative.. where you could literally change the story (of the bird and its journey), but i might have to play some more of it to understand it further. this was basically interactive art though, borrowing the language of games for the exact same purpose of art. most people kind of ignored this one, or gave up a few seconds after touching some buttons.
klassik night
[yeah, sorry, i can't link a picture because gamespot still hasn't f***ing fixed their 'forbidden words' problem]
this one was a bit more 'gamey'. you controlled a ghoul-like figure with stick arms and fork hands, who moved in a 'scary' way across a sort of tim burton-esque landscape. you had to 'collect' (although it was more like absorbing) moonlight from little plants. you keep on walking, seemingly, in cirlces which was cool as when you walk on the ceilings, the screen adjusts to make it look like the floor.
the blurb said it was supposed to be 'medititive and calming', but there was a big dog chasing me and mauling me every 15 seconds. i'm not sure what the point of the game was, but it wasn't very medititive, or fun.
the game conference
this one was probably my favourite. i can't seem to find much info on it though. if anyone can find a link to the actual game, or some gameplay screenshots, be sure to tell me.
okay, so this was a game about a character (you) who is trying to become a game designer and has to go to 'the game conference' to ask famous designers for a job, and show them your amazing, original ideas.
it's kind of a satire about the difficulty of getting a job in the games industry and how simple it at first seems, but how complicated the reality is. it achieves this by using the structure and basic of mechanics of rogue, one of the earliest, if not the earliest, digital dungeon crawlers (off-topic, doesn't pikmin remind you of rogue, at a basic level?).
so you're in this abstract 'dungeon' of a conference where you meet up with various people. there are the developers ('D' symbols on the map), the recruiters ('R' symbols), shops where you buy items like health and bait ('O'), and the evil fanboys ('F') who attempt to distract your efforts by talking about games.
play is absurd, and fun. you just walk into the developers and gain '+10 ideas', and then find another one and walk into them again, gaining '+10 ideas'. of course, it doesn't seem to have much effect.. but that's the point. it expresses frustration at gaining useless information that just sends you in circles.
the recruiters give you '+10 score', which doesn't seem to do anything either. the only enemies seem to be the fanboys, and you do have an energy bar that is depleted by running around the conference (you can buy refreshing water at the store).
i loved the presentation of it all, and the humour. it even plays on memories of badly translated NES games to communicate the stupidity and sillyness of it all.
it was worth hurting my neck for. :/ probably.
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there were some other games, but i can't find images of them. the path was there, and there was a sort of converted pac-man sidescroller type game, loosely inspired by alice in wonderland as well. you played a confused dot person (imagine graphics like braid, but less lavish) wandering through a etheral network of tunnels. you collected, or consumed pills, and the more you ate it filled a bar at the top, but i'm not sure what that did. i think if you took enough pills, a demon starts chasing you (kind of like the ghosts in pac-man), and the whole screen turns darker and moodier and you have to find an exit. it was alright.. not very subtle though.
my overall impressions were that it was basically saying "GAMES ARE ART!!" very loudly. there were some more conventional games, but i wasn't really interested in them much. i think there was some genuine talent on display, but some of the games were just plain boring (and not interesting), or relying too much on parody.
anyway, just some thoughts. ;-)