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Reminds me of one of my favorite freeware games, Seiklus.

What do you need to fund a game? Food stamps and enough scratch to pay the electricity bill.

Programming a game can be a labor of love. It can be an artistic expression that doesn't require millions of dollars, prima dona rockstar programmers, glossy ads in gaming magazines (if you can find one these days), and gouging your customers.

We've lost this ethic in computer games. The indies are doing great work, but complaining that you can't charge $60 for their game is lunacy. The primary justification that large game companies and publishers use for charging that much is that they have a large number of people working on their game, they have the cost of packaging and physical media, and they have the overhead of the retail shelf.

Costs which online-distributed indie games do not have. People see this and refuse to pay (what they perceive as) an inflated price. However, if we value the games by the innovation, fun, and experience they provide instead of their actual real cost, I'm sure indie games would come out on top.

Sorry to post so late, I can't believe I didn't think of this before.

You'll find some excellent freeware games over at http://www.reloaded.org/ and http://www.freehare.com./

A couple of gems to get you started: http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html and http://autofish.net/clysm/art/video_games/seiklus/

The haunting music in the first level of "Johnny's Odyssey", the silhouettes of your dead bodies in "Johnny's Nightmare", and the deaded piano room in Seiklus, they all simply drip with art.

It is a great little adventure game I played when I was a kid that helped me learn programming concepts. You can design your own levels and program little objects to do whatever you say. It was kinda like programmable Rogue. You could use the ZZT programming language to make the little objects do all kinds of neat stuff, very fun to play too. See it here

Tim Sweeney will, in my mind, forever be linked to the wonderful ZZT. This interview, given some time before Unreal 2 is an interesting contrast to the one posted above. In particular, he talks about ease-of-creation:

Hercules: You moved onto to other, bigger projects long ago. It must be good to know that the first thing you ever created is still used/played a lot. Does ZZT still cross your mind, sometimes?

Tim Sweeney: Yes, one of the interesting things to do is contrast ZZT and Unreal, and look at how incredibly far we've come in graphics quality in that time. But also to see how little the industry has progressed -- or maybe even gone backwards in some respects... So, how will game development be 10 years from now? If levels take six months to build, and compiles take 5 hours each, and it costs $20 million to develop a game, then developing games won't be fun or even possible anymore.

I'm a fan of creation tools that are accessible to anyone who can play the game. (Casual players who may not be technically inclined.) As a developer, I'm hoping that we will be among the first to offer something that lets even the most casual user plink around. As a player, I'm hoping that Sweeney has retained this philosophy, and that future Epic offerings let us build -- at least a little bit -- with the same ease that ZZT did.