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Then downgrade your graphics to Doom caliber if the machine can't handle thousands of guys, like Indie Game Jam 0 did.

Interestingly enough, 3D video cards are good at rendering very busy 2D scenes. Imagine 100,000 sprites on the screen. Imagine a normal-mapped sprite that reacts to lighting the way a 3D model might.

Sounds a lot like "Supermodel Shootout" from Indie Game Jam 2. Exactly like it, in fact.

http://www.indiegamejam.com/ seems to be down at the moment, but there's an article at http://mag.awn.com/index.php?ltype=Special+Feature s&article_no=1745&page=3.

Dead on about the sprites.

The flipside of that was that sprite games didn't have to clear away the corpses to make room for more bad guys, so you could leave bodies like a trail of breadcrumbs to remember where you've been.

A surprising # of FPSes still follow an NES-like "blink blink blink, bye bye body".

The first indie game jam took this idea to an extreme...they realized a modern machine could churn out 100,000 sprites without busting a sweat, and then gave some developers 4 days to see what they could do with that much muchness.

Okay, I'll admit that the follow-on "problem" has always existed. When a truly innovative game became a huge commercial success, people copied and remixed ruthlessly. Some of the follow-ons could even be described as innovative in their own right: the creators took the genre in a slightly different direction, or simply added the sort of polish that turned the game into an outstanding example of what the genre could be.

But the fact that the problem has always existed, and has given rise to some creativity in its own right, doesn't mean that there isn't a downside. Every time a publisher decides, "Our most promising route to commercial success is a quick Starcraft knockoff," it takes the time and energy that could otherwise have gone into exploring a more innovative idea.

You're missing the point, as evidenced by your Holodeck reference. When people complain about the lack of creativity in games, it's usually the case that "more realistic graphics" is the last thing on their list. Katamari Damacy is often listed as one of the really innovative games, despite having among the most primitive graphics I've ever seen on the PS2. For other examples, check out the Indy Gaming Jam, a small event held each year where a group of developers come together and churn out a bunch of games over the course of a few days.

Each year has a different technology focus. For example, the first one focused on sprites in gameplay, and led to a series of games where the player controls thousands upon thousands of units. The most recent Jam, subtitled, "Physics must be good for something besides ragdolls and exploding crates!" led to one game where your goal was to help a yoga master maintain increasingly difficult positions.

None of these games is intended to be a runaway blockbuster. But it's a good indication of just how tiny a fraction of potential gaming ideas actually get commercial attention.

FTA:

"but in gaming, we have no indie aesthetic, no group of people (of any size at least) who prize independent vision and creativity over production values."

Umm, yeah we do.

I think there is a lot more than this author admits to. Why do you think there exists open source 3D engines like Ogre3D as well as a ton of websites devoted to game design techniques , etc? Yes, the indie scene could be bigger, but it is by no means non-existant.

Sorry, I fscked the links as mailto, thanks to Firefox BBCode extension and me being stupid. So: site, game zip.

Sorry, I fscked the links as mailto, thanks to Firefox BBCode extension and me being stupid. So: site, game zip.

If I designed this über-cool monster with this and those textures, triangle counts and what not, it would have very little reuse if there suddenly was a new engine which could do twice the pixels

Then there'd be twice the monsters! A new engine that can push more polygons transforms a shooter model into a sim model.

A friend of mine and I, at the first Indie Game Jam (IGJ0), wrote a game in a couple of days called "Wrath".

It was bascially a two-player RTS-ish game where you had various tools that you could use to manipulate the 100,000 humans running around the board. One player played God, the other Satan. You could place attractors or repulsors, you could raise/lower terrain, you could convert them to your side (save vs damn), and you can kill them. The object is to basically convert-and-kill. Whoever ends up with more souls in their domain when the time runs out wins.

The IGJ0 page is here.
You can see a screenshot of the game in action here.

Independent studios want to create wonderful, experimental titles, but are, in part, held back by business requirements. As businesses, our first priority is to become profitable, and the least-risky way to do this is to create more traditional offerings. (The same is true for large development houses.) Fortunately for us, better middleware tools and increased publicity can free us of this constraint. The former will allow us to experiment and develop easier; the latter will allow us to reach an audience now reserved for the large publishers. As these conditions improve, you'll see independents take more risks.

Middleware comprises the audio libraries, AI plugins, and 3D engines such as Torque, Conitec A6, and FMOD. These tidbits are the lifeblood of independents. Without them, we'd have to code everything from scratch, and you'd see even more Tetris clones than you do now -- little innovation. With them, we're freed from the low-level stuff. We can create games that look and sound good enough to attract consumers. As middleware improves, it'll become even easier to experiment and innovate.

Publicity is trickier -- while events such as the Independent Games Festival allow us to bend the ears of larger publications, it's still the big studios that are going to command the previews and exclusives. Having approached a number of print publications, I've found that it can be difficult to secure a sizable preview for our game, even though I think folks might like to hear about where we're innovating. But even this is improving; sites like The Adrenaline Vault are particularly indie-friendly, often posting press releases from smaller development studios.

I think, then, that it's only a matter of time before the smaller studios attempt experimental titles in substantial numbers. Many will be terrible; some will be great fun. But as it becomes easier to experiment, you bet we'll be doing more of it, simply because we can.

Sleep wit' da Fishes!
Nebulae Drawing Tool
Stunt Hamsters
Deadly Dance of the Robots
Robot Circus (sort of)
BootLooter

Some of the downloads are huge because of large music files (even after downsampling) and image files. We'll try to institute a system next year that allows things like replacing WAVs with MP3s without needing to touch the source code, so we can shrink the downloads more effectively after the event.

The Official Website for the event

The article is building up hype for the event starting on March 18 through March 21, 2004.

According to here... these guys are using SourceForge for hosting the games.

Downloading the games now, but I think these are windows only.

The Official Website for the event

The article is building up hype for the event starting on March 18 through March 21, 2004.

According to here... these guys are using SourceForge for hosting the games.

Downloading the games now, but I think these are windows only.

Best of all, you can download the Indie Game Jam games:
http://www.indiegamejam.com/igj2/games.html

Cheap techology is great -- make digital cameras inexpensive, offer an SDK to grab their output, and folks will come up with wonderful ideas for how to abuse them. Devices like EyeToy are mostly just oddities now, but I'd like to see them used to popularize gestural interfaces.

Arkane Studios' RPG, Arx Fatalis is one of a handful of titles that offers gestural input, with its mouse-gesture-based spells. But this was more a novelty than a boon for usability -- it would have been easier to cast a spell by clicking icons. Perhaps a sequel will allow you to embellish your runes with serifs to achieve subtle variations on an incantation?

Avant Browser offers up a more useful gestural interface -- and I like it because it allows me to execute common tasks more easily. Rather than having to hit a smallish "new window" icon, I can rudely right-click anywhere on a window and sloppily drag my mouse upwards to open a new window.

EyeToy takes this a step further and does away with the mouse altogether; and though I had modest luck with the thing when I played against the noisy backdrop at Toys "R" Us, here's hoping that it's the first among many such interfaces. Perhaps five years down the road, a) gestures will be common, b) we'll laugh at what Minority Report got wrong, and c) we'll thank goofy gadgets like this one for paving the way.

After all, it was pretty silly to have a "Rat" for the Atari 800.
________________________________________________
The Inago Rage website is now up.
Critiques welcome and appreciated!

I'm hoping that Electronic Arts's transition from boutique software house to publishing juggernaut leaves room for -- well -- other boutique software houses. Many here must recall the early days of EA. They published titles that their small teams were passionate about; and while I've enjoyed many of EA's recent, grander offerings, they appeal to me in a much different way.

For the time being, the advent of a middleware industry is making it easier -- not harder -- for smaller studios to produce good-looking titles with depth. Consider that there are many audio libraries, 3D engines, and AI middleware libraries which are quite reasonably priced. Smaller studios seem to go strange and wonderful directions with these; (if you haven't already, try some of the Indie Game Jam titles, which make use of a simple, standardized physics engine).

I labor under the impression that the gaming public has a desire for boutique products; if I'm wrong, I don't mind taking my licks and moving to something more productive.

"If Microsoft can woo more developers to Xbox, the balance of power in the next round could change."

I'm blatantly biased here, but I'd be thrilled if Microsoft were to make overtures to the independent game developer community. Some noises were made along those lines in November, 2000, but they didn't follow up tangibly. As an independent developer, I don't feel drawn towards Xbox development the way I did, Pocket PC development. In that arena, MS gave the development tools away for free, (something I always felt Palm should have done to keep Pocket PC from gaining market share from 2001 onward).

Xbox development is said to be technically similar to Windows desktop development, so from a development standpoint, I imagine that authors of 95/2K/XP software would feel comfortable developing for the console. Further, 3d engines such as Torque and Conitec's 3DGS make it possible for modest-sized groups to develop popular titles. But both the developers of such engines, and the developers of games, face restrictions imposed by the console manufacturer(s). Conitec's Doug Poston states his case -- the manufacturers make the cost-of-entry too high for smaller studios.

Does the manufacturer-imposed barrier-to-entry for console development raise the quality of games, or does it mean fewer interesting titles and less experimentation? (I suppose the businessman-side of me would be thrilled if larger studios abandoned the desktop PC, leaving the market open. But somehow, I think that'd be a phyrric victory for all of us.)

This is the absolute truth. Check out the home page to read about IndieJam0 (massive sprite counts) and IndieJam1 (shadow interface).

Check out the Indie Game Jam for some truly unique game concepts.

At the IGDA awards, three games were given "Game Innovation Spotlights": the EyeToy, Viewtiful Joe, and WarioWare Inc. All three of these seem quite novel and worthy of the attention.

At the Experimental Gameplay Workshop, both indies and mainstream games were shown. On the indie front, this year's Indie Game Jam games (full disclosure: I co-run this event); Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates; and Zoesis' The Demon and the Princess. On the commercial front, the creator of Namco's Katamari Damashii spoke about and demoed the game ("Was it difficult to convince Namco to let you do this game?" "Of course." was even funnier with the long pause for translation between question and answer); we had presentations about WarioWare and about the explorations of time as a game mechanic (specifically in Prince of Persia, Max Payne 1 & 2, and Viewtiful Joe).

(There were a few more presentations about more academic "games": Ken Perlin's work on natural-language-programming for kids, "Haptic Battle Pong", and I forget what else, as I was developing a fever during the 3-hour EGW.)

The winner of the Indie Games Festival's web downloadable grand prize, Oasis, is a fairly original and creative game (full disclosure: I did contract work for Oasis' developers on a different project), and since this is announced at essentially the same ceremony as the IGDA awards it has a fairly significant cachet.

So I think the Reuters reporters just didn't go to the right events at the GDC.

The story itself has plenty of debatable claims. Are gamers, as the article claims, getting more conservative, or are publishers just getting extremely conservative and releasing more sequels and focusing their marketing dollars there? Hint: nobody debates the truth of the latter.

at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose last year. A groupd of guys threw an Indie Game Jam and most of the games were of this type. Interesting stuff.

For a perfect example and a damn fine tense mini-game check out Dueling Machine by Thatcher Ulrich (last game at the bottom of the page). You may need some Wads. This was created at the 0th Indie Game Jam. From the site:

Dueling Machine
Thatcher Ulrich
Guy variants by Justin Hall

Based on a book by Ben Bova. The game looks like a first-person shooter, but with a twist. You are in a city full of thousands of pedestrians, you have exactly one bullet, and you have to find and kill a single unique fugitive. You have a sonar that will help you locate him, but he can also hear it when you use it. This game is also 2-player networked, and it is the tensest game experience you will ever have. The audio is an integral part of the gameplay. Marc LeBlanc had the idea for the sonar, which is another example of game design cross polination at the Jam.

Binary Archive: fugitive.zip 735kb
WADs Used: Army of Darkness, Batman, Fistful of Doom, Goldeneye

Wish I could remembered my account so I could get some karma. Oh well, back to the booze.

For a perfect example and a damn fine tense mini-game check out Dueling Machine by Thatcher Ulrich (last game at the bottom of the page). You may need some Wads. This was created at the 0th Indie Game Jam. From the site:

Dueling Machine
Thatcher Ulrich
Guy variants by Justin Hall

Based on a book by Ben Bova. The game looks like a first-person shooter, but with a twist. You are in a city full of thousands of pedestrians, you have exactly one bullet, and you have to find and kill a single unique fugitive. You have a sonar that will help you locate him, but he can also hear it when you use it. This game is also 2-player networked, and it is the tensest game experience you will ever have. The audio is an integral part of the gameplay. Marc LeBlanc had the idea for the sonar, which is another example of game design cross polination at the Jam.

Binary Archive: fugitive.zip 735kb
WADs Used: Army of Darkness, Batman, Fistful of Doom, Goldeneye

Wish I could remembered my account so I could get some karma. Oh well, back to the booze.

For a perfect example and a damn fine tense mini-game check out Dueling Machine by Thatcher Ulrich (last game at the bottom of the page). You may need some Wads. This was created at the 0th Indie Game Jam. From the site:

Dueling Machine
Thatcher Ulrich
Guy variants by Justin Hall

Based on a book by Ben Bova. The game looks like a first-person shooter, but with a twist. You are in a city full of thousands of pedestrians, you have exactly one bullet, and you have to find and kill a single unique fugitive. You have a sonar that will help you locate him, but he can also hear it when you use it. This game is also 2-player networked, and it is the tensest game experience you will ever have. The audio is an integral part of the gameplay. Marc LeBlanc had the idea for the sonar, which is another example of game design cross polination at the Jam.

Binary Archive: fugitive.zip 735kb
WADs Used: Army of Darkness, Batman, Fistful of Doom, Goldeneye

Wish I could remembered my account so I could get some karma. Oh well, back to the booze.

For a perfect example and a damn fine tense mini-game check out Dueling Machine by Thatcher Ulrich (last game at the bottom of the page). You may need some Wads. This was created at the 0th Indie Game Jam. From the site:

Dueling Machine
Thatcher Ulrich
Guy variants by Justin Hall

Based on a book by Ben Bova. The game looks like a first-person shooter, but with a twist. You are in a city full of thousands of pedestrians, you have exactly one bullet, and you have to find and kill a single unique fugitive. You have a sonar that will help you locate him, but he can also hear it when you use it. This game is also 2-player networked, and it is the tensest game experience you will ever have. The audio is an integral part of the gameplay. Marc LeBlanc had the idea for the sonar, which is another example of game design cross polination at the Jam.

Binary Archive: fugitive.zip 735kb
WADs Used: Army of Darkness, Batman, Fistful of Doom, Goldeneye

Wish I could remembered my account so I could get some karma. Oh well, back to the booze.

These days games are almost exclusively written the other way around: people think of the "skin" first (i.e. what it looks like, what it plays like) and then re-use an existing (possibly commercial) engine.

The first approach allows for innovation and inspiration; the second approach leads to an endless string of me-too titles. Before I'm accused of having rose-tinted glasses, I also believe the amount of trashy games is constant throughout the space-time continuum...

As a form of proof I offer this link; these games were written around an engine rather than the other way around, and while they are by no means finished products, you can see inspiration shine through.

(context for mods) let's see... ELF... elves... races in fantasy and science fiction:

No. Trolls

Look at that troll. Isn't it Qt?

are completely different creatures from hobbits and elves.

let's see... among (semi) intelligent roughly-humanoid races, the fantasy multiverse has at least humans, dwarves, elves, hobbits, ents, weebles, smurfs, cyclopes, gnomes (pronounced g; 90 cm tall), gnomes (silent g; 15 cm tall), trolls, orcs, merfolk, selkies, marsh-wiggles, nerdlucks, jawas, tuskens, wookiees, ewoks, teeks, borrowers, morlocks, and eloi.

Saturday, Saturday, Saturday! Watch the Race Race at the Motor Speedway!

Be there.

Over the past few months /. has posted a couple of stories about the Indy Game Jam. The concept seemed interesting, so I went and checked out the page.

As one might expect, the games were reasonably simplistic, though on the whole surprisingly fun. The one that really stood out to me most was "Very Serious RoboDOOM".

This game isn't really a game. It has gameplay, but that's not what it's about. Really, it's a commentary on the state of the gaming industry. Go check it out, they talk about it a bit at the site.

My reaction to this was basically "Fuckin' A right on!" It's troubled me for ages that video games don't seem to be living up to their potential as a medium. The interactive element of gaming can be used for much more than just entertainment - by involving the "audience" and forcing their complicity in the action presented, games can make powerful statements in ways that have never been possible before. RoboDOOM is a great example of this, as are a couple of the games mentioned in the article (the ones by the French designers seem particularly inspired).

But the real problem isn't just the design of games, it is how gaming is percieved as a whole. Even here on Slashdot, where there is a more than healthy hardcore gaming audience, games seem to be considered trivial - entertainment, nothing more. Look at the other comments on this story! The truth is, gaming (as a medium) is still in its infant state, like so many media before it. Television, radio, cinema, comics, all were seen as means of simple amusement. All took decades to mature into the artforms they (sometimes) are today. The earliest examples, the earliest signs of the potential these media held were only recognized by a very few. It saddens me to see that the few who should be recognizing the beginnings of gaming's growth spurt are so seemingly oblivious.

Maybe this isn't a major new development on the political commentary scene - honestly, I don't think it is myself. But it is a major step in the development of gaming. And, for sure, that is something worth noting.