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Remember, if you bounce them 6 times, they give you a powerup!

Jardinains, baby!

Return To Chaos - The Dungeon Master / Chaos Strikes Back Clone

DNA/Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Infocom Adventure (online, java)

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (flash)

NetHack 3.4.3: Main Page

Jardinains! (fun breakout clone)

mono (excellent modern asteroids clone)

Aside from Tetris and Jardinains I really never bothered with games. Too little time, too little interest. I was more concerned with creating real content that playing on my PC.

This week though I downloaded the now free for asking GTA 2 and started playing with it.

Hey - it's fun to crash cars, run over pedestrians,and generally blast the daylights out of everyone on the screen. I haven't even figured out half of how the game works, and have no clue what the end goal is, but I am enjoying myself.

The GTA series is incredibly popular, as are the various shooter games. Socially redeeming? Hardly. Artistic merit? Yah, right.

And these guys are asking why gamers are stereotyped???

If you want to make games and not focus on programming geekery and coding arcana, Blitz is a great little toolset. With the cross-platform support and in the 2D graphics using OpenGL and you've got a very happy little package here.

I learn fun new stuff, I get to take things at my own pace, I get fun email from other people, and I make enough to cover my car payment. Best of all, it feeds my megalomania.

When it comes to Tetris or other arcade games, it's easy enough to find a PC clone. But, are there any decent win32 clones of Q*Bert? I've been searching for years but still haven't found one.

And FWIW, I'm also a sucker for Arkanoid clones. The latest I've found is BreakQuest which (will be) shareware and is currently in beta (4 levels or so in the beta). And, Jardinains isn't bad either but there's no save-game functionality so even advanced players end up starting at the beginning each time :(.

My favorite thus far was an offer from a couple in Ireland who offered a night's lodging and a hearty Irish breakfast should we ever visit their fair country--in exchange for the bonus level pack.

Even though we probably won't hav ethe opportunity to take them up on the offer anytime soon, it was made in earnest, and I was happy to send them a copy of the level pack in return. Even though I can't buy beer 'n' pizza with it, this "barter" has proven far more memorable than the typical few bucks plonked in the PayPal account...

There's this guy I know from college who's written a free (as in beer) game for Windows. (Maybe you've heard of it; he also spends too much time on slashdot). Tens of thousands of windows users have downloaded it (according to webserver logs) and (presumably) run it on their machines, almost all of them (presumably) while logged in as administrator or equivalent. (At one point, it got farked, and is still getting referer hits from there)

Sure, you've found a patch of very trusting FreeBSD users. However, I'll bet that this one stupid windows game is downloaded and run with full privleges with no safety checks at all by a hundred times as many people.

Well, it all depends on how you define 'success'.

My own little game has brought in over $1000 in donations and profit from tchotchke sales over the past year. I wrote the game in my free time (I was unemployed for a while, which helped) and I treat it like a full-time hobby. I've made more than it cost me to create the game, so I'm happy about that, and I consider most of the time I took making it time well spent. (I could have done without the weeks of tracking down forehead-slapper bugs, but it comes with the territory.)

I'm lucky in that I have free hosting through a friend, so I don't need to worry about bandwidth costs, which is a big plus. Even if I had to buy my own server space, though, I'm making enough that I could come close to breaking even, or maybe even earn a little bit.

Thing is, I never planned to earn money off this game. I wrote it for two reasons: it sounded like a fun thing to do, and I wanted to get some name recognition. Today, most of my hits are coming directly to the game's home page; even six months ago, I was relying primarily on other peoples' links. This tells me that people have heard of the game and are coming straight to the site to get it--the name is out there, and it's generating it's own buzz.

Now that I've gone through it, I've learned that the real trick isn't to make money--at least, not right off the bat. The real trick is to get noticed. Once you get noticed, the Internet practically builds a game's reputation for you. If your game is fun and engaging, it gets forwarded around and shared. You don't need to pay a dime for this.

Look at Ambrosia. They started out with Malestrom, which was and still is one of the best versions of Asteroids out there. The game got noticed, people passed it around, linked to it, and Ambrosia got a name. Today, they run a solvent shareware business; they've developed a solid registration system, they have tons of titles, and (most importantly) tons of people know who they are.

Shareware can make $$, but if that's the first thing you gun for, you'll have trouble. Make your game fun, free as in beer, have non-obtrusive requests for donations, and seed it onto the net. Make a name for yourself. Then start looking into ways to make a business out of it.

Tom

(P.S. A tip: release early in the year, so you don't get passed over on the 'Best of 200X' award lists...)

However, the games that we truely play together or even competitively, are of a different vein.

We recommend:

Jardinians - "Like Breakout, But With More Gnome Bouncing", Fun to play competitively, and you can make your own levels to challenge each other. (Just make sure you can beat your own level)

Text Twist - Kind of a word jumble game. There's a free trial, give it a chance, it's a addictive. Fun to play cooperatively.

Super Collapse 2 This is an interesting puzzle game which is best played solo.

Spider Solitare - This one was free courtesy of Microsoft. Sure it's solitare, but you can play cooperatively too.

Monopoly Party - This old stand-by never dies. We stick to classic, not the weird "party mode". The CPU's are kind of stupid, but it's still a good time, especially with more people. The best part is, nobody has to be the bank, so games go sooo much faster.

Old NES ROMS - We have a hacked xbox that has a ROM emulator loaded on it and we love to play Super Mario 2 and some of the classics. And now we're talking about building a MAME/XNES Cabinet.

...now if only I could break her into Linux.

• Shape matters. If you have things like powerups, try to make their shapes distinct, sharply defined, and easy to identify. As a test, set your monitor to grayscale; if you have trouble distinguishing between different shapes, you should try making them more distinctive.
• Avoid red/green pairings without tying them to spatial or geometric differences. While color can play a key role in a game, it's important to realize that a colorblind player won't be able to tell when that green light on the booby-trap turns red. You can still use red and green in this fashion, but be sure to add some other distinguishing trait, like flashing the light, changing the shape of the object, or highlighting the object. Again, setting your monitor to grayscale will speak volumes.
• Try using colors that are independent of colorblindness. You can use oranges, purples, and yellows to make an image look uniform to most eyeballs.
• Use brightness to highlight changes between red and green. If you absolutely -must- use red and green and can't follow the suggestions above, try making one color measurably lighter than the other. While there will still be some confusion, (is this red or green?) a colorblind person will at least be able to distinguish between the two.

It may seem like a lot of work, but it isn't as hard as it sounds, and your colorblind friends will thank you!

Mainstream (adj.) Representing the prevalent attitudes, values, and practices of a society or group

If anything, games like Bejeweled are more mainstream than your Super Console Kill Kill Hit Of The Week 2. Gamers who play Halo are likely to be young, male, and hardcore. Gamers who play Bejeweled cover the entire spectrum of old, young, male, female, hardcore and casual. Tetris has universal appeal. I regularly get mail from grandparents telling me how nice it is that they can play my game with their grandchildren and have a great time at it. That is mainstream, not the cutting-edge stuff that we (a group largely comprised of young men) think of as mainstream.

Old people play video games. Old people play lots of video games. Old people do not generally play the niche games that are designed for and targeted at young, male, hardcore gamers.

Add to that a strong hobbyist community, an increasingly useful toolset, and you've got an environment where lots of different people and groups can innovate. You don't need to be a megacorp to make a fun or innovative game--innovation can be as simple as Tetris.

Just because the gaming industry is becoming more and more corporate doesn't mean that there's no space for a) innovation or b) indie shops/hobbyists. What more people need to realize is that you can make a Simple, fun game (shameless self-plug*) on your own time, so long as you're willing to accept your limitations. Just because you can't go toe-to-toe with EA or Rockstar doesn't mean that you can't make games or innovate...

* Disclaimer: Nothing about above game is particularly innovative, except, perhaps, the garden gnomes.

Even if you can't make it to the mecca of excitement that is Des Moines, you can still get your Lockergnome-approved daily dose of gnomish fun here...

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Were any of the gnomes bouncing and throwing flowerpots?

(shameless self-promotion mode)

There's always Jardinains!. Shareware in the old-school, send-me-a-donation-if-you-like-but-above-all-share -it-with-your-friends style. It's only a few months old, and even though it's a Breakout clone at heart, it's got a few new twists to keep things interesting. (Besides, isn't just about everything these days a clone of something else?)

I figured I wouldn't make any money off it (which has not been entirely true; about 1 out of every 10,000 downloads yields a donation.) The sheer good karma of making a program like this makes it worth the effort.

As far as sites, check out gamehippo.com. They maintain an excellent listing of truly freeware games, and have some nice features like user comments and ratings. Each game has an editor's review.

Jardinains is the answer to your every hope of breakout like enjoyment. Trust me, it blows DX-Ball out of the water. After all, how many gnomes are there in DX-Ball? Go, check it out and tell me it's not the best 'arkanoidesque' game you've played.