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Similar to the TIGSource Assemblee Competition. I think I might actually enter this one, though. It really is a fantastic idea for artistically-deficient programmers like myself who otherwise wouldn't be able to create something at a passable level.

Note that despite the emphasis on art in the description, this phase refers to the creation of music and sound effects as well as graphics.

No, there was a previous competition that did largely the same thing: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?board=37.0

Basically, one group made art, another group made games from the art. A pretty successful game called Realm of the Mad God came from that: http://store.steampowered.com/app/200210/

Yeah, many games will suck, but it doesn't mean they all have to. Hope we see some great results like from the first Assemblee contest (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?board=38.0)

Back in the day of screeching phone lines, I trawled through mound and mounds of freeware games. As Sturgeon's Law dictated, 95% of them were crap, however I found a fair few gems in the steaming piles of software. First stop should be vertigogaming.net, where you will find the most delightful puzzler Acidbomb - all of his other free stuff is good, but that is by far the best. Also, have a search for a brilliant game-maker called Darthlupi at http://db.tigsource.com/developers/darthlupi Then stop by fullyramblomatic.com and download 5 Days a Stranger, 7 Days a Sacrifice, Trilby's Notes and 6 Days a Sacrifice - best adventure series I have ever played. Also there is the delightful stealth platformer The Art of Theft on that site as well. THIS also. http://www.reloaded.org/download/A-Blurred-Line/269/ There are more but I will stop here. Happy gaming!

Which is the whole trick, this was shown off at least a year ago, it pops up now and then.

The tech precalculates a LOT, for that it needs static model information.
The site of the creators is http://unlimiteddetailtechnology.com/

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=11624.30 they talked about it last year.

Oh, nice website. It indeed already has all the games I would mention.

It also shows the problem with Indie games: Overall they are quite limited. Minecraft is nr2 on their Top List, and that's still in Beta. It's very ambitious for an Indie game and I really like it, because it's different.

I'm not saying some of those games aren't great fun. I think they are. But it also shows that in today's game market people you need a level of perfection and an amount of content and art quality that is very hard to achieve alone or with a small team. If you want to reach the masses that is. It's amazing what such Indie developers can accomplish with the limited resources they have. But it also shows that there is a difference in scale compared to something like Blizzard.

The nr1 on the top list is Cave Story. A platform game with quite good and simple pixel graphics, all made by a single person. To get success in the indie market you don't need huge amount of content and art quality. You'll need a solid game.

And, there are loads and loads more indiegames then in the tigsource db, those are just the most noticeable. If you want more indie (smaller scale), head for the feedback forum: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?board=6.0 where people show off finished and unfinished games. If you want less indie (larger scale), head for the steam store.

Tigsource also runs a blog on the main page if you want information about new developments.

http://db.tigsource.com/

You are welcome.

Oh, nice website. It indeed already has all the games I would mention.

It also shows the problem with Indie games: Overall they are quite limited. Minecraft is nr2 on their Top List, and that's still in Beta. It's very ambitious for an Indie game and I really like it, because it's different.

I'm not saying some of those games aren't great fun. I think they are. But it also shows that in today's game market people you need a level of perfection and an amount of content and art quality that is very hard to achieve alone or with a small team. If you want to reach the masses that is. It's amazing what such Indie developers can accomplish with the limited resources they have. But it also shows that there is a difference in scale compared to something like Blizzard.

http://db.tigsource.com/

You are welcome.

It makes many things more complicated, it introduces many bugs, and the single-window GUI makes things much less convenient for how I use it.
This guy addresses many points about the GUI, although I disagree on a minor nitpick or two or he missed many of the things that bother me.
 
As to making things more complicated, one example is running a profiler. In XCode 3, running a different profiler than the current one required:

1. Select sub-menu item for the type of profiling you want.

In XCode4:

• Select menu item (Edit Scheme)
• Wait for window to pop up.
• Select left-hand list item.
• Select drop-down list item.
• Click Okay
• Click or type "run profile" command.

The other option I found is to duplicate the current "scheme" and edit it, which creates two new menu items for each scheme, meaning that just to have a separate scheme for each profiling type you now have a nice long list of 24 items. If you have more than one basic scheme, the list length multiplies; it wouldn't take much to get the menu list to be too tall for the screen. Better still, selecting that scheme doesn't run it -- even after you bothered to create a new scheme, it still takes two clicks versus one in XCode 3. Enabling guard malloc, as an another example, similarly went from one click to three (including waiting for a new window to pop up), or having to create another version of your basic scheme(s).

Now, I'm more focused on working past XCode 4 because the app I've been working on as my main job for two years is finally feature complete and I want to get it out the door, so maybe I'm missing another way for that particular example. Please do correct me. But there are just so many things that now take more time or more clicks or more GUI transitions than they use to. Why doesn't the console stayed scrolled to the bottom so it displays the latest output anymore? Why, when you have "midnight" color selected, does the time profiler now show percentages in black with dark tint around it, so as to be illegible on the black background? (I need a black background to reduce eye fatigue and symptoms of dry eye.)
 
I realize, even without studying it in too much detail, that they're trying to make XCode more powerful, but being more powerful doesn't mean that simple things have to be more complicated, time-consuming, and different both from previous versions of XCode and other IDEs. Much of what I see is simply change for the sake of change, and has nothing to do with improving it. Why, as the link mentions, would you possibly remove "Get Info" completely and replace that system-standard cmd-I functionality with having it be a shortcut to "run profiler"?

One word, "TigSource" (It also happens to be where minecraft started :D)

Look at their database, and forget about AAA titles, It's refreshing to have so many new, creative games to choose from. I'd almost completely given up on PC gaming until lately. (with the last PC game I'd bought that I still enjoyed being UT2004). Now...Cave Story, Minecraft, Penumbra, World of Goo, Aquaria, Spelunky, and so many more.

Prepare to lose weeks on end...here's the link http://db.tigsource.com/

Funny how you drooling console fanboys always seem to miss the large number of PC game releases by only focusing on mainstream crap and games that have television commercials.

You'll find hundreds of PC only games at the following sites.

TIGSource
IndieGames
SourceForge

Drop the AAA players who want nothing more than your money. Pickup free/donationware/small-payment-and-drm-free indie games that are actually fun, and not just rehashed trash from yesterday with new textures.

http://tigsource.com./ Start here. If you have an Xbox 360, check out the Indie Games section under the game marketplace.

You do not HAVE to play into their game when they are intent on being the only ones who ever win.

if you're on Windows, check out ROM Check Fail ^^

divide the map into a grid and randomly load the grid spaces with pre-designed sections,

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Spelunky, a free rougelike platformer which does exactly this. It work pretty well, mainly because this method guarantees that each block will be at least somewhat interesting to go through, since it was designed by a human. Look out for it coming to XBox live soon.

And also buggy as fuck. Read their forum. Avoid this game.

Instead, try something that actually works -- like Cave Story.

Jeez are you a moron or what, how about playing the game instead of trawling through old bugs?

Btw here's Derek Yu (Spelunky creator) interviewing Daisuke Amaya (aka Pixel, creator of Cave Story) http://www.tigsource.com/features/interview_pixel.html. They're not griefers like you.

Someone went and made a game out of this man's career, Edge Tycoon: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6619.msg211236#msg211236 You play Tim Langdell trying to patent game names before the games are made, and then sue the developers. I found it rather funny.

Not offhand, but while it's down you can check out the Commonplace Book Competition, for which the game was written.

(To save you having to actually click the link: The Commonplace Book was H. P. Lovecraft's notebook of story ideas, most of which he never used. Someone got hold of a big chunk of the text and posted it online, and some people on an independent games forum got together and based a bunch of games on quotes from the book. The title screen of Eversion contains one such quote.)

Independent game development studios are not part of company that publishes games. Since they must go to a publisher to sell their games, they are considered to be independent. Independent game development studios are a subset of third party game development studios.

Indie game development studios are small groups that are often poorly funded if they are funded at all. They generally try to make small games that garner attention by being different in a way that seems novel and interesting. Unlike regular independ game development studios, they rarely attempt to make AAA titles. Still, they are a subset of independent game development studios.

The days of one or two people with next to no money attempting to produce a commercially viable game are still very much alive. Some of them are even successful.

http://db.tigsource.com/top
http://www.igf.com/02finalists.html

I'd spend $2-$3 to support "You Got A Grappling Hook".

A simple game that has a unique play mechnic, and a great story.

I agree with the author of the article that Depths of Peril is probably the best indie RPG available today. But of course I haven't played them all. (And he's obviously slanted towards RPGs based on his list.)

I find more and more that my game purchases are smaller games, or just donating on the Paypal buttons of freeware games I like. The last indie game I bought was a simple, mindless (but strangely addictive - at least at first) tile RPG called Battle of Tiles that cost $4.95.

There are so many indie games (freeware and shareware) out there that it's hard to find time to sort through them all.

This game is an excellent play, and well worth the download. The retro-style graphics are fun, leaving the overall game design and wonderful music to reveal what a well-built game this really is. Here's another review, along with a link to the game, over at TIGSource.

Not to steal the paren't thunder here, but this bears mentioning twice: New players really should review the first few walkthrough videos on youtube. While these give the first few puzzles away, it will make the game several orders of magnitude less frustrating for the reasons cited above (saving the game and warping), as well as helping set the mode for the kind of brutality the dungeon throws at the player. Also, there's some hints in the game manual - be sure to read the item descriptions!

Oh, and the 10-20 hours cited above only applies if you know what you're doing or playing right out of the strategy guide. Real world time is probably something more on the order of 50-60 hours, and could easily be ten times that if you forego any outside help - kind of like The Legend of Zelda.

In short, La-Mulana really does harken back to the good 'ol days of platform gaming when "beating the game" had some bragging rights attached to it.

It scared me into thinking the article was written by some idiot who though that the best 2d games were all on the PS2. Not the best 2D Games on the PS2. Anyone who thinks 2D games are dead should really look into the indie PC scene though. Aquaria (IGF 2006 Winner) is a beautiful game; and there are many others in development. Heartforth Alicia features some of the best 2d graphics I've seen in a while. http://www.tigsource.com/ You can find a ton of awesome 2d games on there.

There are so many freeware and shareware games that have been released online by independent developers and programming hobbyists.

The Independent Games Festival is a good start. And to make things easier, there are a many sites and blogs that review indie games and make recommendations: the2bears and Shoot the Core cover shoot-em ups/STGs; Jay is Games handles flash and casual games; and TIGSource (for which I'm an editor), Independent Gaming, and Game Tunnel cover all genres of games. You can expect to find some overlapping, but they each have plenty to search through.

Or just add tigsource.com to your RSS and get notified of cool new games.

theres tons more than that, firstly you missed out the rather excellent
game tunnel and then there is the daily updates on tigsource and more small developers sites than you can shake a stick at, including mine:
Positech Games
The problem is that sites like this just dont get the traffic that gamespy and gamspot do, because none of us have the multimillion dollar advertising budgets. A clique of big name companies have decided that independent games == casual color matching games for soccer moms, and thats definitely not true. My most succesfull game was targeted at people who like complex political strategy games (nationstates / republic / civilisation), you try and persuade the likes of Real or Yahoo to publish that game?
There are plenty of original and interesting titles out there, you just need to google for them a bit, instead of just walking into CompUSA.