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The Indie Game Jam
Rich Carlson writes "The Indie Game Jam is a yearly game design
and programming event designed to encourage experimentation and innovation in the game industry."
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"The Indie Game Jam is a yearly game design and programming event designed to encourage experimentation and innovation in the game industry."
Here's some real innovation and experimentation:
Dani Bunten Berry
Pardon me while I feel nostalgiac...every game that comes out lately (esp. in the arcade) is either two guys beating the stuffing out of each other, or some sort of Exxxtreme Simulation, be it piloting a helicopter, shooting a gun, or pushing a shopping cart full of your worldly possesions down the street while being chased by cops and skinheads.
Okay, that last one doesn't really exist but WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH ALL THE SIMULATIONS??? You wanna be Deer Avenger Mega XL? Why not actually go hunt a deer. There are millions of 'em out there. You want to drive real fast? Go to the local racetrack and ACTUALLY DO IT.
I miss the quality games like Rampart, which was extremely playable as a multiplayer or single player endeavor...must stop ranting...trying to stay on topic:
A lot of the games on that web page are very, very cool ideas, and I'm really glad to see the big vendors (read: Intel) getting behind the local community. I would love to play Dueling Machine, because it sounds totally cool, and many of the others seem utterly hilarious.
God, I miss the good games. I think everyone fell in love with the "rich story line" after Wing Commander II and forgot about playability and the intense PLEASURE that comes from battling it out with a game like Lemmings. I bet the current crop of mainstream game designers has watched a lot more TV and action adventure movies and spent a hell of a lot less time playing lunar lander, drag racer, and Adventure on the mainframe.
100,000 sprites? You had to do something crafty with interrupts to get more than 7 sprites on my old C64. And yet, I have a game of MULE scheduled for right after I hit the submit button...
I light a candle for Infocom
The code is released under GPL, and is available on sourceforge for everyone to play with. I've always wanted to develop games, so looking at *actual* game code is really exciting. I know I can do that elsewhere too, but these are (supposed to be, anyway) top-of-the-line game developers doing their stuff. I'll be downloading the source for sure :-)
Black holes are where God divided by zero
The term innovation seems to becoming more and more overused. As much as I'm
sure that code will be created through this that will be very interesting to see
and see run, isn't innovation something rare enough to not be expected? What's so wrong nowadays with being proud to have simply made something of quality, even if it's not some earth shattering revelation.
Sometimes it just seems to me Microsoft's proclamations of their so called
'innovations' have lowered the bar considerably. I'm about to go make a bowl of
ramen noodles, and I'll be throwing in some pieces of broccoli. By todays
standards would that be considered an innovation in the world of everyday
nutrition?
Everything will be taken away from you.
Well, the concept behind the indiegamejam seems to be very interesting, but what are the games actually like? I would like to download some of them and give them a go, and see what you can actually do over a 4 day period.
/. discussion in a comments on AOTC news item rather than posting all over the place.
The sreen shots don't give that much away. Just 100000s of people everywhere to kill. How complete was the base sourcecode they were working from?
--
I guess everyones attention is on AOTC, so perhaps it would be wise to have a
Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
When you put broccoli in your ramen, that's called *synthesizing*.
The ramen noodles are the *framework*. Nutrition is a *functional requirement*. Dumping leftover veggies into your kibble *adds value* and *lowers your TCO*.
I could keep going except I agree with you too much. Innovation is dead, or at least becoming increasingly more stultified as we approach the "McCultural singularity"
Democracy is a registered trademark of the America Corporation.
I think the premise of "innovative" is that all possible games and ways to play games haven't been discovered, and that they want to try to find some of them.
So, they provide a new gimmick (100,000 sprites), and ask the developers to try to discover new games for the gimmick. The gimmick exists to help kick the developers out of any rut they may be in -- to be the impetus for them to exploit their creativity.
Quality is something we all want. And there are plenty of groups producing games of quality.
But innovation, while perhaps hard to force, also isn't something that just falls from the sky. You have to keep at it and keep at it, and hopefully finally out of the 100's and 1000's of tries, something is actually new and interesting.
Or maybe we should be working toward a top quality abacus, nevermind all those new-fangled tran-sis-tors. Translation: if they try hard enough, they may eventually find something that changes everything, that becomes the foundation for everything else. A lofty goal, for certain; but, they've got to start somewhere, and they may develop lots of other cool stuff along the way.
I'm still missing a multiplayer game where participants could create free-form 'creatures' and let them fight or do another things. Of course there were attempts, like TechnoSphere, some others but usually they are limited to some narrow set of rules, are not developed or not addictive.
Wouldn't it be nice to have a game where you could design your characted in a let's say modern 3D package, give it physical properties and let it 'live' together with others in a virtual environment. It sounds maybe dull, but look how popular Sims are - and not - Sims is also one of those 'limited' kind of games. Pity.
/Diolas