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Indie Game Jam 2004 Recounted
scishop writes "While most of the gaming world has been focused on the dazzling smoke and mirrors special effects of E3, Gamasutra has published an interesting article on a different game convention: Indie Game Jam '04 where two dozen game developers spent four days creating a variety of games built around the same engine in an effort to encourage innovation. The results included apps centered around boxing, yoga and flaming hamsters." Our earlier story over at Slashdot Games has more links and information.
The results included apps centered around boxing, yoga and flaming hamsters..
Thanks but i'll take smoke & mirror titles Doom III and Half Life 2 rather than 'yoga challenge', or 'flaming hamster wars'!
Best of all, you can download the Indie Game Jam games:
http://www.indiegamejam.com/igj2/games.html
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.
If they wanted to promote innovation shouldn't they have avoided one of the biggest problems with stale modern gaming?
Don't use the same engine...
For those who use linux, you can use a tool called WINE to play unported apps. You can even run it on the BSDs thanks to the Linux emulation,
Lets not forget the HUGE ammount of Native games for Linux! and BSD
Please help eliminate this misconception that there are no games for these platforms by adding to these lists!
I think there exists a strange paradox in the gaming world - there is a growing, dedicated and rapid effort to make the games graphics simulate reality as much as possible, the actual gameplay is still quite far from it. Quite so many times we see in third person shooting games that the player can withstand several bullet shots, run indefinitely (ok Far Cry changed that), etc... Is it possible in reality for one guy to take on 100?
I'm sure the exponents of the game will argue and say that's precisely why it's the game - an experience that you go through. But, in this world where the experience is being brought closer to reality, why not the game play and feel then? Sure it would make the game harder to play, but the degree of hardness would increase in doing "simple" stuff and the game designers wouldnt have to think of complex/hideous creatures who by virtue of their design become harder to kill
On the other hand, games that have provided a total and absolute break from reality, but with a goal that is difficult to achieve, yet forcing you to jump through mostly similar hoops - have become popular as well. That's because, IMO, they were able to trigger within us the simplest of all human desires - to succeed
I believe a game to become interesting and popular has to not only have stunning visuals - sure they enhance the gameplaying experience, but I don't think they always make such a big difference. The factors that make a game popular is how much variety and challenge the game provides, how much it enables a player to "relate" to it (the "relation" to game is most always in a phantom sense - no one goes on a killing spree in real life) and how involved it makes the gameplayer.
Games don't have to have dazzling graphics. I think it's a sense of attachment, of being able to relate to game that becomes the prime factor in the game popularity.
http://efil.blogspot.com/
...and it's really rather fun. Think of a cross between Lemmings and Frozen Bubble. Recommended.
It could be interesting if all the game developers in the US picked/created a cross-platform 3D engine to standardize on. Then maybe they could concentrate more effort on playability and game innovation and less on flipping bits.
No.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
I've been noticing that alot since i started playing America's Army.
A while ago i played a bit of Delta Force: Blackhawk Down at a friend's house, i was standing right infront of this guy who was shooting at me and i hardly got hurt, while in AA you are likely to get killed for peeking around the corner for more than a second.
Granted, it's real players Vs. AI, but still...
Stund hamsters is about the only one of these you can actually play, as they were designed for a hacked-up PS2 controller. Most of the games, you can't even start them or move about.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
Look, hear, point, click, sigh, repeat again.
I use to love spending hours playing games, but in the end I realised the psyology is the same for every game. So I got bored. Sure the same principal can apply to other mediums but gaming as it is has wasted to much of my time.
I'm guessing the next evolution will be virtual gaming in ever "sense".
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.
This year's theme strikes a particular chord. You see, we get loads of games using Havok physics. But it's all eye candy!
Yet when we criticised the underuse of physics in Max Payne 2, our comments system was overloaded with people complaining "look at the pretty ragdolls! the boxes FALL OVER!"
People don't seem to realise that so much more is possible with Havok technology - and as long as they don't realise, game developers will continue to be lazy
Gamers Europe - Gaming News. Reviews.
I play a lot of Medal of Honor and the player damage isn't very realistic, although there are some mods that claim to increase it.
.30-06 sniper rifle kills a guy with one shot, but a .30 BAR round which is virtually identical to the the round used in the sniper rifle takes numerous hits to kill someone.
What really makes the game unrealistic is the lack of deformable environments. You can duck behind a plaster wall and have two guys open up with a BAR and an RPG and you're totally safe. A group of enemies will take cover in a building that gets hit with a ton of RPGs and grenades and they're never threatened.
The buildings should totally fall apart; they should have holes blown in them, stairs fall apart, fires started. You should get shot through walls and floors. And so on.
They've done an OK job with the weapons out of the box, although I still think that the sniper rifle is far too easy. Having actually fired numerous scoped weapons hunting, it's NEVER that easy, and the kill zone on a deer is a lot bigger than the kill zone on a man. And then there's the question of why a
LOL, is that a communication between two terrorists al-qaeda cells?
Gamasutra has published an interesting article on a different game convention
I hope I'm not the only one that noticed Gamasutra is spelled a lot like Kamasutra. What kind of message are they trying to convey?