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.

Comments

Download the games

[joelparker]

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

Some things to note

[INeededALogin]

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.

You can play them with WINE!

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

some games playable without ps2 controller

[nothings]

Despite what the game download page says, the following games can be played with mouse and/or keyboard:

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.

Re:hmm..

[moviepig.com]

...stunning visuals ... don't ... always make such a big difference [as] variety and challenge ... and how involved it makes the gameplayer.

Nolan Bushnell (Atari Pong) used to talk of a successful game as being "hot", in a way that I think today might imagine the player as a collection of myriad stimulus/response ports, e.g., sight, sound, touch, worry, planning, speed, balance, ego. (I could - and apparently did - go on.)

"Hot" is activating as many of those as possible.