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

Hm....

[Anonymous Coward]

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'!

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.

Re:Innovation?

[ecc0]

The point is to show that you can make vastly differing games with the same "engine." You don't need to make a Quake clone only because you use the Quake engine. Some people use open engines to make games that are very different from the games the engine was originally developed for, like Unreal Annihilation, Total Annihilation (a Real-Time Strategy game) reimplemented with the Unreal Tournament 2003 engine.

Re:hmm..

[rockgorilla]

I think new and 'weird' ideas are best for the computer games industry, there is only so new and shiny that you can make a game.

There are lots of games out there which don't fit into the classic categories, but the company that I think make the biggest effort with new game play rather than better graphics is Nintendo. Games like Lougie's Mansion, Pikmin and to be titles like Jungle Beat are (will) be great fun to play, because they're different. I'm not saying Halo 2 or Doom 3 will be bad, just that it's more of the same. Think of how they could be made more original, see what Nintendo did to beat 'em ups with Smash Brothers. That is still the most fun I've had with friends in front of any kind of computer.

05 50 1337

[neoshroom]

When it comes time to order pizza, co-organizer Chris Hecker calls out: "Okay guys--how hungry are you, on a scale of 0 to 1?" After tallying the empty bellies and desired slices, someone does the math and asks "Can we order 6.75 pizzas?"

No.

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.

As a game reviewer

[ProudClod]

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