News: Bolls – an Indie Game from a Small Group of Swedish Students
A small group of students studying Game development at Stockholm University just released their first game.
News: Social Haven Rescue Free Iphone Game-We liked it?
If you go over to the Iphone store and download social haven rescue. You will see a cute little space app and the fish under the sea secret water world is adorable. Its a free good attempt. What games are there out there that also have fish like graphics?
News: The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Journey to the Center of the Earth
I'll keep this short and sweet, as the game is online, loads quickly, it's free, and easy to play: it's quicker to play it than describe it: EnterTheStory.com
News: Today announced - indie RPG Nyrthos
Hey everyone! These are a few screenshots from an indie game we announced today - Nyrthos. If you like it, definitely check us out at www.nyrthos.com and tell us what you think!
Just Released: Dungeon Defenders Gameplay Footage
Dungeon Defenders is finally out on the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. We've previously featured the tower defense RPG, and if you haven't had a chance to check out the PAX interview with Trendy Entertainment, now would be a good time.
Dungeon Defenders: Heaven for Hardcore Gamers
Dungeon Defenders is the most exciting craft game on the Fall 2011 release schedule. I got a chance to play it at PAX in August and interviewed developers Trendy Entertainment last month. After more than a year of publishing difficulty and delay, the game finally came out on PSN, XBLA and Steam. I put about 20 hours into the XBLA version over the past weekend, beating all the campaign maps and racking up a huge pile of in-game money. It is not a perfect game. But it is a huge, challenging, an...
News: Friday Indie Game Review Roundup: 3 Obscure Puzzle Games That Test Your Wits
This week's review roundup is a diverse lot. They really only have two things in common—their indie origins and puzzle elements. Otherwise, they come from France, Spain and the U.S., a few from unknown designers and one by the guy who inspired Minecraft.
News: Slightly Mad Studios Launches Slightly Brilliant AAA Game Funding Project
Getting money to make a AAA game is hard. When anyone is lucky enough to get the funds they need, it usually comes from a giant game publishing company that wants the rights to the game, not to mention complete control. Those publishers have shareholders who demand a high return on their investment, so they avoid risk when choosing game projects to fund.
Afterfall: InSanity Game Only $1 in Outlandish Plan to Reach 10 Million Pre-Orders
Nicholas Entertainment Group (NEG) is a Polish independent game publisher that recently got their hands dirty with development. Their first game (with Intoxicate Studios) is the forthcoming horror first-person shooter Afterfall: InSanity, which comes out next month—dangerously close to the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3 and Assassin's Creed Revelations release dates. That's some stiff competition for small company, especially since it's a $35 debut game.
News: Indie Games Hit the Red Carpet at the IndieCade Awards
Last Thursday, on October 7th, indie game developers from around the world walked down a red carpet in Santa Monica, California in the hopes of winning an IndieCade award. We previously discussed the IndieCade festival and conference, but the award show is a smaller, more inclusive event that provides finalists the opportunity to see their project on stage with rewards by sponsors such as LG, who presented this year’s ceremony.
NORTHWAY Games: Cool Indies by a Restless Company on the Road
Game design is sedentary work. Generally its practitioners do their work with their butts planted securely in front of a computer in an office (be it home or away) as their muscles and verbal skills atrophy. Even game journalists are prone to this condition. Not so with Colin and Sarah Northway (pictured below), the husband and wife team behind NORTHWAY Games. Not only do they make really cool indie games, but they do it with just a laptop while traveling the world meeting indie developers of...
News: PayPal Problems Strike Yet Another Indie Developer
PayPal has, all in all, been great for allowing Web 2.0 economy to grow. For most entities, it's the best way to send money between two people on the internet.
News: Hideo Kojima and Fox Engine Make Special USC Appearance
Hideo Kojima is one of the biggest names in Japanese game design. He's the man behind every Metal Gear game, each of which has been beautiful but divisive. He's an auteur, a rarity in AAA game design, managing business, design, and programming for Kojima Productions. Last week he made a rare public appearance at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, which contains the school's video game programs, and gave a 90-minute talk about his career, influences, and the specifics of his new Fox game design...
Indie Game Review Round-Up: Radical Fishing, Super Crate Box & Serious Sam
The Netherlands are a hotbed of indie game development, which seems appropriate for such a brilliant and eccentric little nation. Two man Dutch indie developer Vlambeer have found themselves in the news more often than most companies of their size, thanks to two great games and a third on the way.
News: Sales Stats Show that Gamers Prefer Downloads Over Discs
The NPD Group is a market research firm that issues the most trusted sales numbers for video games. They just released their second quarter 2011 report, and the trends it reveals confirm much of what we here have been speculating here at Indie Games Ichiban (and what we've been hoping for): downloadable games have risen, while full-box retail games have fallen—that is in the US, at least.
A Closed World: MIT Video Game Confronts Sexual Identity Issues
University video game design programs have been spreading like wildfire around the world over the last ten years. They allow students, researchers and game developers to work on their craft in an academic environment away from the harsh realities of the market, and have led to some interesting products like Fl0w from USC and Ulitsa Dimitrova from Germany. Both games take on topics not often addressed in mainstream games and do so in simple, poignant ways that aim to influence the rest of the ...
News: Pokemon + Jabbawockeez + YouTube = Kusarine Project
Japan has a tendency to produce things that boggle the Western mind. Its citizens are already responsible for without a question the weirdest music video in the history of the medium. With that said, here is a video reenactment of several Pokemon (Pocket Monster in Japan) games released by Japanese performance art troupe Kusarine Project: Kusarine Project and their amazing YouTube channel first became known through the Japanese video sharing site/meme originator NicoNicoDouba. Their white mas...
News: UK Man Chokes 13-Year Old Boy Over Call of Duty: Black Ops Trash Talk
The UK seems to have become an international hotbed of gamers going wild on society. Last week a British Navy sailor killed his superior officer, which parts of the tabloid media blamed on Grand Theft Auto. Today, a more concretely video game related tale of real life violence comes to us from The Daily Mail.
News: Double Fine Improves the Psychonauts Meat Circus!
Anyone who likes shooters is going to hate me for saying this: the best game of the 2000's for me was Psychonauts by Double Fine Studios. It came out in 2005 for the original Xbox, achieving critical acclaim, but never selling very well due to its sheer kookiness and poor marketing. Over the ensuing years it has become a cult classic, with downloadable re-releases on Xbox 360 (sadly no longer available). PC has allowed gamers who missed out on the original to bask in its ageless glory.
News: Resurrecting the Video Game Magazine: PC Gamer Digital
PC Gamer represents all that was awesome about games journalism in the '90s, now sadly diminished. Brilliant, funny, full of integrity, and solid print sales were always present, and with the tragic exception of the latter, still are. Video game magazines were hit harder than nearly any other magazine vertical when the internet began its uncoordinated, but inevitable assault on print media. Magazines are now struggling to find their place in a world filled with more competitors than paying cu...
News: Friday Indie Game Review Roundup: Digital Board Games (No Assembly Required)
The noble board game has stalwartly staved off elimination in the face of more technologically advanced video games for four decades. Try as they might, video games just can't seem to surpass them as an easy-to-use diversion for large groups of seated indoor people.
News: The Humble Bundle Strikes Again with a "Frozen" Theme
The Humble Indie Bundle has become like an unpredictable little gamer Christmas. It helps indie developers get their games exposure, helps gamers get cheap DRM-free games via the most user-friendly online purchasing process ever, and helps the world at large by raising money for Child's Play and EFF.
News: Glitch Has Launched! New Oddball MMO from the Makers of Flickr and Katamari Damacy
We've covered Glitch before, the oddball indie social MMO involving the minds behind Flickr, Katamari Damacy, and Game Neverending. Yesterday, the game officially left Beta and entered general release. Anyone can create an account and start playing for free, although there are freemium elements in the form of real money purchasable clothing items.
IndieCade: An Indie Gaming Conference and Festival All in One
On October 7th, the IndieCade Conference will open its doors to some of the most innovative minds in the independent gaming industry. The three day event located in Culver City, California includes presentations by notable indie designers, workshops, galleries, and mixers. On the following day, however, the IndieCade Festival begins. Unlike the conference, the festival includes events targeted at gamers and the general public. While a $15 wristband will grant you access to keynotes, events, a...
News: Finally! A Practical Use for Arcade Game Skills
Most kids who play video games will never become professional gamers. Those that do are part of a very select group— it's like being a professional actor or athlete. It's nice work if you can get it. For everyone else, the sad realization usually arrives sooner or later that time spent playing games might not have the practical rewards that homework or working hard at your job might deliver.
News: Iconic Indie Game Publisher Interplay Struggles to Make a Comeback
For more than a decade, Interplay was arguably the best video game publisher in America. Their list of games is a who's-who of the most creative and forward thinking games of the '90s, including everything fromOut of This World to Alone in the Dark to Earthworm Jim to Descent. They've been around since 1983, but have fallen on hard times since 1997, when they became a public company. They were acquired by a French publisher who then went bankrupt. They were forced to close their internal deve...
News: Next Professor Layton Game to Include 100-Hour Long Bonus RPG
Games have been getting shorter in length over the last decade. RPGs like The Elder Scrolls series are still tremendously long, but most single-player game experiences have gotten shorter as production values, costs, and manpower requirements to create them have gone up. It seems that elite Japanese developers Level-5 and Brownie Brown have decided to completely disregard that trend for their forthcoming collaborative effort Professor Layton and the Last Specter, which will feature what might...
News: Has Chain World's Journey from Game to Religious Icon Ended?
At GDC 2011 this past March, three of the world's best game designers participated in a contest called Game Design Challenge. Each presented their vision for a game that fit the prompt "Bigger than Jesus: games as religion" before an audience, with applause to determine the winner. Jenova Chen, John Romero, and Jason Rohrer all spoke, and Rohrer won in a landslide with his revolutionary game called Chain World.
News: Friday Indie Game Review Roundup: Old-New School
This week's FIGRR is all about games that are old-new (or new-old, if you like) school. Each celebrates a different vital, yet largely taken for granted, aspect of video game history in the decidedly new-school world of indie games. Their titles betray them. Blocks That Matter is all about blocks. Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is all about item shops. Neither are particularly sexy aspects of gaming, but both are ubiquitous elements of great games that can stand on their own.
News: UK Newspaper Runs Series of Yellow Anti-Video Game Articles
The United Kingdom has long been known as an international hub of yellow tabloid journalism. The News Of The World, one of the nation's largest tabloids, is famously in court right now because of the deplorable methods it used to acquire salacious information about interesting people. It appears, given their recent string of video game related reportage, that daily newspaper Metro has also had its fair share of morally dubious reporters on staff.
News: Freemium Games Start Their US Invasion on the iOS Front
For more than a decade, free-to-play games with microtransactions (also called In-App Purchase or IAP) by which players can pay real money for in-game content have been the industry standard for online success in Asia. Mainstream American gamers have long resisted these "freemium" games, with World of Warcraft and other subscription based online games reigning supreme, and being seen as more AAA than their free-ish counterparts. Casual games developers have encountered no such problems, and m...
News: MAC-Using Gamemakers Rejoice! UDK Now Compatible With MAC OS X
Epic Games announced today that the free version of Unreal Engine 3, Unreal Development Kit or UDK, is now compatible with Mac OS X. Apple users will now have access to arguably the most powerful piece of free game development software available in almost exactly the same way as their PC counterparts, minus some small tweaks.
News: Free Protein Folding Game Cracks HIV Molecule Riddle
Foldit is definitely a niche game. The sole gameplay mechanic is attempting to fold complex proteins into smaller and more efficient shapes following the rules of molecular physics and biology. Points are awarded based on how small one can make the protein. Online leaderboards track players' relative progress and allows them to view and manipulate other players' completed designs. It's original, certainly, but no developer is going to ship a million units of a game about molecular-level prote...
News: Ni No Kuni Coming To The US!
There wasn't a lot of huge news for Indie Games Ichiban to come out of TGS last weekend, but this is a whopper: Level-5 and Studio Ghibli's epic RPG Ni No Kuni is officially coming to America next year. No word on the 3DS version, but the PS3 one will be released in 2012 in North America in English, according to a press conference by principal developer Level-5.
News: Indie Developer Fights Pirates with Piracy
No Time To Explain is the first game by two man indie developer tiny Build Games. It's a fun and very stylish platformer in it's own right, available for $10 from the tiny Build website. Articles about the game on RockPaperShotgun, Destructoid, and other prominent PC sites helped it develop substantial hype and raise more than $26,000 via Kickstarter to fund development.
News: IGI Contest #1 Results Are In!
Thanks to all who participated in our inaugural IGI Contest. Our goal was to come up with a new word for medium-priced downloadable games, and we have done just that. After reviewing the flurry of last-minute submissions, a winner has emerged. Congratulations, Mike Grimaldi! We will contact you to determine how you would like to receive your $10.
News: Portal Free to Download for a Limited Time!
Portal is game design milestone. Originally only available bundled in with larger cousins Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 in The Orange Box, its creators, Valve Software, changed what first person gameplay could be. It's been a stand alone product for much of the four years since its release, but never an expensive one, usually available for $5 on Steam (also created by Valve). If that barrier to entry was too high for you, or you just never got around to trying it, there are no more excuses....
Meeting the Dungeon Defenders: An Interview with Trendy Entertainment
I've been unreasonably excited about Dungeon Defenders (NOT DUNGEON DEFENDER!) for almost a year. Playing it at PAX did nothing to damper that enthusiasm. I had a chance this week to speak with co-founder/development director Jeremy Stieglitz and marketing diretor Philip Asher from Gainesville, Florida based developer Trendy Entertainment to find out a little more about the game, and how it came together.