#diygamer

[jbcrochetwizard]

Crochet pattern set of Charmander, Pikachu, Squirtle and Bulbasaur!

Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/listing/278856860/crochet-pattern-set-of-a-charmander

Ravelry: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/poke-chibi-amigurumi-set

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Graduate Games‘ new Flash platformer, Minina Time, was written in five days for March’s Experimental Gameplay Project. March’s theme was 10 seconds, which becomes the basic question of survival in Minima Time. Players are greeted with the announcement that they have10 seconds before they die — although you can extend your time with special items which stop or slow down the death count – so players have to make the most of those few seconds!

Flash platform games are hardly a new genre, but the interesting shift here is from an indefinite amount of time that the player ends by making a mistake, mistiming a jump, or otherwise failing to complete the games’ objectives, into an incredibly short lifespan, making thirty seconds of survival feel like a massive accomplishment and not the glaring failure it would be in another WASD platformer.

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Puzzle Bloom, a short web-based puzzle-adventure game, was created by students at DADIU, the National Academy of Digital, Interactive Entertainment in Copenhagen, and became a 2010 IGF finalist. I really enjoy puzzle games (especially when puzzle isn’t secret code for another match-three clone), and I was interested in Puzzle Bloom’s premise.

Players take on the role of Canotila, an adorably plump, glowing nature sprite who travels a sad, gray world full of machines, defeated slaves and robot masters. Your goal is to destroy the machines and bring nature back to the world. To do so, Canotila takes a ride on a friendly NPC creature and moves him around to solve puzzles and reach her goal.

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Indie studio Red Aphid‘s new Facebook game Feed The Rocker is in a playable, open beta, but it’s more stable than plenty of other Facebook games I’ve played. (I’m looking at you, Island Paradise.) I was pretty excited to check it out, I see a lot of potential in casual Facebook games for a creative indie studio.

Gameplay Feed The Rocker blends the fun physics gameplay found in Max and the Magic Marker, Magic Toychest or Crayon Physics,  with the seedy rock backdrops you’d expect in Guitar Hero. Your goal is to pour power pellets down the gullet of a sleeping starving rocker. You’ll use your guitars, amps and the rest of your rock gear to spill or bounce the food into the rocker’s open mouth.

The first levels involve bouncing a steady stream of pellets into the rocker’s mouth, then obstacles, special food and special gear are quickly added. As obstacles are added, though, it becomes more difficult to tell obstacles from environment.  The rocker seems to have a special love for sushi, donuts and mini-pizzas, which are worth extra calories. You’ll need to achieve a benchmark in calories in order to progress to the next level. This is ideal Facebook difficulty, not too hard for a casual slacking game, with the option to replay for the perfectionists amoung us.

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Say What You See presents a canvas with a music festival scene, and asks players to find band and musician names in the picture. The canvas is a rebus, so for example, a bumblebee, the number eleven and the Spanish flag would be Bee + Once,  Beyonce. The puzzles have quite a range in difficulty, from the incredibly obvious (The statue of a madonna is clearly Madonna) to thought-provoking (No example for this one, I’ll let you get the brain-tickling ah-ha moment on your own).

When you spot a band or artist name in the picture, tap it and a Qwerty keyboard comes up for you to type in your answer. You’ll get a green light for success or a red for failure. The game is pretty forgiving about spelling and punctuation. A yellow light tips you off when you’re on the right track, but not getting the right name. Usually this was me wondering if a band name had “the” or not. When you’re right, that part of the picture fades to gray to let you it’s been completed.

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Stranded Without A Phone is an iGadget game from indie developer Gilligames, set in the same universe at their previous release Space HoRSE. (No knowledge of Space HoRSE is required to play and love Stranded, but it does explain why the protagonist is wearing what looks like a stylish dress-shirt-and-diaper ensemble.)  I enjoyed the island survival and crafting found in Sims2 Castaway andLost In Blue 2, so I went in with high hopes for Stranded Without A Phone.

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Indie designer Seth Alter’s Neocolonialism is a PC strategy game about taking over the world. But don’t start training an army or building a barracks, this serious game invites players to take on their friends, or the AI, though financial soft power and economic control.

Players assume the roles of greedy capitalists, that is, investors, and try to control the world. Straight violence isn’t the answer, but funding puppet governments is totally acceptable! So is insider trading, manipulating votes, and skimming money into your private account. By using game mechanics to represent the relationship between the investor’s financial choices and the worldwide consequences, Alter creates a simulation that’s playable as a strategy game and informative on other levels.

I’ve played Sid Meier’s Civ a few times with a non-violent house role, battling friends and the jerk Montezuma to control the globe by dominating trade routes, controlling resources, and spreading culture. Players who enjoy that sort of strategic challenge will enjoy the gameplay involved in Neocolonialism. Alter has aligned gameplay goals with economic exploitation, which uses both the moral thoughtfulness players have making virtual political decisions in Positech’s Democracy or Max Barry’s NationStates, and our desires to succeed in multiplayer games, and he creates a strategy sim that’s serious, moral and still engaging.

The Neocolonialism game map puts north on the bottom, and south on top. Alter hopes an upside-down worldmap will provoke discomfort, and draw attention to economic inequality between regions.  The reoriented map isn’t so usual that it brings social discomfort for me. As veteran boardgamers know, playing a game set on a world map, like Pandemic or Axis&Allies, means that someone at the table’s going to be sitting with the map upside-down. But it does require more thought and inconvenience to navigate on the upside-down map, and it works well with Neocolonialism’s disruptive themes and ideas of privilege.

The game is currently in alpha. The alpha version can be downloaded here from Subaltern Games, and there’s a Greenlight for Neocolonialism for distribution through Steam.

There’s a Kickstarter for the game too. Backers at the top tier receive a re-oriented play map, and a credit as an “Orthodox Cartographer”, a delightful bit of Orwellian phrasing. With enough money, Alter is saying, and you can have things your way! Pay enough, and you have have it the easy way, where you don’t have to think too much.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – ‘Neocolonialism’: Fill Your Bank Account, While Ruining The World

[wiiandthekid-blog]

Indiecade at E3: ibb and obb from Sparpweed

A 2D Portal, without the hassle of laying out portals? Sign me up! ibb and obb by Sparpweed is due to release Q4 2011 on PSN and Steam. The curator at Indiecade’s E3 booth stated that the game will have local co-op only at launch, but will update with online co-op.

It was originally developed as an Unreal Tournament mod as a type of graduate project. He locked the camera to create a 2D sidescroller even though it contained all 3D elements. It worked well enough such that he went back and redid the whole thing in Sony’s Phyre Engine. The curator stated that the developer is projecting roughly 5 hours of gameplay.

The main mechanic is that there are doors/portals along the ground or walls that flip the game’s gravity. Players can jump on objects and each other to navigate through the stage. There were enemies in the demo that could only be killed on one side of the game’s central plane. This sometimes required jumping through door and walking upside down. To further emphasize how much co-op is essential, when one player dies, the other also dies.

The doors themselves add to the co-op experience. While some are white and allow both players to pass, others are color-coded to match the main characters and allow only for character specific passage. This results in challenging and frustrating puzzles, as shown here:

As the Indiecade curator understood it, the graphics in the above video are placeholders and are subject to change. Hopefully the developer will create a mode where both characters are controlled on one controller, likeTwisted Pixel’s “Two Girls, One Controller” mode in the upcoming Ms. Splosion Man.

Ibb and Obb was also featured at Indiecade’s booth at E3 in 2008. This game is definitely a long time comin’. Fingers crossed the team makes its release.

Ibb and Obb official website/Sparpweed

via diy gamer