Intelligent Artifice

Greenhouse, Penny Arcade’s digital distribution system April 13, 2008

Penny Arcade is setting up their own digital distribution system, Greenhouse, together with Hothead Games. This will be used to distribute PA’s game “On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness” (which is coming out for the Mac, yay), as well as… other games. They’re not saying much for now. Probably because they don’t know yet.

According to this interview over at Wired it was just a logical extrapolation of the way they do things. They control the distribution of their comic, so why not of their game?

No mention anywhere of that other indie game digital distributor, Manifesto Games.

(Via Boing Boing.)

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Love, a one-man indie MMO February 29, 2008

Jim Rossignol has written an article over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun about Love, a ‘first person not so massively multi player online procedural adventure game’ developed by Eskil Steenberg.

The game itself, dubbed Love (as in For The Love Of Game Development), is an exploration-based moderately-multiplayer FPS with astounding impressionistic visuals and a procedurally generated universe. Since Steenberg is a one man show, he’s relying on clever maths to build the world for him and then clever gamers to come in and help him figure out where to take it, and what to do with it.

It sounds like an amazing effort. Great look too!

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“And Yet It Moves,” an independent game from Austria February 23, 2008

And Yet It Moves is an independent game made by four students at the Technical University in Vienna. Um, and yes, it was made over a year ago, don’t know why I didn’t blog about it before…

It has a great look:

Great use of production restrictions. Gameplay is interesting, but I feel the level design could be better (that’s code for: I couldn’t beat the game within 10 minutes :P). It even runs on a Mac!

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20+ Tools For Creating Your Own Games January 9, 2008

Mashable has a list of tools for creating your own games - Flash and/or homebrew games, that is. I haven’t checked out every single link, and perhaps I could come up with a similar list in 5 minutes with Google, but hey, Mashable is a pretty cool site. Who knows what you might find here? Cool ideas, prototyping tools, new business opportunities?

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Pac-Man as interactive fiction November 19, 2007

This is probably really old but I am not really keeping up to date with the Interactive Fiction world: Pac-Man as a text adventure.

Pac-Man was a junkie, eyes oozing pus, haunted by the ghosts of those he’d killed.

They called him Pac-Man because he was always packing heat, lightning-quick on the draw with a personal arsenal second to none. But today he woke up in an alley, all weapons missing but his mouth, an animal, starving hysterical naked, trapped in an unfamiliar maze of mean streets. Needing a fix. Needing a fix like nothing else.

And the ghosts are coming.

You can guess the rest, but it’s well done.

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Joerg Plewe and Flying Guns September 26, 2007

Joerg Plewe currently is a senior Java and GUI developer and has been in many areas of IT ranging from embedded programming to bioinformatics and games. Joerg has studied physics and used to work with languages like C/C++, Forth, Lisp, Assembly and others in all kinds of environments.

That may be so, but I know Joerg Plewe as the programmer I used to work with over 10 years ago at Blue Byte Software. He is a very serious programmer, and almost talked me into developing an interest in FORTH. The world might have been very different if he had succeeded.

He has a blog over at java.net where he mainly talks about Java (duh), but also about physics/dynamics stacks and cloud rendering.

He is also one of the key people behind Flying Guns, an open source distributed 3D simulation framework (aka 3D action flight sim). It is based on a framework for distributed simulations, all written in Java. Pretty impressive!

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Braid is coming to Xbox Live Arcade September 23, 2007

Braid, one of the more interesting indie games I’ve noticed in the last few years, is coming to Xbox Live Arcade. Which means I will be able to play it, seeing as I don’t own a PC.

There’s a lot more I could say about Braid and indie games. And perhaps one day I will.

(Via Kim Pallister.)

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A Tribute to the Rolling Boulder August 19, 2007

Through the Independent Gaming Source I found out about A Tribute to the Rolling Boulder, an indie game by Petri Purho.

In it, you play the boulder from the first Indiana Jones movie, and you need to defend the honor of two fertility statues from the lecherous advances of brown-hatted archaeologists. I presume it’s a PC game, so I haven’t played it myself, but the concept is hilarious. Be sure to check out the video (skip to the end if you’re getting bored, it rocks).

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Former Rockstar Games employee develops messiah complex May 19, 2007

VIENNA, Austria — Almost exactly one year after the sudden closure of his workplace, former Rockstar Vienna employee Reinhard Schmid announces the release of the game “I Am Jesus”.

Released as a free download for PC on the website of aptly-named Suicidal Entertainment, this may be the most offensive game since Postal. We cannot describe the contents or topic of the game on a family blog, but be warned that it makes even atheists blush. Schmid, father of two and described by former co-workers as a mild-mannered animator, credits himself for every aspect of the game, with help from God and the Lord Jesus Christ on the story and voice recordings. On being asked about the highly controversial nature of his game, he claimed that “people need help to not take themselves too serious.”

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Article on independent game development February 23, 2003

O’Reilly’s ONLamp.com has an article on independent game development. It discusses Garage Games, the Torque engine, the Independent Game Developers Conference, open source middleware, the independent game business strategy, and scripting languages.

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