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The Games That Are Too Underground to Be Indie. Many marginalized creators in the industry don’t relate to “indie” or “AAA” because their work can be viewed as too experimental or offbeat—and thus, not as marketable as more popular games. Their approaches to development may also be hindered by only having access to open source tools, and not being able to afford more sophisticated resources (although that will hopefully begin to change now that powerful game development engines like Unity and Unreal 4 are available for free). Instead, they create their games using accessible tools like Twine, Ren’Py, Game Maker, and Construct 2 to build new stories and create different worlds.

And as ever more diverse creators dig deeper into the frameworks of open source or inexpensive tools, their own life experiences seep into the games they create. The content most of these games explore is often experimental, autobiographical, or political. In She Who Fights Monsters, the player must help Jennifer live with her alcoholic father. Raghav raghaaav sur Twitter : "How to deal with making something as sad as a•part•ment: don't take it too seriously! #aptgame @aseparatedplace.

Punk Games. By Zoe Quinn It's no secret independent game makers are feeling the ever-increasing pull these days between making art and making rent. What's more, being an "indie" -- if that even means anything anymore -- and publishing on community-driven digital platforms can put you directly in the crosshairs of an increasingly-hostile online audience. Believe me, I'd know. And I'm hardly alone in this: strung up between social and economic tensions, many creators and critics have left the industry entirely over the last seven months' crucible of online abuse and hopelessness.

Games need a united punk movement, and we're finding one in altgames. It's far from new, too. Three Chords In 1976, an english fanzine called Sideburns published an illustration of three chords, captioned "This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. "For me its a desire to get out from under the mechanic-focussed design practice that I feel a lot of indie spaces treat as gospel" @ceMelusine @icepotato @Erichermit @inurashii. A·part·ment sur Twitter : "It's #screenshotsaturday ! A screenshot from one of the #aptgame vignettes created by @raghaaav. A·part·ment sur Twitter : "Celebrating how many people we've brought to tears! #aptgame #GDC2015 #IGF2015... My IndieCade East 2015 talk (text): “creating alternative game & art scenes” | T R O N M A X I M U M . N E T.

This is the text version of my talk at IndieCade East 2015. my actual talk wasn’t exactly like this, but you should get the gist of it. also, there has been absolutely no proofreading done whatsoever, so take that however you will. your boy tron loves you. creating alternative game & art scenes the year 2014 brought on many, many unfortunate things in the world of video games. for every great leap forward that the culture made, three leaps were deducted. it feels like although many of us have been watching the cracks in the roof increase, many of us decided last year that we were done waiting for the landlord to fix it, and that it was time for some of us to get our hands dirty. one thing that people love to do– not just in games, but in many artistic affairs, and really, LIFE, when someone’s got such a strong and open beef with something– is to bring up some kind of perceived lack of effort, or some kind of call-of-arms to do more. “why not just make your own?”

Aether. Art Games. Page 2. Cavesweeper (QUIMDUNG) Reveal the soul gems of monsters in this addictive puzzle game inspired by Minesweeper, NetHack, and Diablo. – [Author's description] [Play Online] Travelling Salesman (Rabbit from Hell) you must find the path that goes through all positions on a 2d grid, without visiting any location twice. – [Author's description] [Play Online (HTML5)] Sheep (Rabbit from Hell) You are the shepherd in charge of taking the sheep to their pens – [Author's description] [Play Online (HTML5)] GBSenku (Miguel Sanchez) A valid move is to jump a peg orthogonally over an adjacent peg into a hole two positions away and then to remove the jumped peg – [Author's description] [Play Online (HTML5)] I MOVE THE PEOPLE (Conrad Hughes) …a Twine (text adventure) game about elevator algorithms and some other things. - [Author's description] [Play Online]

Glorious Trainwrecks | Make Games Constantly Forever. Video Games Shouldn’t Be Afraid to Mean Something. Bioshock 2. Where Bioshock was, I feel, an ignorant work (and I must admit that I may actually be wrong about this, so if you think I missed the mark, please explain) that essentially complained "nooo! You can't tell a story without all choice being an illusion! " What was strange was that the game itself had been all about choice (in gameplay) up until that point, so having the narrative suddenly go "nope, it was all a lie! " seemed less like a great point and more like Ken Levine (a man whom I have nigh-endless respect for) suddenly sticking his head up his ass. Bioshock 2, interestingly enough, was a wonderful counterpoint to that. It turned you into a slave—a big daddy prototype bonded to a little girl. Bioshock 2 essentially said "you know what? There is nothing unique (or, dare I say, interesting?)

The strength of the medium is in its interactivity, and that's what Bioshock 2 was all about. That meant something. So yeah, sometimes, meaning in games is good. Auteurship, Indie Games, and Out of this World/Another World | The Artful Gamer. When I bought this game for my 8 mhz 286 Amstrad PC in 1991, it barely ran. I had to turn the sound quality down to the lowest possible settings, and even then it only ran at a slow pace. Despite the relatively poor framerate at the time, the introduction still managed to be absolutely jaw-dropping. I had never seen animation so fluid, detailed, and life-like on my PC. That night I called a few friends over, and we crowded around the monitor to watch the introduction over and over, each time trying to imagine how such a feat of animation might be accomplished.

The dark, brooding, almost secretive atmosphere of the introduction pulled me immediately into the game, through the fanciful depiction of an experimental physicist’s life – the hero of the story: Lester Chaykin. After struggling to play through the game on our 286 for months, my parents gave in to buying a new family computer: a lightning-fast IBM PS/1 486 PC with a whopping 4 megabytes of RAM! Gameplay Artwork and Graphics. Writing/thesis.pdf. Games. Five games for the price of none! A bonus game for the price of one! It could only be the most fabulous Bungle of your dreams! Play the games your grandma might have bought you at a mall in Singapore by mistake! Experience the highs and lows of spying, gardening, dying, loathing, and gluing! Maybe you can even go fishing! The Mumble Indie Bungle was created in GameMaker for Mac and GameMaker: Studio.

You can read my writing about the bungle on my blog. The Mumble Indie Bungle has appeared in the exhibitions Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start at SPACES, A MAZE Indie Pop-up at the Republika Festival, and Art & the Viewser at the Allegheny College art gallery. Go to the Mumble Indie Bungle downloads page. Art Games: Best Indy Titles ~ mentisworks. When I think of art that has influenced me most, it is generally work done by individuals. I can't recall the last time a corporation created a brilliant painting. I find that this also tends to be true in the emerging area of art games.

Individuals are not generally driven to create purely for profit, and have more leeway to experiment and create according to their own artistic vision. I thought it was time to compile a "best of" list for art games, because there has only been one other such list that I recall online. I'm sure someone will correct me on that point if there has been in fact another well drafted list somewhere out there. The first list can be found in an article on Artifical.dk, titled Art Games - Artificial's List [...]. This was also about two years ago, and since then more art games have surfaced. As such, I am providing this list of 27 titles. So, without further ado, I present to you the Best Indy Art Games... 27. 26. 25. 24. 23.

Direct and to the point. 22. 21. 20. Art Games.