Jeux
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The 14th Annual Independent Games Festival
Organizers of the third annual Independent Games Festival China have announced the winners for this weekend's indie showcase in Shanghai, with Feng Li's 2D action beat-em-up Pixel May Cry (pictured) taking home the prize for Best Game, in addition to a host of other notable winners. Following the announcement of the IGF China finalists in September, the selected teams attended a special awards show at the Shanghai Exhibition Center during GDC China on Saturday night, where the winners took home a prestigious IGF award, and a cash prize ranging from RMB3,000 ($450 USD) to RMB20,000 ($3,060 USD). Guest presenters from the independent games community on hand to help give out awards included GDC China Independent Games Summit speakers such as Amir Rao ( Bastion ), Baiyon ( PixelJunk Eden/4am ) and Jenova Chen ( Flower/Journey ).
The Weblog
In the latest postings over the last seven days, Gamasutra's jobs board plays host to roles in every major discipline, including opportunities at Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group, Square Enix, and others. Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.
Logic Mazes
Most of the mazes on this site are pretty complicated—so, here are some easy mazes you might want to try. You can start with Easy Maze 1 and then follow the pointers to the other mazes, or you can go directly to Easy Maze 2 , 3 , 4 , or 5 . There are 12 interactive mazes here. They use a simple concept—you travel to a square that has either the same symbol or the same color as the square you just left—but there are added complications and some of the mazes are very tricky. These are called “Alice” mazes because they recall the scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice eats a piece of cake with the sign “Eat Me” and grows larger, then she drinks from a bottle marked “Drink Me” and becomes smaller. These mazes won’t make you larger or smaller, but the distance you travel in a move will get larger or smaller.
Lors du dernier salon des jeux de Cannes, j’ai fait la connaissance des deux auteurs de Et Toque, Barbara Turquier et Emmanuelle Piard. L’une des caractéristiques notables de Et Toque!, outre que c’est un jeu diablement amusant, est que ses deux auteurs sont des femmes.
Bruno Faidutti
Kory Heath Designs
Katamari Damacy is a game built around a brilliant core concept, but its overarching goal structure nearly ruins the experience for me. Here’s the brilliant part: you push around a growing ball which can grab literally any object in the game world if it grows large enough. Here’s the annoying part: in each of the main “Make a Star” levels of the game, if you don’t grow your Katamari big enough within a given amount of time, you have to start the level over again from the beginning. It’s easy to turn a fun, sandboxy pastime into a game by adding a time-pressure to it, but that’s almost always the least interesting way to do it, and it usually has negative side-effects. For instance, Katamari’s final level is 25 minutes long, and most players will need to play through it multiple times in order to win.
