Indie Game Jam 2004 Recounted 41
scishop writes "While most of the gaming world has been focused on the dazzling smoke and mirrors special effects of E3, Gamasutra has published an interesting article on a different game convention: Indie Game Jam '04 where two dozen game developers spent four days creating a variety of games built around the same engine in an effort to encourage innovation. The results included apps centered around boxing, yoga and flaming hamsters." Our earlier story over at Slashdot Games has more links and information.
Hm.... (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks but i'll take smoke & mirror titles Doom III and Half Life 2 rather than 'yoga challenge', or 'flaming hamster wars'!
Download the games (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.indiegamejam.com/igj2/games.html [indiegamejam.com]
Some things to note (Score:5, Informative)
The article is building up hype for the event starting on March 18 through March 21, 2004.
According to here [indiegamejam.com]... these guys are using SourceForge for hosting the games.
Downloading the games now, but I think these are windows only.
You can play them with WINE! (Score:2, Informative)
Lets not forget the HUGE ammount of Native games for Linux! [wikipedia.org] and BSD [wikipedia.org]
Please help eliminate this misconception that there are no games for these platforms by adding to these lists!
Re:You can play them with WINE! (Score:3, Insightful)
From the glutil.h(a common header):
#define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN
#include <windows.h>
#include <windowsx.h>
#include <math.h>
#include <gl/gl.h>
...
I don't think I will be able to compile this natively:-( Sorta sad that they picked opengl and then didn't go the next step with a platform independent wrapper.
Innovation? (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't use the same engine...
Re:Innovation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Innovation? (Score:2)
hmm.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure the exponents of the game will argue and say that's precisely why it's the game - an experience that you go through. But, in this world where the experience is being brought closer to reality, why not the game play and feel then? Sure it would make the game harder to play, but the degree of hardness would increase in doing "simple" stuff and the game designers wouldnt have to think of complex/hideous creatures who by virtue of their design become harder to kill
On the other hand, games that have provided a total and absolute break from reality, but with a goal that is difficult to achieve, yet forcing you to jump through mostly similar hoops - have become popular as well. That's because, IMO, they were able to trigger within us the simplest of all human desires - to succeed
I believe a game to become interesting and popular has to not only have stunning visuals - sure they enhance the gameplaying experience, but I don't think they always make such a big difference. The factors that make a game popular is how much variety and challenge the game provides, how much it enables a player to "relate" to it (the "relation" to game is most always in a phantom sense - no one goes on a killing spree in real life) and how involved it makes the gameplayer.
Games don't have to have dazzling graphics. I think it's a sense of attachment, of being able to relate to game that becomes the prime factor in the game popularity.
Re:hmm.. (Score:5, Interesting)
There are lots of games out there which don't fit into the classic categories, but the company that I think make the biggest effort with new game play rather than better graphics is Nintendo. Games like Lougie's Mansion, Pikmin [nintendo.com] and to be titles like Jungle Beat [nintendo.com] are (will) be great fun to play, because they're different. I'm not saying Halo 2 or Doom 3 will be bad, just that it's more of the same. Think of how they could be made more original, see what Nintendo did to beat 'em ups with Smash Brothers. That is still the most fun I've had with friends in front of any kind of computer.
America's Army (Score:1)
A while ago i played a bit of Delta Force: Blackhawk Down at a friend's house, i was standing right infront of this guy who was shooting at me and i hardly got hurt, while in AA you are likely to get killed for peeking around the corner for more than a second.
Granted, it's real players Vs. AI, but still...
Re:hmm.. (Score:3, Informative)
Nolan Bushnell (Atari Pong) used to talk of a successful game as being "hot", in a way that I think today might imagine the player as a collection of myriad stimulus/response ports, e.g., sight, sound, touch, worry, planning, speed, balance, ego. (I could - and apparently did - go on.)
"Hot" is activating as many of those as possible.
Deformable environments and weapons (Score:4, Interesting)
What really makes the game unrealistic is the lack of deformable environments. You can duck behind a plaster wall and have two guys open up with a BAR and an RPG and you're totally safe. A group of enemies will take cover in a building that gets hit with a ton of RPGs and grenades and they're never threatened.
The buildings should totally fall apart; they should have holes blown in them, stairs fall apart, fires started. You should get shot through walls and floors. And so on.
They've done an OK job with the weapons out of the box, although I still think that the sniper rifle is far too easy. Having actually fired numerous scoped weapons hunting, it's NEVER that easy, and the kill zone on a deer is a lot bigger than the kill zone on a man. And then there's the question of why a
Re:Deformable environments and weapons (Score:1)
People just like variety in weapons and apparent weapon damage so not surprising how a bunch of weapons which really about kill anyone in the same amount of time have their differen
Re:Deformable environments and weapons (Score:2)
Have walls comprised of 3-5 different materials, varying from undeformable (bunkers) to easily deformable (interior plaster or wood), and have the deformation be in chunks, using graphics to simulate the randomness of a hole actually blown in a building. Material strength could be meshed against the strength and number of projectile hits to determine when a chunk was blown out.
Buildings could be 'built' of material mixes such that only a few would actually collapse, and they c
Re:Deformable environments and weapons (Score:2)
Playing Stunt Hamsters now... (Score:3, Interesting)
05 50 1337 (Score:4, Funny)
No.
Important point (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Important point (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:Important point (Score:2)
Are not games all the same in the end (Score:1, Interesting)
I use to love spending hours playing games, but in the end I realised the psyology is the same for every game. So I got bored. Sure the same principal can apply to other mediums but gaming as it is has wasted to much of my time.
I'm guessing the next evolution will be virtual gaming in ever "sense".
Re:Are not games all the same in the end (Score:2, Insightful)
some games playable without ps2 controller (Score:5, Informative)
Sleep wit' da Fishes!
Nebulae Drawing Tool
Stunt Hamsters
Deadly Dance of the Robots
Robot Circus (sort of)
BootLooter
Some of the downloads are huge because of large music files (even after downsampling) and image files. We'll try to institute a system next year that allows things like replacing WAVs with MP3s without needing to touch the source code, so we can shrink the downloads more effectively after the event.
As a game reviewer (Score:4, Interesting)
Yet when we criticised the underuse of physics in Max Payne 2, our comments system was overloaded with people complaining "look at the pretty ragdolls! the boxes FALL OVER!"
People don't seem to realise that so much more is possible with Havok technology - and as long as they don't realise, game developers will continue to be lazy
Gamasutra? (Score:1)
I hope I'm not the only one that noticed Gamasutra is spelled a lot like Kamasutra [kamasutra.com]. What kind of message are they trying to convey?