More Indie games you should know
Posted by inpheaux on November 6th, 2005 at 6:55 am
Welcome to another thrilling installment of 'Indie Games You Should Know', a periodic segment here at DPad where we bring the existence of certain notable Independent Games to your attention. In particular, today we've got two games for you and one giant project full of a bunch of little games, so lets get started.
Cloud - Cloud is a game about clouds. It combines all the rolling-stuff-up fun of Katamari Damacy with neat globby cloud physics and a bonus side-serving of terminal illness. You pretty much spend your time flying around in the sky and manipulating clouds. You can take bright clouds and drag them around. Lead them into less-bright clouds and you'll convert the dingy clouds into bright ones and then be able to drag those. After a couple minutes of this you're dragging a supercell the size of Texas, ready to take on the world. You can also store these clouds and then fly around and release them like skywriting, which is necessary to complete some level objectives. Right now it's at a very early stage of the development process, but it's neat and free, so go check it out. There's four levels and a free-form level-building mode right now, with more to come.
Seiklus - Seiklus is a short little 2d platformer. It's a pretty simple game, but the art of the 2d platformer is one that's quickly being lost in today's market, so I feel obligated to give props to anyone still carrying the 2d platformer torch. In Seiklus you wander around this hand-drawn world collecting assorted colored . . things . . to help you proceed and solve puzzles. Apart from the little colored things you also have artifacts to collect that give you a special ability like the ability to see hidden platforms. Unlike Cloud, Seiklus is done. Very done, actually, it's been pretty much completed for the past couple years, but every time I mention it there's always someone who hasn't heard of it. So hey, it might be new to you. Go check it out.
Experimental Gameplay Project - I could probably do an 'indie games you should know' on nothing but EGP games, but I won't, because I'd never run out of things to feature. So instead I'm just going to give the project as a whole some coverage. The idea behind the project is that over the course of one semester a team of four students will attempt to produce ~50 games. They might not all be amazing, but some will be good, and will have been developed over a VERY short dev cycle. The project is in it's second semester right now, so new games should be showing up on a rather constant basis again, but as of yet I haven't come across any amazing must-play games. That will probably change at some point, though.
I brought up the Experimental Gameplay Project for another reason, too, not just that they have new stuff coming out again. Two weeks ago the project's creators had a rather lengthy article published over at Gamasutra. The article is a really neat look at their motivation behind starting the project, plus a recap of what exactly they learned from this endeavor. Even if you're not heavily in to game development it's a good read, and hey, if you are in to game development, definitely check it out since some of their findings can be applied to everything, not just the rapid prototyping process.
So there, there are some free little games for you to go waste time with. Have you got a favourite Indie game you'd like us to expose to a larger audience? Send it on in and we'll queue it up for the next installment.
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