IndieCade are coming to GameCity Squared!
Exhibiting in the IndieVillage arena, a diverse range of playable games will be featured for your amusement and delight.
Featuring:
Akrasia - MIT Gambit Lab (US/Singapore)
Akrasia is an elegant and artful experiment in expressing an emotional experience through a game mechanic. Eating the rainbow-colored pill takes you into a colorful cave, which remains that way as long as you keep taking pills. But if you take too many pills...or not enough...or go to deep in, the world becomes dark and suddenly, you are being pursued by a monster and you must find the exit. A metaphor for drug addiction, Akrasia takes players on an emotional roller-coaster without the benefit of an elaborate storyline. Akrasia is part of a growing genre of serious games that attempt to convey complex ideas through abstracted gameplay.
Profile: Team AHA!, forged in the fires of Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in the summer of ‘08, is made up of a diverse and international cast of characters with one common binding force, games. Students representing the various tertiary institutions in Singapore, ranging from the Polytechnics to the Universities, across several disciplines, from Business IT to New Media, are brought to Cambridge to work with researchers and students from MIT to develop innovations for the games industry. The team consists of: Product owner Doris C. Rusch, who holds a post doctoral position at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, where she investigates design strategies to expand game’s emotional scope. She idolizes Nanny Ogg and someday wants to make a game about her view of life. Our producer Paul Yang, Communications and New Media major (recently graduated), who draws upon his expertise in film to drive story-telling in games. He’s also a kick ass guitarist, who turned the summer of 08 into a musical experience. Artists Shawn Dominic Loh, a passionate 3D modeller and hardcore gamer who lives life to the fullest, and Zou Xinru, a fresh graduate from Nanyang Technological University, majoring in Digital Animation, an avid gamer with a penchant for RPGs of the romantic kind. Programmers Stephie Wu, while not playing MapleStory, only the cutest MMORPG of all time, she enjoys reading, sleeping, rhythm games, and 16-bit RPGs, and Law Kok Chung an undergraduate student of National University of Singapore, who prefers to spend his time playing RPGs and working towards creating his own in the near future. QA lead Alexander Luke Chong, who is doing a degree in Business IT, often indulging in Sci-Fi or Fantasy books and Japanese Anime with horrible plots. Audio designer Erik Sahlström who works as a DJ, spinning 'house' music (mainly) in Indonesia and endangered the streets of Cambridge during the summer of 08 with his skateboard.Game designer Louis Teo is trying to finish up his New Media diploma in Republic Polytechnic while writing short stories and working on his digital paintings. His tongue- in-cheek melancholy is legendary.
ClassicNight (Korea)
ClassicNight is a lovely strategy/arcade game from JoYoung Won / Akarolis, a Korean developer, with novel gameplay and a meditative play style. You collect light for the moon, who has chosen to glow brighter than the sun. Won has found a clever blend of mechanics, and gameplay moves smoothly and gently, creating a different experience from a traditional arcade or strategy game. Collecting bits of light is constantly engaging for the player, but ClassicNight never raises your blood pressure too high, maintaining a pleasant flow state for the player.
Dear Esther (Gamemaker and Composer Attending, UK)
Dear Esther is a mod of Half Life 2 that uses the technology and appearance of traditional games in a very innovative and non-traditional way. A ghost story written by Dan Pichbeck, Dear Esther is a narrative dispersed through a digital space, encouraging exploration by the player, but also allowing her to navigate the story in the order she chooses, discovering different elements and moments at her own pace and through her own experiences and perceptions. Pinchbeck has created a layered narrative, strengthened and reinforced by symbols and codes also hidden throughout the game space, creating a complex space commenting on the fragmentary nature of narrative and interactivity.
Moon Stories (Argentina)
A trilogy of small, poetic games designed by Argentinean developer Daniel Benmergui. Daniel has drawn from his own life experience and emotions, and as a result the games of Moon Stories are small and surprising, each one quietly evoking moods and thoughts as the players navigate the play space and rules. Each game encourages the player to explore and discover the rules and goals of the game through experimentation and play. By occluding the rules and goals, the games are able to create revelatory moments and build a strong connection between the player and the artist's personal stories and statements.
Nanobots (Canada)
This charming old school point and click adventure game has a unique twist: a group of tiny robots (who incidentally hate each other) have to work together to solve a series of puzzles. Each one has a single, unique capability to contribute to saving the group from their creator's nefarious thesis supervisor. But if they don't keep each other happy, they won't cooperate. The puzzles involve a complex combination of maneuvers mixed with interpersonal (inter-robotic?) skills to get the cranky robots to collaborate effectively. The stated goal of this small Canadian team, lead by Erin "The Ivy" Robinson, is to make a game where the story is completely integrated with the gameplay.
Profile: Nanobots was created by three unlikely teammates from different age groups, nationalities, and even continents. Erin was a teenage university student in Canada. Vince was an American expat raising his young family in Japan. Chris was an eager and endlessly positive musician from Europe. They met in 2005 on the Adventure Game Studio (AGS) forums and created one game together, Spooks. The success of that project (the game won two community "AGS Awards") inspired them to work on something more ambitious. Just a few months later, Erin pitched her idea of a game with six interchangeable player characters. Over the next year and a half the team worked on the game in their spare time. Although short in length, the game was complex: the AGS engine wan't built to handle pseudo-3D puzzles, among other things, but Vince's ninja-like coding abilities always prevailed. Chris composed a soundtrack that was fun and lighthearted, but memorable ("It is how one might imagine a fanciful factory would sound," said Adventure Gamers). In July of 2008, just in time for Canada Day, the game was finally released. Since then it has won three AGS Awards (Best Gameplay, Best Puzzles, and Best Programming).
Papermint (Gamemakers attending, Austria)
Developed by Avaloop, a Viennese development studio, Papermint is a radical departure from the current spate of high-end, 3D multiplayer games. A cross between a game and a social virtual world, Papermint's unique paperdoll aesthetic of flat characters and objects in a 3D environment creates a totally fresh and original look and feel. It's gameplay focuses on social interactions, exploration and collection, and among other things, your "wobble" paperdoll avatar can transform into a rolling ball to become part of a soccer game, or fold into a paper boat to sail the seas. Papermint is a charming, artful and magical virtual place that reminds us what it means to be playful.
Path, The (Gamemakers attending, Belgium)
The Path is the latest offering by award-winning Belgium-based game developers Tale of Tales. A surreal twist on the classic fairytale Little Red Riding Hood, The Path is a Gothic horror tale that subverts traditional game mechanics in the same way that a dream subverts narrative. You are inevitably compelled to violate its only instruction—to go to grandmother's house and stay on the path—and discover the rich and unexpected landscape of experience that awaits you. Each step you make in the unexplored territory of the woods contributes to constructing a different variation on grandmother's house once you arrive at your destination. As with Tale of Tales' previous games, The Path's immersive world, deft visual and spatial storytelling, and phenomenal artistry make it one of the highlights of this years' Festival.
Shadow Physics (US)
In Shadow Physics, your are a two-dimensional character (a shadow character) interacting with a three-dimensional space space. The shadows of the 3D objects create varied terrain and obstacles for your character, and manipulating light and objects makes enormous changes to the shadow space, creating many intriguing and entertaining puzzles. With Shadow Physics, Steve Swink and Scott Anderson exploit a highly developed non-gaming technology (shadow maps) to create gameplay scenarios and puzzles. A truly innovative and inventive gameplay experience, Shadow Physics is very simply about a 2D character interacting with a 3D world, and the play and situations that emerge.
Sowlar - DigiPen Institute of Technology (US)
An epic adventure in farming spanning a galaxy, Sowlar is highly entertaining. Designed by Odd Man In, a team at the DigiPen Institue of Technology, Sowlar wears its heart on its sleeve as it explores farming and environmental issues right out front, wrapped in compelling gameplay and entertaning art. Sowlar is designed with an extremely old school aesthetic, ASCII art and levels, and a general look that conjures up Apple II games. The bright, lightly amusing art provides a lovely support for the gameplay, which is deep and engaging. The game never preaches or discusses issues, but simply immerses the player in a struggle which cannot help but make a point. The simplicity of the artisitic design plays well with this immersion, and allows graphics to become strong visual symbols within this thesis.
Profile: Odd Man In is a four-man freshman game team at DigiPen Institute of Technology. Aging from 18 to 32, the members have had a lot of experience playing games, but very little coding and game development experience with the exception of Robert who has dabbled in code for about 3 years and Ed who worked for a small developer for about 4 years. Each member has strong qualities they bring to the table – Kyle is a quality task manager that keeps the team focused and on task while trying to keep morale high and teamwork solid. Dan is musically inclined and keeps the content of the game in line with the goals that are established (ie we're making this game for casual gamers, not the hardcore). Robert is very technically-minded and can see the architecture of every system in the game in his head and is the go-to guy for all questions that begin with “How do I...?” Ed is the team's ASCII artist and idea tweaker, as well as the marketing and promotional guru. “With our powers combined, we are Odd Man In.” All members are avid gamers and see games not just as a form of entertainment but also as art. After graduation, each hopes to attain employment in the professional video game industry as coders, designers, and/or producers.
(This list is unconfirmed and subject to change)
