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Indie Game Night 2-17
Monday nights, 6PM, at Awesome Inc., we meet up to expose ourselves to indie games. C’mon out and look at how small game designers are pushing the medium, or bring something we can play!
This week we played Flappy Bird, & Jazzpunk.
Flappy Bird
Flappy Bird, with limited marketing and incredibly simple mechanics, recently exploded (and subsequently imploded) in the world of indie gaming. The rise and fall were meteoric. It has been fascinating to see how much the game has garnered the attention it has, with the mechanic as simple as possible.
What does the game do well:
- make it easy to get back into
- simple mechanic, utilized well
- tapped into the mobile consciousness (a game easily played in short spurts)
We related the game to the release of the game “Badland,” an iOS title that has a very similar mechanic, with different art work, aesthetic, puzzles and other similar features — that managed to be critically acclaimed.
In many ways Dong utilized many of the techniques used by indie developers. Create a game to throw at the app store and hope something sticks.
Jazzpunk
Jazzpunk is a cinematic first person spy thriller game currently being pushed by Adult Swim. The game is sort of similar to Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving though made by a different developer. The game has a quirky sense of humor, buoyed by a distinctive sense of style and flavor.
There’s so much to the game that is not necessary to complete the mission that adds to the overall sense of the game. For example, you can degaus pigeons to grab pheromone cologne. It’s not imperative that you complete these side quests, but they contribute to the game feel as a whole. The game creates depth through interaction and environmental design.
It’s interesting the difference in experiences. On one hand, you can explore everything and get a very wacky experience, complete with frogger mini-games and a movie theater. However, if you follow the main missions, then you can feel like you’re in a spy movie the whole time. Each moment is a one-off experience.
We also played the mini-game Wedding Qake, a rare combination of Quake first-person shooters and weddings.
Have a game you enjoyed? Bring it next week at 6PM.
