Indie Video Games
I have a request of you all.
A while ago, Mario (I think) posted a link to Jason Rohrer's game "Passage." I liked it a lot and now I routinely use it in my classes to teach the video game medium.
As I've gone forward in grad school, I've started to develop a niche of study--new media, which includes comics and video games. Now, this April, I'm going to be presenting at an education conference in Michigan about ways that teachers can inexpensively use video games in their classrooms.
Passage is great because it's free, graphically low-key, short, and tries to tell a story using the unique features of the medium. What I'm asking of you all is this: do you know of any other indie games that are like this? I'm going to use Passage as my main example but I'd like to also include a list of other indie games that might have classroom application to teach students about the medium and its place in culture. Also a possibility are games that you can get from Steam, because I'm going to talk about that as well. But the ideal game will be kinda short-ish, will run on school computers, and is free or nearly free. Any ideas?
A while ago, Mario (I think) posted a link to Jason Rohrer's game "Passage." I liked it a lot and now I routinely use it in my classes to teach the video game medium.
As I've gone forward in grad school, I've started to develop a niche of study--new media, which includes comics and video games. Now, this April, I'm going to be presenting at an education conference in Michigan about ways that teachers can inexpensively use video games in their classrooms.
Passage is great because it's free, graphically low-key, short, and tries to tell a story using the unique features of the medium. What I'm asking of you all is this: do you know of any other indie games that are like this? I'm going to use Passage as my main example but I'd like to also include a list of other indie games that might have classroom application to teach students about the medium and its place in culture. Also a possibility are games that you can get from Steam, because I'm going to talk about that as well. But the ideal game will be kinda short-ish, will run on school computers, and is free or nearly free. Any ideas?
Comments
But, maybe this will help: I'm thinking of games that could be considered literary or artistic, that is, they have something profound to say (or at least they think they do) OR alternately, that they utilize very specifically some unique aspect of video games to function.
So, for example, part of what Passage does is that it tries to remind the player of death, the futility of life, and the passage of time. It uses the interactivity of the medium to put the player FULLY into the persona of the main character so the player feels the death more personally.
Either of those. Does that help at all?
Andrew, these games are fairly popular on newgrounds, but have you ever heard of the "Color my world" series on newgrounds? Here's a link to just one of them... if you go to "Submissions by Silverstitch" on the left side of the page you can see some of the other "Colour my.." games he's made. I would definitely consider those games artistic. The point is not to beat the game, it is to explore the game's environment and to go through it slowly, seeing the little things in the world that can bring joy to you (or at least the character you play).
Yeah, the games are cheesy, probably an attempt to be romantic. I think it's similar enough to Passage that you could look into using the game as another example though.
If I think of any other games you might like for this, I'll be sure to post them here.
This is actually a really really really damn good top down shooting game. If you have a 360 and you don't own this game, then fuck you too.
I've been playing a lot of Captain Forever lately. It's a browser-based spaceship shooter game with a twist: you can pull the pieces of downed enemy ships with the mouse and attach them to your own ship to augment weapons, thruster and armor. The game works in a backstory to explain the cyclical nature of the gameplay. Basically you try to advance as far as possible (advancement being measured by the classes of enemy ships you take out). It's a rewarding system, and the drag-and-drop mechanics for upgrading are novel and allow for a lot of freedom in ship design. Gets wickedly difficult when you start reaching Hotel and India-class ships.
And Judith was perfect.. that's pretty much exactly what I'm looking for. Games that are somewhat short, do something interesting with the medium, and don't take a lot of skill to get through.
Grave*
Platonic Archetypes of Dice
Theatrics
Missing*
Downloads
Fuck Oregon let's go find El Dorado
Glum Buster
And Everything Started to Fall*
I can probably dredge up more, I have a shitload of game blog and devlog RSS feeds that I follow. For your purposes I think you're going to really want to check out the ones I put asterisks by, but the others I think are along the lines of what you're looking for (except maybe El Dorado). A lot of stuff that Cactusdoes is great for this, he cranks out games like a machine
Also notable is something Cactus did with Arthur Lee, Dungeon, a game the two of them programmed intentionally to have bugs, different bugs depending on the computer it was played on.
Hell, anything Arthur posts on The Pretentious Indie Gamer Scene should be some good fodder to look through too.
By the by, you gonna be anywhere near Flint in the near future?
Sometimes you just have to cut and run. If I've got enough thrust I'll sometimes slap pieces onto my ship haphazardly, rocket a safe distance away from attackers and regroup. This tactic is nearly impossible when you reach Kilo-class though.
Just... difficult. If you get a totally kickass ship at some point in the future you should show me.
EDIT: This one's even better. It's got Juilet-class guns! I accidentally placed a turret on the right side that fires spread shots, so you might need to relocate that or else it shoots itself up a bit.
Heh, going through my Twitter archive yielded another game I made for myself out of Captain Forever: capturing enemy ships within your hull!
Just bought the full version of the game last night, Captain Successor! Looks much more in-depth in terms of strategy and variety of ship parts.
I'm thinking about getting it, but I'm not very good at it, and I don't want to spend 20 bucks on a game I'll never get anywhere with.
haha
Captain Successor is insane/awesome! It's got energy shields and burst thrusts. ^__^
Edit: Decent Ship II.
I even found that it was handy to design a ship with a big scoop on the front of the ship so after blasting something I could just pull some choice pieces into my scoop and fly away with them. In the future I think I will replace the scoop with a empty space in the middle of the ship if I can. drop scattered bits into it and leave them free-floating until I find time to work on the ship.
(No, not that one!)
Captain Successor has a surprising depth in terms of custom configuration. It's sometimes difficult to decide what type of ship to build. Still, a fun adventure, and the varieties of ship parts make for cool diverse designs.