Wired News contributor Clive Thompson has an article on some top Indie Games of 2007, although I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be “so far in 2007” or if the games are actually from 2006. He ranking based on ‘IGF worthy’ gameplay, meaning more of a focus on innovation and risk taking rather than overall polish -- you won’t find Quake clones or casual games here. Most of the games I had not heard of, so I thought I’d link to the article. Here’s a snip:

The good news? The world of indie games is booming -- supercharged by a growing number of schools that teach game design, cheaper game-design tools and the emergence of festivals devoted to indie gaming. Last year, I wrote a column describing some of my favorite right-brained games that were freely available online. I’ve decided to make this an annual tradition, so here’s round two: This year’s sampling, by no means comprehensive, of the latest oddball gameplay.

None of them are perfect, but all of them do at least one thing amazingly well in a new way.

He’s got some interesting game articles, including the myth of the 40-hour gamer (which mirrors some of the thoughts Will Wright was expounding on in the Spore article) and a great piece on episodic gaming.

Check out his top Indie Games article and try the games he links to.

Creating Casual Games For Profit and Fun is a new book by Allen Partridge. Looks like a cool book, Allen contributes to the various Director mailing lists, has programmed a bunch of games, and for the book he interviewed lots of casual game developers. Here’s the description, from Amazon.com:

Thousands of game enthusiasts and would-be developers are searching habitually for an opportunity to expand their knowledge of games. Whether they’re clicking through Amazon or browsing Barnes and Noble, they are all looking for a path to their dream, a secret door into the games industry. The Casual Games Market is that secret passage. The industry, featuring online downloadable games generally delivered through distributors like Real-One Arcade, Shockwave.com and Oberon Media (via MSN Games and Pogo) has exploded over the past five years into a multi-billion dollar annual marketplace. Independent developers have rapidly discovered the field as one of the last remaining venues to break into the public eye. It is now the single most attractive opportunity available to anyone who wants to become a game developer. Casual Games for Profit and Fun introduces and defines casual games, explains the current state and scope of the industry, and describes the various genres, formats, conventions, and business models that define the industry today. It also teaches the basic casual game development techniques in Flash for the web, PC, and PDA’s and cell phones. Throughout the book users will learn how to create a variety of games that they can use for their own fun or sell commercially.

About the Author
Dr. Allen Partridge is Director of the Applied Media and Simulation Games Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Partridge owns Insight Interactive games and has developed a myriad of interactive 3D games. Partridge’s games are featured on Reflexive Arcade and in international publications. He has written several articles and a book on Shockwave 3D games and was the technical editor for Paul Catanese’s Director’s Third Dimension. Partridge is the host of the popular dirGames-l and dir3d-l mailing lists. See attached resume for more information.

Check it out on Amazon.com

Have you noticed that some of the applications you use are rendering text with Cleartype, even though you have turned Cleartype off in Control Panel? So did I. So I tracked down why it was happening and I fixed it.

I hate Cleartype. Cleartype is the Windows OS setting that uses sub-pixel antialiasing to make the curves in letters to look smoother. I hate it because it sacrifices color accuracy in exchange for edge accuracy, and I guess my eye is extra sensitive to the color shift, because it bugs the hell out of me. It also screws up screenhots. Whenever I get a new PC, one of the first things I do is turn off Cleartype. Read the rest of this entry

Kongregate.com, the new upload-it-yourself game portal, is now accepting submissions for Adobe Shockwave games. They’ve only supported Flash games until now. I’ve written about Kongregate before, specifically how Kongregate could change the landscape of indie game publishing by giving game developers more rights. In a nutshell, Kongregate allows you to upload your games on their site for free where they’ll get exposure, but will allow you to take all the revenue from conversions, in-game ads, and more. They’ll make money on on-site ads.

Perhaps I’ll put a Shockwave version of Rocknor’s Donut Factory on their site to see how it converts.

Popsci.com has an eight page interview with Will Wright, designer of simCity, the Sims, and many other games with “sim” in their title. In it he talks (and talks and talks) about Spore, which I’m really looking forward to. It’s a great article.

Here’s a morsel:

Every time the player makes something in the game – creature, building, vehicle, planet, whatever, it gets sent to our servers automatically, a compressed representation of it. As other players are playing the game we need to populate their game with other creatures around them in the evolution game, other cities around them in the civilization game, other planets and races and aliens in the space game, and those are actually coming from our server and were created by other players. so there’s an infinite variety of NPCs that I can encounter in the game that are continually being made by the other players as they play.

link (via Kotaku)

Warning! This is a heavily geeky Adobe Director post! This is something I’ve messed around with in Director for a while now, and I recently brought it up on Direct-L. A lot of people there hadn’t heard about it so I thought I’d blog about it here.

An object’s ancestor property allows you to attach a secondary object that will get events that the original object doesn’t get. For example you can attach a “car” child object as an ancestor to a “Probe” child object. Once you’ve done that, any events sent to “Probe” that the probe script doesn’t process will be passed on to “car”. If you’re confused, look it up in the help docs, because it’s only going to get , um, confusinger.

I discovered a while back that you can assign other types to a child object’s ancestor property and have the resulting object act like the ancestor’s ilk. And by “ilk” I mean lists, property lists, rect(), point(), image objects … you name it and it probably works. Read the rest of this entry