La-Mulana is one of those games that seems to make people want to tell stories, and share them with friends. From the famous Let’s Plays, to the adventuring image-blogs and more, there’s just something about the sprawling platform-adventure that just generates interesting anecdotes. Long-time fan (to the point of being in the thanks section of the remake’s credits) Pauli ‘MadamLuna’ Kohberger agrees, and is assembling a fan-book entitled Stories From the Ruins. All it needs are some stories, and that’s where you come in.

There’s a tentative deadline of August 31st on this project, and once all the tales and anecdotes are collected, they’ll all be professionally edited together and distributed as a PDF booklet for all to enjoy. Submissions can be in any visual form, so if you want to draw some inspired art, or just doodle your incoherent rage at an unfair puzzle, go right ahead. If you think you’ve got a story worth telling, then check out the Stories From The Ruins site and shoot off an email. And if you haven’t been lucky enough to play the game yet? Well, it just got a polished, updated and generally improved remake, so go check our review and give it a try. 

Images shamelessly pilfered from the brilliant and adorable La-Momolana image-blog. Many of these illustrations were polished up and used in the official manual for the re-release.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Archaeological Records – ‘La-Mulana’ Fan-Book Seeks Contributions

It’s no secret that I wasn’t the biggest fan of Arcen Games‘ procedurally generated platform-RPG A Valley Without Wind. While I could go into great detail as to what gameplay elements I had issues with, my main problem was the same as most other reviewers; the game was not pleasant to look at. Being unable to hire a dedicated artist at the time, Arcen Games effectively made the game out of 3D modelling clip-art and photoshop filters. To this day, it’s the only game – 2D, 3D or otherwise – to give me motion sickness.

Still, they’re a very reactive studio. They kept working on AI War until it was a shockingly good and original piece of RTS design, where it was previously rather lackluster. With AVWW, they’ve decided to try to fund a graphical redesign of the game via Kickstarter, and are auditioning a range of different artists or art-teams to see which would be the best for the job. The results so far are very heartening. The top image above is an environmental mock-up from ‘Studio G’. Beneath that, some character concept art from ‘Studio H’. To ensure fairness, they’ve keeping the contributors anonymous for now. You can see more art from the various teams over on this official forum thread, in particular pages 18 and onwards.

In other, related news, a major update has rolled out for the game. Version 1.2 brings another wave of major tweaks and changes to the core gameplay, including the first phases of re-implementing the strategic city-building elements that seemed to interesting during the Alpha/Beta phases of development, but were cut out late in development. While I’m still not a fan of the game, there’s potential here for greatness. It’ll be interesting seeing how it develops over the coming months.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – ‘A Valley Without Wind’ Art-Auditions Bear Fruit. Also, Updates

Not so much a ‘game’ today, so much as a book. A small visual novel, written natively in English, with luscious art and rather pleasant writing. A nice way to while away part of a slow Sunday afternoon. Juniper’s Knot by Dischan Media is a short story about a bound demon and a boy, and the stories they share in some crumbling ruins on an autumn afternoon.

Juniper’s Knot is only a short story, and you should chew your way through it in less than an hour if you tend to read quickly. There’s no interaction here, beyond clicking through the script, but that’s all there really needs to be. Juniper’s Knot was created in a fairly short space of time, but aside from its short length, it really doesn’t show. The art is genuinely good, and the music is emotive without being overbearing. The writing in particular is an interesting mish-mash of slightly archaic wordings, but it makes the characters a little more colourful, and as the perspective of the story alternates between the two characters, you get a feel for both their internal monologues. Here’s a video showing the first few minutes of it:

Juniper’s Knot is available to download for free for Windows, Mac and Linux and even iOS. There’s some bad language and some dark concepts, but nothing otherwise unsuitable for an impressionable youth. If you’ve got an hour or so spare, give it a look.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Freeware Game Pick – ‘Juniper’s Knot’

What if LSD: Dream Emulator was made nowadays? Well, there’s no need to imagine it because that’s what surreal exploration game, TRIP, basically is.

Unfortunately we didn’t hear about TRIP prior to this date, because if we had we could have funded it and got ourselves into the playable alpha. Nothing we can do about it now though. What we can do, on the other hand, is to tell you about it and stare at its imagery, dribbling a little bit.

Pitched an art game and even cited to be a remake of LSD: Dream Emulator with a slight twist, TRIP is headed for PC and Mac. The troubling thing is that it was originally said to be ready for purchase in late April…maybe not then. The game is presumably finished though, or so we surmise by going through the jumbled development blog, but a release seems to be hanging around if imminent.

Enough of these boring words though! More screenshots are demanded:

More information on TRIP can be found on the game’s official website.

Thanks Gather Your Party!

Jamo Games has released a teaser for their next game in the form of a cute piece of artwork.

James Biddulph, the solo developer behind Jamo Games, gave us a heads up today, it kind of went something like this, “Psst, take a look at this!” So off we went, over to his charming blog where we were greeted by a little piece of art featuring two odd looking characters.

“What on Earth is this, fine sir?” we jauntily replied.

“It’s a teaser for my next project”, James said. “It’ll be on PC/Mac/Android/iOS, and follows Papa Tooki and his son hunting for food in their own unique way…”

“Well”, we remarked while widening our eyes, “you’ve definitely got us interested.”

If you didn’t know, this will be Jamo Games’ second game, the first being Amp, Watts & Circuit which we reviewed here and is available on Desura and Indievania.

Dear Esther was one of the more interesting mods released in 2009. A quiet, short, contemplative and mostly interpretive combination of ghost story, poetry reading and interactive sightseeing. It divided critics, elicited angry internet cries of ‘pretentious!’ and earned no shortage of fans, but of all the possible mods to be adapted into a more fleshed-out, updated commercial release, it seemed to be one of the least likely. Unlikely, but here we are anyway, with a release-date and a price tag set.

As you can see from the screenshots (many of them bordering on photorealism) and teaser videos, this is probably the most impressive set of environments ever made using Valve’s stalwart Source engine, and a true labor of love. Odder still, considering that high-action titles tend to end up as graphical showcases, more often than not. The rocky hillsides, overcast shores and waterlogged caverns are clearly the work of a dedicated and talented artist, explaining the lengthy development time of this update.

Eagle-eyed readers will also note that the release date – Feb 14th, 2012 – is Valentines day. Rather appropriate given the subject matter of the story. So, come the fated day, will you be buying this? If a cheap painted landscape print to hang on your wall can set you back $20 or more, does a digital island to roam demand a fitting price tag? Expect no shortage of arguments when it’s released… but for now, I’m just going to listen to the mod soundtrack again.

[Dear Esther]

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DIYGamer Holiday Give Away! For each and every article we post we’re giving away an indie game.

This article’s game is Star Sky for the PC (code redeemable here) by Marten Jonsson.

Leave a meaningful comment below to enter into the drawing.

You could say that the SNES was the epitome of Miyamoto-styled design (even in games by other developers), and you’d have a reason for saying that. Namely, it was the Miyamoto Box: Nintendo’s reward to Miyamoto for the broad appeal of his NES catalog. Meanwhile Miyamoto’s opposing force, in Gunpei Yokoi, was rewarded for his invention of the Game Boy by having his studio removed from mainstream console development to support his brainchild. The message was clear: Miyamoto’s way was the successful one, so he would be in charge of everything important from here on.

The thing is, Miyamoto is just one voice. He had a few brilliant ideas in the mid-1980s, all born out of a particular context and in response to particular problems. And then by the turn of the ’90s he was pretty much dry. All that was left was to codify his ideas, turn them into a near law of proper design — regardless of context — and then sit back to admire his work, while new generations carefully followed his example as if manufacturing chairs or earthenware pots. A videogame was a videogame, much as a chair was a chair. It was a thing, an object, with particular qualities and laws.

Thing is, videogames aren’t things; they’re ideas. A game mechanism exists not in a vacuum, as a fact, but as a solution to a problem. Mario jumps so as to make use of the vertical space on the screen. He attacks by stomping on enemies or punching from below out of economy; his main defining trait is his ability to jump, so there’s a practical effect to both the upswing and the downswing. What makes Super Mario Bros. so effective, on a systemic level, is the tangibility of the player’s exploration. Compared with earlier games, it is revelatory to lump so much behavior onto physically touching the environment. The game is both visceral and curiously intimate.

That isn’t to suggest that jumping is the best use of vertical 2D space, or that leaping on or leaping into creatures or objects is an ideal way of interacting with an environment. This isn’t to suggest that the game’s level progression is ideal. Just because (given the right powers) you hit blocks in Super Mario Bros., and (given the right powers) you burn or bomb or lift blocks in Zelda, and (given the right powers) you shoot blocks in Metroid, that doesn’t mean that a chain of special powers and tiles, blocking the player’s path, is an ideal game structure.

You get the idea. One way or another, most mainstream games have evolved from the Miyamoto model. Not just on consoles, either; Carmack and Romero’s debt to Miyamoto is well-recorded, and fairly obvious in Keen, Wolf3D, and Doom. In a more sophisticated sense, Valve’s debt to Doom brings the theories to present on both shores. Granted, Valve tends to be more contemplative than most, with Half-Life 2 almost being a Super Mario Bros. style State of the Art address. Yet in its deconstructionist brilliance, it pretty well shows up the lack of ideas elsewhere. Even six years later, there’s not much been much advance on, or even equal to, the game’s grasp on player psychology.

There are some solid reasons for this lack of progress. For one, commercial videogames are expensive, limiting their potential audience to people who like “videogames.” For another, any established audience tends to drift toward the familiar. The most a fanbase ever wants is a slight twist on its object of attachment, or else it becomes unrecognizable. Remember how much people hated The Adventure of Link, for the NES — in some ways is one of the bravest and most sophisticated sequels ever made. The reason? It was too different from the original Zelda. So the third game was pretty much exactly like the first again, except prettier and a bit more polished, with a few new gimmicks. And to this day, gamers won’t shut up about it.

Another problem is of the cart-before-the-horse that is technology. Mainstream games keep getting more and more expensive and difficult to make, just to make use of all of the processing power of each new generation. Yet for all that processing power they’re not exploring many ideas that were impossible ten, fifteen years ago; they’re too concerned with just making back their investment — which means selling to as broad an audience as possible, where the audience has a very specific idea of what it wants.

In the wake of Nintendo and Sony, that audience has gotten large enough to command a certain voice, suggesting that there is an outlet for these expensive monstrosities, yet it’s too small and narrow to leave much room for alternative perspectives. Nintendo got around the problem by targeting non-gamers and people who haven’t played games in years. Which is brilliant in principle. And then, being Nintendo, they didn’t do much of anything with the idea. Oh well.

But now we have alternative channels. We have the Internet, we have cheap design tools, we have communities of individuals who grew up on videogames and who think in game design the way that New Wave auteurs thought in film. These aren’t people with a huge budget, or an audience to placate; all they have to please is themselves, and maybe a few peers. And videogames are a palette through which to explore their ideas. The atmosphere lends itself to asking questions — why do so many games revolve around killing and death? Why is Mega Man so hard? What’s the point of RPG statistics? What does all of this mean, anyway?

And so somehow, right now, and as of the last few years, it seems all the important questions, and most of the relevant answers in game design, are coming not from the institutions with the budget and the influence to command attention, but from a handful of hack programmers, putting in a few hours after their day jobs or between term papers — the way it used to be, twenty-five, thirty years ago. Videogames have gone through the maelstrom and come back to zero, a bit confused but also just a little more mature.

If videogames are an exchange of ideas, perhaps it’s best that exchange is between individuals.

Roger Ebert is a widely respected film critic but his opinions on videogames leave most videogames critics puzzled. Ebert is no stranger to this kind of discussion, either, as he’s made the same accusation multiple times over a number of years: videogames are not art. As has been pointed out, multiple times and by many people more experienced in the industry than I, Ebert is a film critic; not a videogames critic.

That isn’t to say that some of his points are not valid or somewhat accurate. The problem does not stem from his conclusions. It stems, instead, from his premise. I do not dispute that games, as he defines, do not necessarily constitute art. What I dispute, however, is his definition of games in general. It seems that Ebert lumps all games into having goals, being about winning and involving the attempt to get to those goals.

In this way, he brings things like chess, checkers and golf (as well as a number of other sports) to the same table. This is where his premise strays away from the actual area that games exist in: Some games are about winning and goals but not all of them. As an example, some rectangles are squares and all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares.

Ebert chooses in his most recent article to pick on one kind of square particularly: thatgamecompany’s Kellee Santiago. Given that his contention is that games can never be art, it is not all that terribly surprising to see him pick a bone with an independent game developer, especially one associated with games like Flower or flOw.

Even more specifically, Ebert responds to Santiago’s TED conference presentation. He begins by acknowledging that she is very intelligent, charming and able to get her points across effectively. He moves then to explain that she had to give the talk live while he has the luxury of responding at his leisure and with numerous edits. Well, he actually uses the word “extemporaneously,” but that’s rather big and serves only to obfuscate the situation. (See, Ebert, I can do it too.) This is mostly just a smokescreen that will later allow him to attempt to tear her argument down, brick by brick, and make broad sweeping generalizations about videogames.

But, again, it’s not that I disagree with the notion. What he describes, I, too, might also concede is outside the realm of art. He just does not seem to actually describe the medium that we have all come to know and love. He, instead, focuses on a minute window that he’s been made aware of through others instead of attempting to explore the field on his own.

Kellee Santiago has even gone so far as to write a response to Ebert’s criticisms, where she states that she’s deeply flattered by his attention but a bit disappointed as it seems he doesn’t actually engage with the topic and instead commentates from a lofty position. In fact, she notes that it doesn’t seem that Ebert has played any, “if any” videogames. The “if any” accusation is a bit meritless, but his experiences all seem to be limited to many, many years ago. Technology, and just about everything associated with it, changes rapidly, far more rapidly than Ebert has been able to keep up with it seems.

There are a number of equally amazing responses out there, ranging from IGN to G4 and beyond, but it does make one wonder whether Ebert truly did his research. If so, how does he discount more recent stabs at serious journalistic endeavors in order to more thoroughly explore the subject? I feel as if his bold challenge and mentality of “Show me if it exists, then” is much akin to a blindfolded man telling his friend that he can’t see when all he needs do is remove the cloth in front of his eyes.

Even barring these secondary sources, there is a plentiful supply of primary ones. Where is the competition in Flower or stated goals? Ebert makes off-hand commentary about short clips of the game he has seen but never played. I could, in like, make judgments about Citizen Kane but will instead leave that to those who are obviously more knowledgeable on the subject.

An even better comparison might be made to Jason Rohrer’s most recent game: Sleep Is Death. Santiago mentions both Jenova Chen’s huge involvement in Flower and Jonathan Blow’s self-development of Braid as examples of what Ebert seems to seek in art, as they are “usually the creation of one artist.” Neglecting to even get into arguing about the collaborative nature of some art forms—Hello? Films have hundreds of hands in them, plays have half that, if not more, and the list goes on—no other developer so easily fits the mold of “artist” described as Rohrer.

While his Passage game might also challenge Ebert’s statements, his most recent, Sleep Is Death, does so more effortlessly. Sleep Is Death is an improvisation tool cleverly disguised as a videogame. You are meant to tell a story through the medium, to evoke emotions through it and, ultimately, craft an intensely personal experience for yourself and another. This is, more or less, the Mecca of game design: this game is just a vehicle for the experience and the vehicle is minimalistic at best.

Peter Eykemans, our fearless Managing Editor, and I had a chance to play with it recently. The design of the game allows you 30 seconds to react to the actions of the other. One is, ostensibly, the player and one the controller. The controller is, arguably, a more difficult role to play as the player merely responds to the objects in front of them but both are equally responsible for the engagement presented.

Most importantly, perhaps, is the lack of a win condition. Or a fail state. Or any real tangible goals. I suppose finishing a scene before the timer counts down might be a goal but there are no true consequences to failing to meet it other than disappointment for both involved. Seeing as this has no goals, no fail state and no winning, what is this concoction that Jason Rohrer has cooked up for us?

Ebert would probably say that it isn’t art but it also isn’t a game. I’m not so sure he’d know what to do with this artifact of our times. I’m not sure it even matters, though, as the experience is the important part. Defining it as an experience puts the medium in an entirely different strata. We don’t need someone else to validate our experiences.