Seumas McNally Grand Prize:

* Blueberry Garden

* CarneyVale Showtime

* Dyson

* Night Games

* Osmos

via The 11th Annual Independent Games Festival – Finalists & Winners.

Some great stuff on the lists in all categories!

I promise, I will get to my “faves of 2008″ post soon!

The Experimental Gameplay Workshop has issued its call for submissions for 2009. Jonathan Blow says

It’s a two-hour showcase of unusual and cutting-edge game designs. Each designer gives a ten- or fifteen-minute presentation of each game, including a live demo.

We’re now looking for submissions for the 2009 workshop, which will be happening in March. If you make unconventional kinds of games, I encourage you to apply. Or, tell your friends. Or do both.

For me “telling your friends” means blogging it, so I did.

There are games about games. Then there’s games about gaming. And then games about how we live our lives. Rara Racer is one of those latter ones. I think. Astonishing considering it was developed in 48 hours for an indie games competition. Don’t be misled by the screenshot.

Ludum Dare » Blog Archive » Rara Racer – Finished.

May your days be merry and bright!

I don’t have a list of my own to offer, but The Offworld 20: 2008′s Best Indie & Overlooked is a pretty good list!

Fishing Girl screenshot

As many of you know, my friend Dan Cook does game prototyping challenges wherein he creates and gives away art and a base game design, and then invites whoever wants to pick the the challenge to make a full game.

Often, the art from these pops up in unexpected places — there’s certainly a few worlds on Metaplace that are using the tilesets that Dan has donated to the community!

Well, one of those challenge games has gone commercial and seems to be doing fairly well in terms of popularity on Newgrounds. A Web developer dove headlong into Flash and created a lovely an atmospheric version of the “Fishing Girl” challenge. Dan then encouraged him to commercialize it.

Check out the review here at JayIsGames, and of course, check out the game itself here: Fishing Girl.

It’s elegant design, and quite beautiful as well. Auditorium.

The Escapist’s new issue has an article about why I never found those t-shirts from the Experimental Gameplay Project at Target.

You know, alternate distribution methods like these are still a very good idea. But jumping straight to Target is challenging. Might the shirts have done better if they started out at something like Comic-Con instead? As of right now, few games have fandoms to the degree that they will follow a brand to a different store (my son’s Guitar Hero shirt was much admired at Cub Scout camp this weekend, but most games are not Guitar Hero).

To get crossover retail presence, the games are going to have be lifestyle brands to some degree, and be broadly recognizable enough to at least help get across tribal affiliation.

“In the Sandbox with Raph Koster” is IndieCade’s take on the talk. It’s interesting to see it getting a different slant from Ben Medler’s — part of what happens when you deliberately give a diffuse talk, I suppose!

Blog regular Over00 writes,

Like many people, I always wanted to be able to bring some of my MMOs ideas to reality. Of course, ideas are cheap and everybody got THE good one. So I thought enough dreaming and more doing.

So about a year ago, I started to work on a framework with the same tools I’m using for my day job: .NET, SQL and Javascript. After a month of design/planning and another one of coding, I had a prototype ready.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ever wanted to run an MMORPG? Well, now you can without having to do the pesky step of actually creating one.

MMORPG Tycoon is an indie game written for a game contest. You have a procedurally generated MMO, and your job is to keep the forum posters happy.

I’m downloading it now… watch me suck at it.