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.
