

Another lecture from the Independent Games Summit posted at GSW, where Valve's Kim Swift talks about innovation, originality, and the transition from working on a student project to developing one of this year's most memorable games.








The excellently titled "Mr. Heart Loves You Very Much" is a short, but original and pretty nifty puzzle game by Zaphos designed for Kotoromi's Gamma 256 exhibition.
Fatal Hearts by Hanako Games has been released. It's a visual novel with a nice variety of puzzles. The mysterious story is about two teenage girls -- one goes missing, and the story proceeds at a relatively fast pace. Besides the puzzles, there are also dialogue choices, but those don't seem to affect the game very much (at least that I could tell from the demo). EDIT: The author of the game just told me that the dialogue choices do in fact affect the game quite a bit, it's just that you don't see the branching and the impact of those choices until later.Labels: adventure, fatal hearts, hanako, visual novel





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Have you started working on any other projects?- read the entire interview
There's collaboration work I'm doing with this musician, but that's sort of on hold since I'm trying to finish this game.
Would you develop for any other platforms?
I'm not done with freeware. I want to make freeware and Sony knows this. Where would I be without Kenta Cho? If I didn't play that game, none of this would have happened. I sort of feel indebted to it.
How did the deal with Sony come about?
I wasn't actually thrilled at the time. I was like, "Oh, Sony--whatever." Because I didn't want anybody to ____ with my game. I was this close to just releasing it (Everyday Shooter) as freeware.








The Abrupt Goodbye is an interesting experiment by Andy Schatz of Pocketwatch Games, made using a combination of simple SQL and PHP coding. Participants can choose to play either side of a conversation, with new responses added every minute by other players.

I, like many of you, have watched the Fez teaser video (see below) several times over since it was released by Kokoromi a few days ago. What we saw was a 3d world compressed down to one of four 2D projections, where only the 2D versions of the world could be navigated. My imagination sprang into the realm of puzzles that would be possible with such a system, though the video showed no puzzles at all. In other words, it gave us a glimpse of the technology itself without showing us what can be done with that technology, without giving us any idea of what it is like to play Fez.

The Gamer's Quarter

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