The Creativity Of Indie Video Games

A video from PBS:

Minecraft Mod

From BoingBoing:

The Biomes O'Plenty Minecraft mod adds wild varieties of landscape to the blocky exploration and building game: wastelands, craggy outcroppings, hazy savannah, ominous woodlands, orchards, and much else besides.

Becoming a Professional Game Designer

Here's a free eBook from iD Tech Camps called 10 Steps to Becoming a Professional Game Designer

The visuals of this puzzle-game-in-development caught my eye & the concept of being inside a synthesizer sounds pretty cool. There's a downloadable prototype at the game website.

FRACT, an in-development independent game from Montreal-based Phosfiend systems is, essentially, a music/puzzle game that combines elements of Tron andRez...before putting players inside a giant synthesizer. In the development walkthrough above, Richard Flanagan and Henk Boom walk players through a big chunk of the game where, by solving puzzles, they activate different parts of what amounts to a gigantic synthesizer, then connect the parts they've activated through a giant, walk-up pattern sequencer to create original music. 

Article at Kotaku

Game Website

Sugar Cube

Sugar Cube was named Best Game at the 2010 IGF China awards.  

At various points on the level are hidden items -- often platforms -- that are revealed, and switch "on," only when you pass through or near them. As you move about, the four squares immediately around you are tinted, and show the hidden items. Frequently, there are small "lights" on the screen that show the hidden items, in ghosted form, until turned on; but often, items are revealed only when you activate them. Finally, by holding "shift" while jumping, you can prevent items from "flipping" from active to inactive state.
The result is that each level holds surprises, and you have to learn how to time and use activations to get to the level end (represented by a door); sometimes you want an item to flip to inactive state to get through its location, while often you want to turn it on, to provide a location or item you can use.

Review via BoingBoing

Disney World in Minecraft

Some people are working on a complete, functional replica of Walt Disney World in Minecraft. The rides all ridable. The files are available as free downloads.
Link

Article on Games is Also a Game

Here's an article in the New York Times about video games that is also a game you can play where you destroy the article itself. Cool.

New Minecraft-like Games

Blockade Runner is a space-based Minecraft-like game that's still in early development. It looks like its free to try.


Also, Notch, creator of Minecraft is working on a new game called 0x10c. You can't play it yet, but there's a description:

A New Game 

Hi, I'm Notch, and this is my new game. It's going to be a space game, and it's quite ambitious!
The game is still extremely early in development, but like we did with Minecraft, we expect to release it early and let the players help me shape the game as it grows.
The cost of the game is still undecided, but it's likely there will be a monthly fee for joining the Multiverse as we are going to emulate all computers and physics even when players aren't logged in. Single player won't have any recurring fees.

Backstory and Setting

In a parallel universe where the space race never ended, space travel was gaining popularity amongst corporations and rich individuals.
In 1988, a brand new deep sleep cell was released, compatible with all popular 16 bit computers. Unfortunately, it used big endian, whereas the DCPU-16 specifications called for little endian. This led to a severe bug in the included drivers, causing a requested sleep of 0x0000 0000 0000 0001 years to last for 0x0001 0000 0000 0000 years. It's now the year 281 474 976 712 644 AD, and the first lost people are starting to wake up to a universe on the brink of extinction, with all remote galaxies forever lost to red shift, star formation long since ended, and massive black holes dominating the galaxy.

Super Mario Marching Band

Mario Game

Here's a trailer for a Mario fan game.

Super Mario Bros. Crossover is a fan game that recreates the original Super Mario Bros. and allows you to play it as characters from other games.

  Here's the game itself.

Maker Faire

Here's an essay by a kid who says going to Maker Faire changed his life:
http://whatsnext.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/08/how-maker-faire-changed-my-life/

cool math video