This is a funny story. Back in May, I was out in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to show Hot Throttle at Babycastles. There happened to be a German/French TV crew out there from Europe’s Arte TV and they produced this segment. I sound much classier talking about Cactus and man-cars in French.
Finally, here’s a segment from PBS on the cultural relevance of videogames in the modern age. About halfway through, our very own Hot Throttle makes an appearance.
It hit twitter the other day that a bunch of indies were banding together to bundle up a slate of games into an IGF Pirate Kart. This inspired me to polish up a couple short games that I’ve never released before.
Braindead
The first is a one-button platformer that I originally put together for Gamma 4. You have no direct control over your character.
Z is the only button. Music by my friend Mike Arnold. Cutscene illustration by Kevin Coulton.
Los Mosquito
The second is a game about being a mosquito. You have to sneak up on people and press Z to suck their blood, before they attack you and start calling in cropdusters of DDT.
Hot Throttle is a new game from cactus and myself, created for Adult Swim Games. It’s about a gang of men who like to race pretending that they are cars.
If you would prefer to download it and run it on your PC, you can grab the full uncensored Hot Throttle, that I showed at Babycastles in New York in 2011, here.
Kevin and I are both proponents of the tradition of carrying around multiple sketchbooks and scraps of paper, to jot down ideas and inspirations for future review.
Evoking an idea often requires a prompt commitment of ink to paper, or text to keyboard, or it can be lost into the noise of modern life.
I’ve found it fun to give whatever sketchbook I’m using at the time to other indie game designers when we’re hanging out together. I’ll usually ask these fine ladies and gentlemen to take a page and draw whatever they want. Here are some of the hidden treasures contained within my current primary sketchbook.
It features scribbles, elegant and crude, from Erin Robinson, Phil Fish, Adam Saltsman, Brandon McCartin, Kyle Pulver, Petri Purho, Jason Rohrer, and of course, sketch work from Kevin and myself.
So I’ve just finished a little iPhone game with my friends Alec Holowka and Danny B. It’s a simple physics-based color smashing kind of thing, with lots of explosions.
Way back when the App store first rolled around, Alec and I put together a game engine and started cooking up some projects. One of them was this game. In the interim, I started doing a ton of iPhone contract work, and Alec put out Paper Moon, and forged ahead on Marian.
But we finally came around and polished this one up, and Danny (composer for megahit Canabalt, and future megahit Super Meat Boy) wrote us some apropo music.
I think the game turned out really nice. It’s a little more casual than anything I’ve ever done, but in a good way!
And the actual game framework we’ve built is kind of cool. It allows for a fairly rapid prototyping of games on the device — I feel a little sheepish that we’re only releasing our first project based on it now. In any case, check out the game and let us know what you think!
This is a cute little essay on indie games, created by taking this NYTimes essay, and substituting ‘indie game’ for ’short story’.
The independent video game is always ducking for cover. The Triple-A game buys up the land, cuts down the trees, puts up the condos. The independent video game scampers across a lawn, squeezes under a fence.
I think it works really well! It’s funny how an essay about another medium verbalizes my fuzzy thoughts about the indie game scene so neatly, although maybe it works better for creators of short-form games like Cactus, Nifflas, Rohrer, and Messhof, than with games like Bit Blot’s Aquaria.
I don’t know what Braid would be… maybe a novella?
