iGame Radio

Game Tunnel has announced its return to the Indie game scene with new content, features, a new look, and more. GT intends to be an independent gaming hub that includes game reviews and Indie games for sale.

First posting independent game reviews back in 2003, Game Tunnel was purchased by Indie Game Magazine back in March of 2011. IGM headed up a Kickstarter campaign and raised over $3500 to redesign, market and relaunch GameTunnel.com.

Mike Gnade, founder of IGM, said, “Game Tunnel has always been very personal to me since it helped me discover indie games back in 2005. I loved Game Tunnel’s monthly reviews and would check the site every month to see what games were featured at the top. I am thrilled to be involved in the new site’s triumphant return!”

The new GT is built to be a HUB for indie gamers and developers. The site is part review site, part indie game database with a dash of news and deals. The site is designed for gamers to discover a new great indie game every day, with deals around the net shown as well. GT features a new rating system that is intended to allow the best games to float to the top with a “User Faves” button. There is a forums button on GameTunnel as well, but they link directly to the Indie Gamer Magazine forums, and are not separate from IGM.

The site has also been redesigned as a free resource for Indie game developers. With a registration, game developers can submit their games for review, add them to the website to get noticed, and sell them from the front page.

Indie Game Magazine started in 2008 as a bi-monthly magazine for news and culture about independent gaming. The magazine combines reviews and long-form features covering the leading aspects of the Independent gaming industry at large.

 

What’s inside this episode:

• Omaha Sternberg interviews Mike Gnade of Indie Game Magazine. Gnade recently ran a Kickstarter Campaign to restart Game Tunnel which Indie Game Magazine had purchased. Omaha talks with Mike about the history of the magazine, the reason why they purchased Game Tunnel, and what the future holds in store for that venerable indie game site.

PAX East has created the Boston Indie Showcase. Similar to the PAX 10 held at PAX Prime, the Boston Indie Showcase will give the most prominent Boston Independent developers a chance to show off their titles at PAX East.

Qualified teams must be an independent developer without a traditional publisher-developer relationship in place (no outside funding), have no more than 15 employees, and be located within the Boston Metro area. All titles must be at least at beta and electronic in nature, and no mods or levels are allowed. In other words, you can’t submit a game that requires the installation of 3rd party software, unless the game uses a 3rd party engine or middleware that you have the rights to, like Torque or Unity.

What you get if you are picked is a kiosk in the PAX East Exhibition Hall for you and your team to demo your game. This year, PAX East enjoyed an inaugural attendance of over 52,000 people, an there will be guaranteed more next year. You will also be included in the announcements on Penny Arcade and PAX East sites about your selection.

The submission deadline is January 15th, 2011. To sign up, or for additional rules and details, go to the PAX East site.

Wolfire Games’ Aubrey Serr and John Graham attended the Fantastic Fest Arcade, which is the film festival’s first foray into indie games. Fantastic Fest is an independent film festival, and this year they decided to include indie games, feeling that the two had a lot in common. I so wanted to go, but Blogworld is two weeks hence, and I just didn’t have the cash or time to do two out of town conventions in two weeks.

The relaxed turnout that John talks about sounds really appealing, and I will definitely try to make it next year.

A group of Mac and iPhone developers have joined together to help the emergency in Haiti by raising money and awareness of the victims of the terrible earthquake that hit their last Tuesday. They will be donating the proceeds of their app sales to Haitian aid organizations this coming Wednesday.

Inspired by Mike Piatek-Jimenez, developer of the Mac weather app Seasonality, who announced that he would donate 100% of his profits to Partners in Health for the earthquake relief through the end of January, a group of developers headed by Justin Williams decided to create a bigger effort.

Indie Relief currently consists of about 25 developers that will be donating all sales of their apps and games for the day of Wednesday, January 20, to a charity of their choice that will benefit the Haitian relief effort. The site will list the participating companies, what products will be part of the effort, and the charities they will donate to. Doctors Without Borders and Red Cross are two of the most popular for the relief effort, but any might be chosen.

If you want to participate and are a Mac or iPhone developer, you can email Justin at secondgearsoftware.com with your company name, product names, and the charity you will support. If you want to help in the donation, make sure to click on the site between now and Wednesday and decide which software you will buy, then start clicking that buy button on Wednesday. I’ll make another post on Wednesday to remind everyone.

BTW, the Mashable article linked above also notes that these are not the only two efforts to help the Haitians in this devastating time. The OmniGroup, which develops OmniFocus and OmniOutliner (both of which I use), are donating over $45,000 through company funds and employee contributions to four different relief organizations.

It’s just good to know that when the chips are down, you can always count on good people to stand up and help. Good people like Mac and iPhone users.

The PAX 10 Independent Games Showcase list was announced recently.

Penny Arcade was pleased to announce today that The PAX 10 for 2009 are (in alphabetical order):

* CarneyVale: Showtime by the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Games Lab (Xbox 360)

* Closure by Tyler Glaiel and Jon Schubbe (PC)

* Fieldrunners by Subatomic Studios (iPhone/iPod touch)

* Liight by Studio Walljump (Wii)

* Machinarium by Amanita Design (PC)

* Osmos by Hemisphere Games (PC)

* Puzzle Bloom by Team Shotgun (PC)

* Tag: The Power of Paint by Tag Team (PC)

* Trino by Trinoteam (Xbox 360)

* What is Bothering Carl? by Story Fort (PC)

Notice all of those (PC) tags? A lot of them are also going to be available for the Mac (and some for iPhone). Specifically:

• Closure by Tyler Glaiel and Jon Schubbe (PC): You can see in their FAQ that Mac is a given…they are considering other platforms (iPhone?).
• Fieldrunners by Subatomic Studios (iPhone/iPod touch): The only solely iPhone game in the list. I’m interested in the decision process they used to determine this would be the game for the PAX 10…there are a lot of good iPhone games out there.
• Machinarium by Amanita Design (PC): I knew that this game would eventually come out for the Mac when I first investigated it for the IGF.
• Osmos by Hemisphere Games (PC): same as above for Osmos. IGF finalist, developer wanted the game to come out for the Mac, just wasn’t sure when.
• Puzzle Bloom by Team Shotgun (PC): This one I’m not so certain of. I mean, you go to the site, and you have to have the Unity web player installed to play it. Which gives the impression it was built on top of Unity. Which would mean it would be absolutely ludicrous not to have a Mac client. But people is dumb…

That’s 50% for those of you keeping score. I’ll be at PAX this year, and will give a report on all of the games, as well as interviews with all of the developers.

Shrapnel Games announced an update for Brainpipe: A Plunge to Unhumanity today. The update (1.02) can be obtained here. This corrects, among other things, a nasty lag in the use of your mouse to direct movement on the screen I mentioned in the review. The difference is definitely there, and makes the game much better. Go and pick up.

Transgaming announced yesterday the release of the Mac version of Tale of Tales’ Indie horror game The Path. Inspired by the legendary tale of Little Red Riding Hood, The Path takes sandbox gaming to new levels. The player controls six sisters, the Red Girls, each of a different age and with a different personality, who will each meet their wolf in a sinister, foreboding, and beautifully rendered forest. The Path becomes a game more about what the player does, then the goal at the end.

The Path is available for $9.99 GameTreeOnline.com. You can listen to an iGame Radio interview with the folks from Tale of Tales here.

 

I talk with Andy Korth of Howling Moon Software about Reclaimed, his entry into the uDevGames 2008 contest, as well as his commercial games. Also, a chat with Stephen Johnson, who developed gw0rp for the uDevGames contest, and won in two categories. We chat about his history in the iDevGames community, his previous commercial success, and what his future is likely to be.

 

Episode 71 is live, featuring reviews of Spiderweb Software’s Geneforge 5: Overthrow, Aquaria by Ambrosia Software, and the Psyclops Dance Mixer iPhone App. Also, I do an interview with Gamerizon CEO Dominique Belanger.

Geneforge 5: Overthrow

The classic old-school RPG series of conflict between the magical Shapers and the Rebels draws to a close. But is there enough in the game to draw both old and new gamers alike?

Aquaria

Winner of the 2007 Seumas McNally Award, Aquaria blends beauty and exploration with a bit of destruction to cook up an underwater winner.

Psyclops Dance Mixer

Teens and pre-teens alike will love the ability to create a mini dance video right on their iPhone. But the interface is nothing to dance about.

Gamerizon

Gamerizon is moving into the Mac casual game scene with their first offering “QuantZ”, a bit of Action-Puzzler, Match-3 and Marble Popper all mixed into one.