Indie Game Collective PAX East 2014: Games, Booths and Talks

paxeastLogo

With PAX East on the horizon, the Indie Game Collective has been receiving a steady stream of inquiries from the media, and other interested parties, regarding our plans for the mega-conference held on April 11 – 13 in Boston, MA. To make it easier on everyone, we have decided to assemble a one-stop-shop for all of our PAX East booth locations, games we’re showing off and talks we are giving for any and all interested parties.

IGC Studio Booths And Games At PAX East

82 Apps
Booth: Indie MEGABOOTH #580
Game: Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball
More Info: http://store.steampowered.com/app/270450/
Dejobaan Games
Booth: Indie MEGABOOTH #774
Games: Drunken Robot Pornography
Elegy for a Dead World
Monster Loves You!
More Info: http:www.dejobaan.com
IGF Nuovo honorable mention
IGF Excellence in Narrative honorable mention
Disco Pixel
Booth: Indie MEGABOOTH #675
Game Jungle Rumble
More Info: http://junglerumblegame.com
Little Worlds Interactive
Booth: MassDiGI Made in MA Booth #499
(1PM to 5PM)
Game: The Counting Kingdom
More Info: www.littleworldsinteractive.com
Owlchemy Labs
Booth: Indie MEGABOOTH #674
Game: Dyscourse - The first ever playable demo of Dyscourse!
More Info: http://dyscourse.com
Popcannibal
Booth: Indie MEGABOOTH #675
Games Elegy for a Dead World
(And just a little Girls Like Robots)
More Info: IGF Nuovo honorable mention
Experimental Gameplay selection GDC 2014

IGC Members Giving Talks At PAX East

Ichiro Lambe - President @ Dejobaan Games


Break On Through: The Future of Music Games
Friday 4/11 7:30PM - 8:30PM
Bumblebee Theatre

Free to Play Throwdown - Boston Mobile Devs Debate the Business of Mobile Games
Saturday 4/12 10:30AM - 11:30AM
Cuttlefish Theatre

What to do with your Game Design Degree: Employment at Social/Mobile/Indie studios
Saturday 4/12 12:00PM - 1:00PM
Bumblebee Theatre

Elliott Mitchell - Co-Founder @ Vermont Digital Arts & Boston Unity Group


How can we stay positive in the games industry?
Friday 4/11 9:00PM - 10:00PM
Bumblebee Theatre

What to do with your Game Design Degree: Employment at Social/Mobile/Indie studios
Saturday 4/12 12:00PM - 1:00PM
Bumblebee Theatre

Trevor Stricker - President @ Disco Pixel


Break On Through: The Future of Music Games
Friday 4/11 7:30PM - 8:30PM
Bumblebee Theatre

What to do with your Game Design Degree: Employment at Social/Mobile/Indie studios
Saturday 4/12 12:00PM - 1:00PM
Bumblebee Theatre

Gaming Socially: A World at Play
Saturday 4/12 4:00PM - 5:00PM
Badger Theatre

While your at the conference, be sure to visit all of our friends at the MassDiGI Made in MA Booth and the Indie MEGABOOTH!

Girls Like Robots Spring Update

Face remixing and a full Japanese translation. That’s right. Japan has given me so much. And now I give back to them (and you).

What do I give? Robots with unibrows and flowers in their blonde, wavy hair. Girls with wicked scars and wickeder mustaches. Nerds with sad, thinning hair, diamond eyeballs and robot teeth.

Edit almost any face in the game and the changes stick through every level and every adorable cutscene. You are no longer chained to the developer’s heteronormative depiction of romance! You like blueberries? EVERYBODY IS NOW BLUEBERRIES. done. I will cloudsave your blueberry people. They are with you everywhere.

You’re welcome Japan.

If you’re like me, and can only speak Japanese after Google has translated it to English, here’s some highlights from our new Japanese website[www.unity-games.jp]:

“Seki-gae spectacle puzzle engulfing the universe! Explosion-Yul square Kawai!
Kawai, the square, boned puzzle! Face of every single character that appeared in the game piece!”

Engulfing. The. Universe.

(drops the mic)

The Counting Kingdom Wins 2014 MassDiGI Game Challenge

We are incredibly excited and honored to announce that The Counting Kingdom took home the overall Grand Prize and the Serious Game Prototype category awards at the third annual MassDiGI Game Challenge!  The weekend was a whirlwind of mentoring sessions, pitching, and swapping tales with other game developers.  This year there was a total of fourty-five teams, including both indie developers and students from around the Northeast.  With a judging panel of industry veterans and a packed house of game developers, the event showcases the growing games industry in the Boston area.

The competition was stiff but at the end of it all we got to bring home two shiny trophies!  This is the first time that a serious or educational game has won the Grand Prize, making the whole weekend extra special for us.  A huge thank you to all of the judges, and to MassDiGI for hosting such a great event and its ongoing support of game development in the region!

MassDigiJenna

Owlchemy Labs at Steam Dev Days

Alex and Devin at Owlchemy recently gave a talk at Steam Dev Days called “Wild West of VR – Discovering the Rules of Oculus Rift”.

Through developing Aaaaacuus!, one of the first commercially available Oculus Rift games, the team at Owlchemy Labs has come to realize that 2013/2014 is truly the Wild West of VR development. In this talk, Alex and Devin cover the many revelations we’ve had during development, such the importance of respecting the player’s head direction, reduction of motion sickness, the complete reversal of UI and HUD paradigms, the introduction of developer fatigue, and realizations about subtle visual cues and the sensitivity of the inner ear.

You can watch the full talk on youtube here

Dyscourse by Owlchemy Labs – Funded!

IGC members Owlchemy Labs had quite the month! They had this to say about their latest project, Dyscourse:

We’re happy to announce that our Kickstarter for Dyscourse is successful!!

We thank you, our fans and supporters, for believing in us! Throughout the past month a lot of very cool stuff has happened and we thought we should break it down for everyone:

The CEO of Unity, David Helgason, gave Owlchemy this amazing shout-out!

He also has this stylin new Twitter icon!

David_twitter

We announced an awesome additional bonus story called the ‘Indie Plane Crash!’, starring a cast of intrepid indie developers who may find their game development skills to be a bit ‘useless’ on a desert island!

indie_island_press_fullsize

We’ve put together a mini-documentary on what makes Owlchemy Labs feel super Owlchemy-ey (yes, that’s now a word)!

We also announced that we’ll be continuing in this vein by creating a behind-the-scenes documentary of the development of Dyscourse thanks to our pal Alex Smith!

We also had some really great praise on Dyscourse!

  • “What a good art style, and what a good concept too.”Rock, Paper, Shotgun
  • “The game has a bright art style, funny characters, and numerous, vastly different endings.”GameInformer
  • “The style and quality of the visuals are top notch!”IndieStatik
  • “Dyscourse is Owlchemy Labs’ most ambitious project to date”Joystiq
  • “This game looks amazing, and dialogue/storytelling is something that’s a very big deal to me”NerdyButFlirty

Also, a super minor thing…

funded


Now that we have all your monies, we’re going to party it up really buckle down and continue cranking on Dyscourse! We couldn’t have done it without you all and we’re so excited to show you how amazing this game can be.

-Owlchemy Labs

Squeezed Out! released on Android

Squeezed Out!

Hybrid Mind Studios is happy to announce a new game released out on the Android Google Play store!

It’s called Squeezed Out! and you can play it for free on your Android phone or tablet.

Here’s a super quick gameplay trailer:

To play you simply tap on the left and right sides of the screen to move left and right, but stay away from the falling blocks! The smaller the gap you pass through, the more points you are rewarded.

Squeezed Out!

This is our first Android game and it’s a Unity port from Flash of our recent Ludum Dare 26 game from the Minimalism theme competition.

Get it on Google Play
Once we make sure it is working well, we’ll be pushing out an iOS build for iPhone and iPad.