MrHoatzin

Phaedrus' Street Crew
  • Content count

    5307
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by MrHoatzin

  1. It seems since I don't have time to play games as much as usually, a royal shitton of important, interesting, weird, under-the-radar little indie games came out. It would be nice if we had them all in one place, for reference. And also so that I and others may search them out and play them more easily. Might be best if we stuck to games that can be played, as in have been released, as opposed to are still being worked on. ☞ COMMENTS ON THIS THREAD ARE TO BE FOUND HERE ☜ Here, I'll start it off: BRAID By: Jonathan Blow and his artist dude Available: XBLA Marketplace, Steam, etc. Synopsis: Paying around with time integral part of platforming. Plot has something to do with princesses, marriage, stalking, the Manhattan project, Milorad Pavic and David Lynch. More: http://braid-game.com/ More: Idle T Braid Thread
  2. Plug your shit

    Word Salsa is a San Antonio Tricentennial Art Object traveling around town for the duration of the celebration year. Dozens of San Antonio poets throughout the ages contributed their bodies of work, we fed them to a robot and taught it to think like a San Antonio poet. When prompted, it produces a brand new, unique poem, reads it out loud and prints it on a numbered card. Create art with the press of a button! We'll move it around town to various venues in the coming year. Are there any San Anto thumbs who might actually be able to write a Word Salsa of their own?
  3. Plug your shit

    Man this is pretty sweet!
  4. Heyo Thumbs fam, how've you been? Some of you might know that for the last few years I have been teaching at this creative youth development nonprofit in San Antonio. It is a long-term after-school art program, project-based learning, free to students and all that fun stuff. My studio focuses on anything made on or with computers, new media, transmedia and video game design. This summer, with the extended summer hours, we're gonna have a little game jam project. And we have a little bit of a budget and we'd really like to bring a GUEST ARTIST for two or three weeks to work with/alongside our students. I was hoping you guys could RECOMMEND SOME GAME JAM ROCKSTARS. Someone who is experienced and comfortable with producing stuff in jam environments, but any and all accomplished indies and like game creators would be fair game. I'm hoping this someone would be a programmer and be able to speak to the engineering side of games. In this context, artists who program and anyone who can convert their ideas into games on their own but don't consider themselves programmers are fair game. They don't have to be US-based but it would be easier if they were. We were thinking about making it a Unity+Processing+PICO8 focus, with students picking groups and what they want to work in. There will be a theme, prolly something to do with tricentennial of (the colonization of) San Antonio which is this year. The residency would fall sometime end of June, beginning of July. Just collecting names right now, so no one is out of reach. Any leads?
  5. Star Wars Episode 8

    God, so much pedantic negativity! I didn't expect that coming here. I thought the movie was p great, very nicely designed. The structure and pacing and reshuffled familiar setpieces doing new things reminded me of a good Telltale game, which I'll gladly take from the Disney machine. It set fire to the reheated lore pile of the previous five movies, did weird shit with the force and angered a bunch of nerds. These are all good things.
  6. The pin appears as bad Coop's hair tie, definitely near the end, but might be in throughout and we somehow missed it. The camera even lingers on it.
  7. Designer Notes 31: Margaret Robertson

    I really enjoyed this episode! Quality conversation! I only wish Margaret had recorded the convo on her side. The Skype compression really made it a struggle to keep up with. Also is anyone else having dns issues trying to reach lookspring.co.uk?
  8. Fresh Indie Game Compendium Extraordinaire

    Hello thread i started a billion years ago when there was three indie games in the world, how've u been? Anyway, I'm here to plug Date Me Super Senpai It's an inclusive dating sim set in a superhero high school and it was made over the last year in an after-school art program in San Antonio by a bunch of weirdo teens (and myself and two other adults in the capacity of producer/teaching artist). It's our first big video game project in the new media studio. Check it out! https://say-si.itch.io/date-me-super-senpai
  9. RuPaul's Drag Race

    Guys! I cannot speak highly enough about RuPaul's Drag Race. It is a contemporary reality tv show that has reaffirmed my faith in humanity. If RuPaul were to run for Unilateral Overlord of All Existance, I would have to force myself to deliberate at length as to whether there can be any downsides to this idea. The production of this show is a work of art. The editing—constantly playing tricks on the audience—is a treatise on the power of the art in shaping the message. Drag queens have to be in full control over an amazing assortment of different skills to pull it all together, yet are in many ways socially middle school girls. The show works as a professionalism boot camp, an extremely effective window into the pantheons of an art form foreign to most, and an impressive mainstreamification of LGBT culture. Rupaul is the lovechild of Barak Obama and Willy Wonka:
  10. As a relatively fresh dad, I've had my share of extreme new feelings at parent-child relationships on tv and film. I'm also not a stranger to the creative process, or killing children as a story device for that matter. And it is not like I have never damned any auteurs on the basis the unredeemableness or irresponsibility of their work (Gaspar Noé can freely go have a gruesome occult death somewhere which also unmakes all his movies, there is no universe in which his work needs to exist). That said, (with all those caveats ) I am not that bothered by Chekhov's kid getting run over. The whole vector of the action with the run-stop-caught-run-stop-caught-run-stop-get run over-caught was stilted with that choice Lynchian foreboding and that choice Lynchian purposeful slow clunkiness. Carl's face carries the whole weird scene, and is probably better than all extra faces there. I couldn't help but think as it was happening how fun it must've been for the kid to shoot his own grody death scene, which prolly made it easier to stomach.
  11. Both coins are dimes, no? Also is the indian dime a real thing?
  12. Hm, I thought this was the same guy but I guess not. So many identical looking white dudes :/
  13. Glad black people exist in The Return.
  14. Heyo! Jake & Chris mention the movie screen of the highway behind the curtain, the glass box tv setup, the purple old-school Caligari world below it all, the ultimate return into a super saturated modern family sitcom—just wanted to explicitly tie all of these themes into a bigger unifying theme so far, namely a journey through motion picture tech. Plus there's the b&w opening with ?????? which doesn't neatly fit into that trajectory but the grading is quite lovely and gets that warm silver gelatin look pat. You never really make this is your angle, but you flirt dangerously close to portraying Lynch as an out-of-touch grampa in matters of technology. Yes, he is angry at phones because the screens are small and a dumb way to see cinema, and he made Inland Empire with the shittiest camera imaginable—but he, in unequivocal words, embraced video over film when it was a ludicrous thing to do and all the serious people still shot on film. Sure he chose the ugly as sin SD because he prolly wanted Inland Empire to look like butt for reasons. I bet the purple room editing in ep3 and the tactless blue filter in ep4 also purposefully read like baby's first art school video projects for reasons I don't really wish to try to excuse... It is weird because his subtlety with special effects is sorta second to none in the industry. Eraserhead and Dune to this day look amazing. In '95 he used the original Lumière brothers camera to shoot Premonitions Following an Evil Deed—which I seem to recall reading somewhere was done in a single take. He is very aware of everything at his disposal and he chooses to use video effects over mainline CG. And true, all his computer interfaces we've seen look weird and out of time, but he also produced video content for the internet years before youtube and broadband penetration made that a sane proposition... so like he knows what's up. He just has nuanced opinions. Anyway, damn good pods. And hot. That Lumière camera thing for those who've not seen it:
  15. Twine Recommendations

    I ended up sharing these with the class: Hero Room (had it in a folder attached with the list) Star Court (ditto) Queer Pirate Plane Uncle Who Works for Nintendo »——-?——-> King of Bees in Fantasyland Horse Master Assimilagent climbing 208 feet up the ruin wall Mythics There was some snickering over adult words from the 6th graders and some serious themes snuck through (had to include Horse Master nnnggh). In retrospect that may have given some of them already predisposed to wiseassery and sabotage implicit permission to go a little crazy with "mature" themes. There was a lot of weirdly inept, cartoony racism in their stories which the ones I pointed this out to, recognized and either worked out of the stories or didn't repeat for the second one. So two prompts for the projects I settled on were Tea Party and Heist. Check out hive dot saysi dot org (a bit apprehensive about spiders indexing the url against its robots.txt wishes what with lists o names o students and all so manually un-dumb link plz) I had to censor two games by one kid from the Official Published List Shown To General Public, even though kids voted to put both of them on the top of the list with an overwhelming margin. I'm gonna use this as a lesson in institutional censorship and how it works and why it happens and how to anticipate it and how to play ball. Also how to be more subversive. How to pick a venue for one's voice/themes/work. If anyone is curious about the censored games, I'll PM you a link.
  16. Plug your shit

    The production is indeed kinda weak on that one. I am not a huuuuuuge fan of the final print of Fever either. It is infinitely better live. The rest of their songs they're recording now and producing themselves and are hopefully going to be mixed with fewer nonsense touches such as huge yawning voids of reverb in the middle of the sound.
  17. Plug your shit

    reconquista.bandcamp.com I'm plugging for a friend here ¬¬ Sal Limones having deleted her account some time ago ¬¬¬¬¬¬ tho I guess I did design the logo! So I'm not just sharing random dope music, but have some skin in that game ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬ It's just a single and some rough demos on bandcamp so far, but they sound so good live omg
  18. Twine Recommendations

    I'm pretty sure a few of the kids would get that it's satire. But I'm afraid of poe and I'm afraid of humorless parents and I am afraid of even coasting close to themes that could derrail the class. It is difficult enough to hold 30 kids on topic as it is without encouraging them to play a game that allows them to objectify a female npc in three different ways. I would not think twice if these were high schoolers :/ Ugh, its so weird to be in a position of having to make these sorts of calls.
  19. Twine Recommendations

    It was great until ¬¬¬¬¬ And on second playtru I met your barmaid.
  20. Twine Recommendations

    Argh, just spent all day reading these (well, mostly those by merritt kopas and Porpentine, still have to take a stab at a lot of the other ones you've posted here) and they're nice and all, but damn, too weird, postmodern, queer for me to show it to my middle schoolers. The Queer Pirate Plane is perfect were it not for the random queer in the title which I'd have to tapdance around somehow. Maybe I can just say YOU KNOW QHEER AS IN WEIRD!! The KE$HA one is great, but there is cursing in it and potentially complicated themes, uh... the arrow one is good and short, but maybe not atomic enough? Cuddlefish is cute and fun, but also um, not quite G-rated enough because of depictions of INVERTEBRATE SAME-SEX/DRAG NOOKIE. Hero Room is perfect, do you guys know of any other ones light and airy along that line? My kids are all into Homestuck which has its fare share of complex relationships and queerness and cursing, but they didn't get into Homestuck because some teacher told them about it, so while I'm positive they'd eat KE$HA up and be all into making something like that, I can't really be the one to show it to them... maybe if they were in high school I wouldn't freak out about it as much, but they're not and I'm not equipped to jump into these topics at all, or deal with parent fallout were that to happen.
  21. I've been working on this story for a while now. I am not anywhere near done with Hobo Lobo. Ok, that is not true, the light at the end of the tunel is so visible. I just have to free myself from daydreaming about the other project, work, real life, fun, self-loathing, twitter, etc to actually wrap it up. The new story is shaping up to be in a format of a puzzle-less adventure game, where you the reader are the compass of the protagonist, but there are no real puzzles to solve or conversation options to navigate. You're just exploring this world and there happens to be a character that you're sortof following through his story. And he talks to people and you get to decide which lines of dialogue to pursue or in what order. Gates are formed by story beats that you need to read before narrative will continue out of an area, or explicit moments of navigating away from an area, like leaving down the road starts the much-talked-about journey with no turning back, etc. I came up with this story while thinking of something to debut this new web-based comic cms that I have been thinking of and building on and off (mostly off) for at least three four years (ugh, whois storyboardo.com says domain was registered 08-nov-2011). The cms, Storyboardo, what little of it I have built is kinda badass! The proof of concept is sexy and there is nothing like it out there still. I imagine it as a decent basic solution for anyone to host their comics in a classy setup but it will have some other tricks up its sleeve. Namely layers—with backgrounds, sprites, styled text objects and any kind of arbitrary content definable into a new layer type—with its own properties tied to rules for display, methods of interaction, behavior—in the admin side and the frontend. On the frontend, as a reader, when you click the next button, sometimes it will move you to the next page, sometimes it will change the sprites around, sometimes it will just advance the speech bubbles. Storyboardo effectively adds pacing and special effects and pans and zooms and freer visual editing abilities into the repertoire of your webcomic artist-writer. SO! Do I build it? I have a proof of concept and a small mountain of PHP backend groundwork, a working purpose-agnostic data server that is the backbone of everything else I'll graft onto it, smatterings of AJAX and a fun extensible oo structure. The interface is fun and unobtrusive. I'll have fun with the v0 default design for it. But it is going to be such a huge time sink to get it off the ground. My update schedule history is fucked as it is. Herzog the Vile is technically still only taking a break. But but Storyboardo's a neat idea! I can totally make it and make the world a better place. Lots of good karma and hopefully some secondary good vibes from other people's adventure game-comics! :tup: But but but, I really want to tell my story and not get bogged down in the production and maintenance of an open source project. Hobo Lobo for all its promise of novelty is clunky as hell. Due to the games I have played with z-indices, I can't plug in accelerated CSS transforms of today's whizbang web upon its main parallax movements without breaking everything. I dread making some kind of unforeseen deal with the HTML of today in making Storyboardo that will bite me in the ass in the medium-long run. Even now, four years later, I can't make a good mobile version of Hobo Lobo. Only way I see to get it on tablets and phones and looking good is a rebuilt nativeish (i.e. not html) code special edition. / But Storyboardo is not about cutting edge effect-heavy motion stuff with a million PNGs requiring infinity production to make happen. It is a bit more resilient a structure. And having something technical to bite into will keep me sane in those times when I need a break from writing, drawing, etc. But I get to deal with technical things if I decide to go the non-Storyboardo route, so I get my fix of wearing many hats anyway. And I yearn for the possibilities of effects and polish that come from not building for the clunky broken bullshit that is the web and its production pipeline. :tup: The audiences of today would not be baffled by my comic-like non-game if I release it as one as they might have been a few short years ago. And maybe I can sell it more easily as an executable than a website? I was thinking about giving a prologue for free and selling access to following episodes of the story through some kind of tbd store mechanism that would plug into Storyboardo... but on the other hand in-app purchases are a known quantity and I probably don't have to dick around with boilerplate code nearly as much. Having it on computers around the world makes it more real somehow than if it were sitting on a single server and merely visited. It is really an opportunity cost thing I guess. I waste so much time locked in weird abstractions as it is, of thought, of engineering. Who cares for yet another sexy cms with ideas and whatnot? I just want to get my stories in front of people. But Storyboardo could be its own word-of-mouth marketing engine that delivers said stories in front of people... etc etc etc What do you guys think?
  22. So...? Should those answers point me in one direction over another?