Experimental Videogames

Storyteller has been picked as finalist for the Nuovo category by the Independent Games Festival, one of the biggest and well-respected festivals of the world. I’ve been on a trip for the past 20 days so I am dealing with all this just now, but these news are exciting and morale-boosting.

During the next two weeks I will finish the new version of the game, where I have rewritten the whole story-building algorithm, allowing me to write rules that give players more freedom. Now “The Lover”, who can fall in love with anybody can do some new interesting things:

(click to view fully enlarged)

Storyteller is a new game I started a few months ago which takes an idea I prototyped a while ago (unfortunately also called “Storyteller”… I wish I didn’t do that), and explores it much further.

It’s more “gamey” than Today I Die or I Wish I Were the Moon, and the mechanics borrow heavily from comic techniques of storytelling like closure, points of view, captioning and frame transitions. Each “puzzle” is a story that must be built. I will write a bit more about it on future posts.

This is going to be my most ambitious project and I want it to offer a very high quality experience. I am still at the point of exploring variants of the core mechanics so there’s still a long way to go! I will probably also hire someone to help me with the visual aspect of the game, which is totally programmer-class right now.

I am planning for the game to take me around a year to finish it!

My initial target platforms are PC, Mac and iPad.

Today I Die *Again*, a complete rewrite of the flash game with new scenes, overhauled audiovisuals and revised gameplay has launched on iTunes recently at $0.99.

I want to thank Thomas Hahn and everybody who sponsored this release of the game… Thank you!

Today I Die was selected as a finalist at the IGF (Independent Games Festival), one of the most prestigious events of the world regarding indie development.

The category it was selected into was “Nuovo”:

The Nuovo award honors abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which advances the medium and the way we think about games.

I always dreamed about being an IGF finalist. The happiest thing about being a finalist is that I can forget about chasing the award. I want to fully focus on my craft.

Meanwhile…

note: fonts used in this prototype were developed by Anna Anthropy (sorry about not linking to this before, Anna!)