Stonekite

Mark my words, Droqen is a name to watch for in the indie game scene. I’ve only seen two of his games so far, but he has excellent pixel handling skills, a good sense of atmosphere, and does those well enough that story isn’t entirely necessary as of yet.

He made the Excellent FISHBANE, which I still have yet to complete.

Here’s the game he finished yesterday for Ludum Dare #18 (a game making competition in which you have 48 hours to make a game). The theme of this competition was “enemies as weapons”. Undermine.

Think Canabalt on skies, except you draw the snowline.

Solipskier

Enough plumbers

[….] In any given war, a significant amount of attention must be paid to what keeps your pilots motivated and logging into the game, losing ships for your alliance’s banner, and maintaining a positive cultural identity so that defectors and spies are not bred. Morale is key, as the history of Red Alliance demonstrates; lose enough pilots due to demoralization and your military suffers, and suddenly your alliance is in a full-on failure cascade. The intelligent use and deployment of propaganda is of crucial strategic importance, no matter how much the e-honor crowd may deny its impact.

—From the musings of the the Mittani [former Goonswarm Intelligence Agency spymaster]

The Goonswarm (goonfleet?) originated from the Something Awful forums, and they continue that anarchic spirit.

Their mascot is the bee:

At some point Goonswarm and the Red Alliance (A Russian faction, rumor has it they organize bear-hunts every once in a while) joined forces:

Goonswarm videos tend to embrace their iconoclastic roots, and are often oddly abstract and creepy:

But sometimes it’s just fun:

Sometimes I see amazing things, and only realize that I should have blogged about it until after other sites pick it up. I just saw this game again on the Stranger, and realized I should have told you as soon as I saw it:

Because it is amazing.

Robot Unicorn Attack falls into that category.

People say things like “the book ——- was a great study of character, you should read it”

The game Eve Online is a great study of community and politics, you should follow its news when you hear of new things happening. The way it was constructed is open enough that its economics and social interactions work beautifully.

You may have heard about how Eve Online is based in Iceland, and how because it’s a multi-national bank game in which players can and do buy digital money with real money, it had a more stable currency than Iceland during Iceland’s crash.

Because of that, there were people (and to some extent still are) who made their bread and butter money trading on the stock exchange of a sci-fi game.

You may have heard about a financial scandal that happened within Eve (a bank manager had real life problems, and cleaned out part of a bank on his way out, netting him a fair sum), covered in the business section of the NY Times.

^Above, a still image from a propaganda video for the GoonSwarm. More on these later.

You may have watched the flow of spice currency, the espionage, the wars, the politics and strategy.

And just yesterday or so, the CEO of GoonSwarm apparently disbanded the GS corporation. Before doing so he also committed insurance fraud with several of their largest battleships. Listen to this (and remember, this is not at all tongue in cheek):

The consequences of this are anyone’s guess. GoonSwarm still has considerable assets in Delve, Querious, and Period Basis, and their capital and supercapital fleets are still intact—although a good deal of assets remain trapped in fallen stations, especially NOL. GoonSwarm’s directorate is trying its best to do damage control on the whole situation, and keep morale up. The broader ramifications are even more difficult to predict. If IT, Stainwagon, A, Atlas, et. al. are able to maintain their coalition, then that is extremely bad news for any independent alliance living in the South, such as Brick Squad and Provibloc, as they no longer have Goons to draw the big hostile blob’s attention away from them. It also leaves the Northern Coalition in a distinctly lonely looking position. However, it is entirely possible that, without Goons to kill, this coalition will fall apart into infighting… in which case look for New Eden’s political situation to become much more fragmented. —Eve-Tribune

Other news sources on this latest:

• Eve Online
• Massively
-Written yesterday.

Surprisingly it was The Stranger that first introduced me to Kosmosis.
It’s in development, but looks promising none-the-less.

I’m really digging the poster style for Icycle. It feels like something I’d aspire to. It’s like Effing Hail in that.

via somewhere or other that I forget. Possibly some website with an “i” and “g” in its name for “indy” or “indy” and “game”.