Sense of Wonder Night 2009's Game Demonstrations
We've already posted detailed accounts of all the games from Sense of Wonder Night 2009, Tokyo Game Show's exhibition of innovative and experimental indie games from around the world, but if you would like to see the actual presentations and Q&A sessions from the event, SOWN's organizers have posted videos from each of the 10 game presentations.
My favorite presentation from the bunch was Swarm Racer 3000 (video above) from Joseph White and Lexaloffle Games as it's an easily understood but still impressive concept, has a choice soundtrack, and the crowd seemed to come away impressed with the demonstration. The point of the game is to expand and contract your swarm to collect gems around the stage as quickly as possible while avoiding lasers and manipulating objects to get through safely.
Here's a list of SOWN's featured games with links to their respective developers' sites (games marked with an asterisks have playable builds available):
- Ball Carry, by Takuya Ono
- Shadow Physics, by Enemy Airship
- Incompatible BLOCK, by Jun Fujiki *
- You Only Live Once, by Marcus Richert *
- Swarm Racer 3000, by Joseph White
- para rail, by Kuniaki Watanabe and Onitama
- Transcend, by Zach Aikman
- ecolpit, by misi
- Hazard - The Journey of Life, by Alexander Bruce *
- His and Her Disconnected Conversations, by Himo *
Another presentation I enjoyed -- despite the game's text being in Japanese -- is Himo's His and Her Disconnected Conversations, in which you follow multiple conversations and match people with who they're talking to. As you read the different conversations, the different couples reveal different stories (e.g. love stages and argument stages over the course of a relationship). There's also a component that allows you to create and submit new conversations:
I also liked Takuya Ono's keyboard-controlled puzzler Ball Carry, even if it is a super simple concept that the developer admits is "something someone should have thought about long before" he did:
[Via IndieGames]
