While I’ve already given a breakdown of the Adventure Time Game Making Frenzy, the Fantastic Arcade-related event coming in just a few short days to Austin, TX and around the globe, next week — from Thursday through Sunday — the Alamo Drafthouse will be hosting Fantastic Arcade proper: a free & public celebration of indie game culture featuring custom arcade cabinets for a selection of showcase games and an even larger field of spotlight games, with panels and developer talks by a number of local and visiting indies including Vlambeer, Terry Cavanagh, Dennaton, White Whale, Stoic & more.

In the lead-up to that, the Alamo will be springing the above trailer on unsuspecting movie-goers: a whirlwind tour of games like Proteus, Windosill and Mirrormoon that should hopefully give the general public an intriguing sense of exactly what’s happening just under the surface of what they more generally think of as videogames.

Not safe for human consumption, apparently, and honestly not a half-step away from these old & apparently now forever discontinued “Stage Scene” models, Tubbypaws imagines an instant DIY Mushroom Kingdom of your very own. [via Tubbypaws]

A hand-crafted wooden idol by local favorite artist Amanda Visell (find the rest of her work here, and see especially her extremely awesome Posters For Girls), part of an entire pop/fantasy character series that appears to have unfortunately entirely sold out almost instantly. [via Switcheroo]

The story of the Adventure Time Game Jam goes back, well, really until the point when Adventure Time first aired, and more or less everyone on earth simultaneously thought, “this would make the most amazing videogame of all time, even if I have zero idea how it would actually work,” well before it was announced that WayForward would be tackling their own upcoming Nintendo 3DS adventure.

Fast forward a few years, and, innocently reading Michael Deforge‘s brilliant guest-work in an issue of the Adventure Time comic, I had a flash. The reason there can never be one perfect, definitive Adventure Time game is that there needs to be hundreds of Adventure Time games. Just like in Deforge’s version of the Land of Ooo, which includes a Breakfast Kingdom that’s never before been mentioned or otherwise existed, the magic of Adventure Time is that everything is permitted.

And so, wearing one of my other hats as a helper on Fantastic Arcade, the free indie-game celebrating offshoot of yearly genre film festival Fantastic Fest, hosted by the Alamo Drafthouse (aka unquestionably the best movie theater chain in the world), we set about to make it so.

Then, many, many months later, almost inconceivably, it really, actually happened: this weekend, September 13th-15th, Fantastic Arcade will be hosting the first ever official Adventure Time Game Jam, a 48 hour sprint open to any developer in the world, with the best of the playable entries getting their own cabinet at Fantastic Arcade itself the following weekend.

The amazing news: we’re rolling up on 500 people who’ve signed up to take part in the jam, which means that by this time next week, if everything goes as hoped, we could have several hundred new Breakfast Kingdom-esque playable realities that all make sense within the Adventure Time universe, even if they don’t follow what little shreds of canon actually exist within the TV show.

Even more exciting, the jam will be hosted on the Beautiful Mess Organizer, B.M.O. for short (heh!), a new game jam management platform we’ve teamed up with developer Brett Chalupa to help create, in the hopes of setting a new standard for organizing future game jams on the web. We’ll be taking a longer look at that in the future!

For now, you’ve got two more days to sign up for the jam yourself, and not too much longer before you can play all the new games for yourself both at home, and, for Austinites, at Fantastic Arcade, September 20th-23rd.

Every month, as part of the regular monthly meetings of the Austin, TX independent game community JUEGOS RANCHEROS, we do a very casual & chatty rundown of the ten or so games from the previous month — both local and global, and both indie and occasionally a bit-bigger-budget — for the audience, to give people — especially those curious onlookers from outside the indie community itself — a look at what they may have missed.

In keeping with the tongue-in-tobacco-packed-cheek tone, we call these run-downs A Fistful of Indies, which will now be presented here on Venus Patrol (even a bit tardy as this one is) for your reference, each fully-annotated, -linked, and off-the-cuff blurbed, in addition to their home on the JUEGOS RANCHEROS site.

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If you’re as thrilled by the return of the cassette as ward against an all-digital future as I am (see also: Deerhoof’s latest Breakup Songs, also available as a bound & turntable-ready booklet of flexi-discs [!]), you’ll want to know that this is your absolute very last chance to pick up Jim ‘jampants’ Guthrie’s Sword & Sworcery EP on said medium, having found one last stray box. Preview the album here, if you still need convincing.

Meanwhile, to celebrate the opening of this very website, #sworcery collaborator Scntfc has made
Moon Grotto Station Four Zero Eight, a digital-only bonus track previously only available with the purchase of the Moon Grotto EP itself, free for everyone to download. Reports that the track might lead you down any sort of rabbit-hole are unsubstantiated and hardly worth mentioning. [via @jampants, @scntfc]

It’s now day two, and it was about as smooth a launch as I could’ve hoped for: nearly 1300 Kickstarter backers have now accessed the system, and a very heartening stream of new subscribers joined in throughout the day, so a sincere thanks to everyone for all the support, kind words, and patience with the turbulent pockets of technical hitches that cropped up (especially during The CSS Incident, and any white-outs and blank-bars you may have encountered deep into the night) as we kicked off this mission.

Most importantly, we worked very long into the wee hours to correct the most major of our issues: you’ll now find yourself with a real name on the site, rather than being id’d by email everywhere you went. To that end, you may want to visit your /account page to amend your name, particularly first-name-only backers that now find themselves part of one big happy LastName family.

One-thousand thanks to developer Kevin ‘Kabojnk‘ Mahoney for his tireless assistance on that id issue, especially with the more delirious I got as time passed closer to early-morning, and there are still a few more tweaks we’ll be tackling in the next day or two: minor layout issues, and especially improving the experience of those of you visiting on Chrome on Windows 7, which we’ve seen screenshots of and, yeah, it’s kind of horrifying. We’re on it!

And, related to the last post, Sachin Teng’s [i]nventory, complete with whiskey and Wind Up Bird. If you dig Teng’s stuff, you might also be interested in his print shop, where you can find more little Links and rainbow melting Macs. [via Sachin Teng]

“How I feel every time we get groceries”, a dorm-room dilemma from artist Sachin Teng, who you might know from his fantastic fine art work (see, most notably: his Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing and other related interwoven anatomy/geometry). [via Sachin Teng]

And then, like a bolt from out of nowhere, Venus Patrol was launched.

If you’re just joining us, quite a while back, I launched a campaign for a new initiative that would attempt to chart a new course for videogame culture via crowd-sourcing site Kickstarter. Even in what was then a pre-Double Fine Adventure world (which pretty much single-handedly legitimized the idea of crowd-funded videogames), the campaign went over more amazingly than I ever could have imagined, reaching its goal within the first 24 hours and going on to more than double that amount over the following four weeks.

Fast forward past an incredibly arduous blur, and Phase One of all that good will & good intention is officially complete: the website before your eyes, designed by Cory Schmitz with background assets graciously provided by indie game developer Neil Thapen‘s not-coincidentally-titled 2009 game Venus Patrol (more on that relationship over here).

A few important notes on the site:

Missed the Kickstarter? You can now get Vlambeer’s Gun Godz, AdamAtomic’s Capsule & many more of the rewards by purchasing a membership to the website.

The wait is finally over, and the “slacker-backer” option has appeared: everyone who missed out on supporting the Kickstarter can now purchase a membership to the site to receive two of the exclusive games, as well as art & music bonuses by Katamari Damacy designer Keita Takahashi, TearAway designer Rex Crowle, PixelJunk Eden designer Baiyon, and Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward. All of the details on that are over here.

Venus Patrol includes all of the content originally posted on Boing Boing spinoff Offworld.

Just under four years ago, I teamed up with the crew at Boing Boing to launch Offworld, a site about independent videogame culture (and the direct ancestor of Venus Patrol itself) that, if absolutely nothing else, brought focus to my own life that working to bring the best of independent gaming to a wider audience was exactly what I needed to be doing.

While I don’t expect that you’ll want to go back and read each of the nearly 2000 Offworld posts contained on Venus Patrol one-by-one, they’re fantastic context to show the first stirrings of things instantly recognizable today: the first stirrings of Superbrothers before #sworcery was even so much as a twinkle in anyone’s twitter feed, the first output that made Olly Moss one of the most sought-after designers working today, even the very first screenshot of PopCap’s now-flagship franchise Plants Vs. Zombies, before anyone had an inkling of just what a success it would become.

There’s even more yet to come.

As I’ve alluded to all along (and as you can see hinted at to the right), the Venus Patrol website is only Phase One of a multi-faceted future, with more information on further related initiatives coming soon.

In the meantime, feel free to poke around, kick the tires a bit and settle in — there might still be a few last technical hitches here and there to iron out as I get back into the groove I had going in the latter days of Offworld, but this is only day-one of a what I genuinely hope will be a real beautiful future. I hope you’re excited to join us on this ride.