[This post is re-blogged from Venus Patrol sister-organization JUEGOS RANCHEROS, our local Austin indie game collective.]

You may have caught little snippets throughout the history of JUEGOS RANCHEROS meetups, but the time has finally come to bring it all together! Join us at Austin’s North Door next Thursday, May 1st, at 7:00PM, as JUEGOS RANCHEROS presents the first look at the final release of Sportsfriends, the new gold-standard indie multiplayer collection.

[ RSVP FOR THIS EVENT AND INVITE YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK BY CLICKING HERE! ]

(more…)

One more HORIZON post for posterity’s sake: if you missed the Twitch.tv livestream of Venus Patrol & MOCAtv’s alternative E3 conference last week — graciously provided and masterminded by the super excellent production team at AREA5 — we’ve uploaded the conference in its entirety to YouTube so you can view it again at your leisure and on your device of choice.

As a reminder, you can also find more information, video, and big, gorgeous screenshots of all the HORIZON games at the conference’s website, as well as all the additional games curated by LA’s Sarah Brin for its post-show party.

Thanks again to all who have supported our efforts to showcase a selection of beautiful games to E3 — we hope to have more news soon on what’s next for HORIZON!

It’s been almost a week since we ran HORIZON, the alternative E3 press conference co-presented by Venus Patrol & MOCAtv, and to be honest, I think we’re all still recovering. Reaction to the conference has been more or less universally positive, and we’re super grateful both to everyone who made it happen and for all the kind words that have been coming in over the past few days from outfits like Polygon & The Verge.

That also includes photographer Brian Erzen, who documented the entire conference as it was happening, which we’re presenting here in slideshow form for those that couldn’t make it the day of. Above is the group shot or HORIZON’s presenters & participating developers that immediately followed the conference, and below the fold, a slew of other great photos of nearly everyone that took part.

(more…)

And now, the news people have been asking for for over a year: Die Gute Fabrik, Noah Sasso, Ramiro Corbetta and Bennett Foddy have just announced Sportsfriends, a four game collection for PC, Mac and PlayStation 3 that will see the combined release of Hokra, BaraBariBall, an updated version of Foddy’s Pole Riders, and — finally! — a full-featured version of Johann Sebastian Joust.

The four developers have taken to Kickstarter to bring the games to PlayStation 3 (and help port each game around to the various platforms they don’t already exist on), where $15 will net you a copy of the collection on its release sometime in Autumn of 2013, along with a bonus copy of Tennnes, created by Vlambeer’s JW Nijman.

For twice that you get early beta access to all the games in the collection far sooner than the projected release date, and twice that will also get you bonus games from Sasso, Corbetta and Foddy. Higher-level backers can get a Joust ‘starter-kit’ with seven PlayStation Move controllers and custom “charms” (see above for an illustrated example of the Ink-It Labs product) to clasp to & identify your own set, a package of pre-configured Mega GIRP dance mats, or the ultra rare 18-player version of Joust.

At the highest level, you can even get two real-live actual trampolines to play Foddy’s Get On Top, recently featured at the Venus Patrol Training Facility, alongside, totally not-coincidentally, all of the Sportsfriends games. As you might have guessed, the Training Facility was my way to help introduce the games that would eventually make its way into this campaign to a wider audience.

Find more details about the campaign and all of the included games at Kickstarter — with Joust being an instrumental part of Venus Patrol’s own campaign, this is obviously one that I’m incredibly excited for & wholeheartedly endorse.

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 are be presented here on Venus Patrol for your reference, each fully-annotated, -linked, and off-the-cuff blurbed, in addition to their home on the JUEGOS RANCHEROS site.

(more…)

RED 7: THE FIRST PROTOTYPE SCREENSHOT OF DIE GUTE FABRIK’S SWAMP-OPERA MUTATIONE

---

8.11.2009

Brandon Boyer

2 Replies

It’s been a good day for early looks at indie games that have been a bit off the radar, and next is Mutatione, the adventure game from Nils ‘Die Gute Fabrik‘ Deneken, whose original concept image (embedded again below) surprisingly but rightly received a lot of positive attention on its first posting.

While there’s still not much more to glean from the image above, Deneken leaves the following comments on the game, and is very much precisely speaking my language with its outside inspirations, and introduces its new heroine:

The game mechanics remind me a lot of the 2D Prince of Persia, Flashback or the polygon classic Another World. I just love those games. Anyways, for Mutatione we try to have a stronger focus on the story and the mood of the game, especially when it comes to sound and music.

The team, now six-strong and already plugging away for the past two months, is looking for more funding for future development — Deneken will only say that much of the “development speed of the game” rests solely on that, and that he “hopes to work on Mutatione a lot more…”

ONE SHOT: HEADBANGING FOR LOVE IN SPIRIT HORSE OF THE CHEROKEE!

---

7.20.2009

Brandon Boyer

1 Reply

Die Gute Fabrik’s Nils Deneken (he of the previously featured forthcoming swamp-opera game Mutatione) teases screenshots of his ‘headbanging game” Spirit Horse of the Cherokee!

Created for the recent No More Sweden indie-meetup/rapid-dev competition, Deneken describes the game as a love story between the couple above, who, “by synchronising their headbanging, reach new planes of heavy metal love.”

ONE SHOT: DIE GUTE FABRIK’S SWAMP-OPERA CONCEPT, MUTATIONE

---

5.23.2009

Brandon Boyer

6 Replies

Concept art for Nils ‘Die Gute Fabrik‘ Deneken’s adventure/platformer/soap opera Mutatione, which takes place “in a mutant-inhabited swamp village with the same name.”