A reminder for all our Toronto indie friends and an update for those that might not have yet seen: this Friday, December 7th will see the latest meetup of the city’s Hand Eye Society — the progenitors of hyper-local indie game meetups — with a series of talks on the subject of roguelikes.

On hand will be N+ co-creator Raigan Burns of Metanet, who’ll discuss how the genre’s “minimalist proceduralism inspired indie hits like Spelunky” and debunk the myth that it “introduced the notion of permadeath as an antidote to the poisonous excess of infinite lives” with his “trademark intensi-passion”.

Metanet’s also brought in Kornel Kisielewicz from his native Poland to discuss DoomRL, his conversion of id’s classic first-person-shooter into a top-town turn-based spacebase-crawler, with pixels by none other than Spelunky creator Derek Yu.

Everything kicks off at 7pm at Toronto’s Monarch Tavern, and we desperately hope someone’s got an iPhone camera handy with a little tripod to bring us video after the event.

Toronto’s TIFF Nexus has just put together this very nice video on the past Spring’s Comics Vs Games jam, an initiative headed by Spooky Squid founder & Hand Eye Society member Miguel Sternberg, which paired five comic artists with five indie devs to create five new games, which were then displayed around the city during comics festival TCAF and the TIFF film festival proper.

The five games created were Andy Belanger and Sternberg’s Black Church Brigandage, Jamie Fristrom & Steve Manale’s We’re No Angels, Kyla Vanderklugt & Christine Love’s The Mysterious Aphroditus, Damian Sommer & Emily Carroll’s The Yawhg and Farbs & John Martz’s Cumulo Nimblers.

Of the five, only Nimblers (above) has yet to be made available for public release, which you can get (and see more about the development of) courtesy Farbs’ site here.

The Hand Eye Society and particularly the recent efforts of the TIFF Nexus (which also include Hand Eye-related initiatives like the Difference Engine, widening the community of women making games) have been hugely influential on what we’re attempting to do in Austin with JUEGOS RANCHEROS, so more successes like this are always quite heartening. [via John Martz]