Really great, especially loved the hard mode of level one. Who wrote the music for level two? That's some seriously great stuff.

I don't know about anyone else, but here are a few reasons why I gravitate towards older games:

* More creative settings. Perhaps on account of the fact that games used to be made by much smaller groups of people, their worlds and characters felt more imaginative and mysterious. Nowadays, it seems like there's only a couple of stock settings and characters that get reused, even if the details vary. Zeno Clash is the last "mainstream" game that really intrigued me in this regard. (By the way, my childhood gaming mostly consisted of shareware Apogee games.)

* Less focus on violence and serious issues. I'm tired of conspiracies, gangs, druglords, arms races, insanity, strife, and other unpleasant things. Sometimes I just want to hang out with my talking owl and rescue my castle from the clutches of an evil wizard, y'know? It feels like games are getting more and more aggressive over the years.

* Cartoonishness instead of realism. For instance, I've never seen anything like the insane, whimsical world of Goblin's Quest 3 in a 3D game.

* Better music. I'll take a chiptune with a strong melody over a lavishly orchestrated soundtrack or ambient background music any day.

* A sense of mystery. You never know what you're going to find next. I absolutely loved staring at shareware nag screens because of all the new levels, weapons, and monsters they revealed that were totally different from anything else I'd seen up to that point. Older games are also okay with leaving things unexplained, whereas games nowadays feel the need to meticulously describe every single thing in their universe. Sometimes, I just want to immerse myself in the setting without any distraction. Knowing too much makes the world seem smaller.

* Different  design paradigms. Duke Nukem 3D and many other shooters had non-linear hub-style levels, where you would start on the outside of the level and slowly work your way towards the center. Platformers like Commander Keen had large overworlds with occasional gates, which allowed you to choose which levels to tackle next.

* Easter eggs and secrets. Many games had fairly large sections that were only available to very careful players or players with guides. Most recently, the Serious Sam series really got this right. Most games nowadays are pretty open about their "secrets", probably to avoid wasting money on making content that few people would see.

I dunno. Maybe it is just nostalgia, but I just don't get that fantastic, intriguing, mysterious sense of storybook immersion with most games anymore. And I think that gamers have changed, too. When I was younger, gaming was a time when my imagination could run free. I would ask my dad to turn on our old Windows 3.1 computer, put in my shareware floppies, and then find myself in another world where everything was new and strange. I doubt many teens today would gravitate towards games like Journey, Rayman Origins, or Machinarium over the latest M-rated slaughterfest.

I never really gave it much thought before, but writing all this out made me realize how much I miss gaming in the 90s.

I'd never heard of the IGDA before going to GDC, but they seemed to be everywhere. Is it an organization that's worth joining? Are there many independent developers in the IGDA, or is it more for developers in the mainstream industry? Thanks!

One thing that annoyed me about the ceremony (IIRC) is that when the indie finalists walked on stage, they didn't play music from their games, whereas they did do that for the finalists in the GDC segment. (Am I misremembering?)

It's the nature of creative communities to have a generational nature. Fez, Spelunky, Meat Boy, et al. represent a "2007 generation" of indie developers, with about a year of leeway on either side. And TIGSource itself is, roughly, a 2007-era vision of independent gaming.

That doesn't mean you can't know the particular people who made these games, but your best chance of doing so is to work your way in from the side - meet people of your own generation, do good work both with your games and to build some community and meet people, and you end up in a better position almost by accident. It's almost entirely network-driven, and it's easiest to build the connections before the nodes are saturated, so to speak.

So if you see something potentially exciting happening, a community about to form, reach out to it and give it a lot of time and care. It'll work out in your favor.

Yeah, I can totally see that. It's just a little hard when the games that got you into this whole shindig came from that prolific 2007 generation. I was so freaking excited when I discovered that such a thing as the indie dev community existed, but I never actually got around to making games until about a year ago. (Or right now, even.)

Maybe I should just make some good games and talk to Jonathan Blow a bit. Everything that dude says is gold, plus he seems to be the godfather of like half the indie games at GDC.

Andy, I didn't realize you frequented these forums. Great presentation last light! You were really slick up there.

Hmm. Reading this thread is really depressing. I didn't even realize all this drama was going on. Although I guess it's the natural course of events, I really dislike the thought that some of my favorite developers are forming private cliques and sharing design ideas exclusively amongst themselves. We had something similar happen on another gaming forum I used to frequent, and it really made a lot of people feel abandoned and left out. The tight and friendly community that we started out with, through no fault of any one member, eventually fractured and drifted apart.

As a shy introvert, it's hard for me to get into the headspace of opening up and meeting new people in the community. It's even harder when I realize that so many indie game developers already know each other pretty closely, which means that they'll probably forget my face about 5 seconds after meeting me. But I guess this amounts to nothing more than a wish that I could have been there from the very start, when everyone was still a stranger and eager to reach out to one another.

I guess all I can really do is keep making games.

Let me just say that I'm so happy that Frozen Synapse won the audience award. I haven't played such a well-designed game in years.

It was also great to see Antichamber win technical excellence, which I wasn't expecting at all.

Because I just can't shut up about pizza, any attendant pizza fans should check out Zero Zero right around the corner. It's great!

I think I'm going to need some sort of time machine for tomorrow, especially around 2-4pm. Holy cow.

...also, I don't think I'll actually have any time to eat.

Best logo I could come up with in 3 evenings. Only later did I realize that I forgot to put my profession. Oh well, it'll matter more next year when I actually have some projects under my belt.

In terms of pizza, the best I've ever had is Emilia's in Berekely and Delfina in SF (Mission).

This is my first GDC, and I'm super-excited! I also have no idea what I'm doing. Are there any interesting meetups or parties going on after hours? So far, I know about Touch Arcade, Havok, 8bitSF, Killscreen, and Super7, as well as the general GDC Happy Hour.

Shogun is a new built-for-iOS bullet-hell shmup that I've been having tons of fun with. Really polished, clearly a labor of love. First level's free, the other three cost $2. (The difficulty is more Jamestown than Cave/Touhou).

Whoa, this game is awesome! Physics can make or break a game like this, but it feels buttery smooth to me. Arcade mode is really fun -- the wall rides are the best!

The art style really reminds me of a demoscene demo I saw a couple of weeks ago, Rupture by ASD.

Jet Car Stunts for iOS plays very similarly.

It's fun, it's polished, it's beautiful, it's surprisingly touching, it's filled to the brim with clever art and design, and it has one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard. It's no mystery why reviewers are so happy with it. But it's not particularly experimental — Terry's previous games were more like that. Perhaps that's what the writer was thinking of.