6 Indie Video Game Designers
Today is Video Games Day (not to be confused with National Video Games Day, which is in September), and though we were tempted to take this opportunity to find more disastrous video game-inspired costumes and videos, we opted for a more artful approach. In contemporary art’s never-ending expansionist push to turn every facet and feature of daily life into art, video games are among the most interesting new territories being explored.
With the tech sector laying off thousands of trained workers and design software available for little or nothing, the last few years have seen the emergence of the independent video game designer. Their games don’t have the sparkle and polish of the latest Halo installment, but they’re much cheaper and, often, much more creative both conceptually and visually. They’re also the products of solo designers and small teams, which makes them more intriguing from an authorial standpoint than your traditional video game designed by a team the size of a small town. So that you’ll be ahead of the curve with the latest video game and art scene, here are 6 Indie Video Game Designers whose work should get some play.
A collective-evoking game design unit that is in fact just one person, in this case Nenad Jalsovec, who designs fairly complex 2D and 3D games that are a mixture of fairly abstract graphics and fairly traditional arcade gameplay principles (and free to download). Like Rescue the Beagles (pictured), wherein a crash-landed shipment of beagles must escape the team sent to retrieve them and take them back to their lab for experiments.
One of the most highly visible indie game designers lately with his work appearing in some major exhibitions, Essen designs games whose retro graphics mask very nontraditional physics and strange narratives. You can download many for just $.99, and others, like Part Boat (pictured) are available as free flash games.
A designer and teacher of video game design at a university in Sweden, Svedang’s games tend to be more akin to explorable universes and tropes of RPG game play. Some were designed with larger teams, while others, like the massive online RPG World of Pong (pictured), are available for free from his site.
Despite its corporate-sounding name, Cactus Software is actually one Swedish video game designer whose games are mostly available for free download on his website. He tends to explore traditional arcade game stories and conventions and provide new twists, whether graphics- or story-related. Such is the case with Shotgun Ninja (pictured), which involves traveling through a Mario World-style environment to kill your accountant.
Designing games both for computers and for mobile devices, Johns creates pretty visually rich variations on traditional arcade games (all of them are available for free download). Space Barnacle (video above), for instance, is a typical 2D shoot-em-up platform game with some especially violent kill action and very pretty, creative environments and characters.
With games that tend to feature a very DIY graphic aesthetic of patched together environments and colorful characters, Jazzuo combines variations on familiar arcade tropes (like Onaraburu Samurai, pictured above) and totally off the wall gameplay scenarios – like Mr. Decek, which as far as we can tell involves exploring a landscape of butts and adventuring into people’s rectums.
oh man mark johns hasnt released anything in a million years, he should make another game goddamnit