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Editor’s note: Evan stepped up to help us cover IndieCade — this is the first of a series of show updates. -Demian
Bitmob intern Alejandro Quan-Madrid and I will be posting articles about IndieCade over the course of the weekend. If you have any questions about the show or want us to check out a game in detail, post a comment on this article and we will do what we can to facilitate your IndieCade needs.
I’ll try and give you guys a daily run down of IndieCade and an idea of what it’s like to attend such an event as a “member of the press,” and representative of the Bitmob community.
Today was technically a press day and it was pretty awesome. (Sure, I have been to E3 before and I attended GDC in San Francisco this year, but not as a community representative or a member of the press.)
Me with a Christmas-themed lunch bag, getting ready to head out to IndieCade.
The first three hours of IndieCade kicked off with a press tour, in which Alejandro and I plus a handful of others paraded to different galleries around Culver City, and had a chance to see about 25 out of the 30 games at the show.
Ruben & Lullaby
Most of the demos were presented by the developers who actually made the games, so it was really cool to hear first-hand where the inspiration for a game came from, or the reasoning behind a specific art style choice. (See Bitmob’s IndieCade finalist interviews for more.)
Moon Stories
After the press tour, we hit a VIP party at the Royal-T Cafe, where we got to hang out with indie game makers such as: Brenda Brathwaite, creator of Train; Edmundo Bordeu, co-creator of Zeno Clash; and Tyler Glaiel, co-creator of Closure and Aether. After a short period of socializing we were shuttled off to the back, where each IndieCade finalist had a short amount of time to talk about their game.
ClassicNight
To finish off the night, a demonstration of Modal Kombat. I kid you not, acoustic guitars replaced controllers as the input devices for Pong, Tetris, Mortal Kombat, and Mario Kart. Chromatic scales controlled movement in Pong or Tetris; dissonant chords executed special moves in Mortal Kombat. It was definitely something you wouldn’t see at major event like E3 or GDC (but if you were lucky, maybe you spotted Modal Kombat at PAX).
Modal Kombat
That’s it for Day 1. We’ve got some conferences to attend tomorrow, so I better go and get some rest.
Stuff coming down the pipe: panels with Jenova Chen (Cloud, Flow, Flower), Keita Takahashi (Katamari Damacy), Henry Jenkins (game theory and academia), and a keynote delivered by Will Wright.
