Today I Die was selected as a finalist at the IGF (Independent Games Festival), one of the most prestigious events of the world regarding indie development.

The category it was selected into was “Nuovo”:

The Nuovo award honors abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which advances the medium and the way we think about games.

I always dreamed about being an IGF finalist. The happiest thing about being a finalist is that I can forget about chasing the award. I want to fully focus on my craft.

Meanwhile…

note: fonts used in this prototype were developed by Anna Anthropy (sorry about not linking to this before, Anna!)

Last month I took a trip to Los Angeles to attend Indiecade, an independent game developer/artist festival that grows bigger each year. I Wish I Were the Moon, Today I Die and Storyteller were picked as finalists (packed as “Moon Stories”), together with lots of very good games like Osmos, Closure and Tuning.

It was a four day event, comprised of several lectures, presentations and social events. A quite varied (albeit small) audience attended, but the greatest takeaway from the event was the opportunity to meet up with other indies and industry celebrities in an intimate environment. GDC has grown far to large to be able to offer this, so I was very happy to discover that the trip to Indiecade exceeded all my expectations on this front.

So I am grateful towards the organizers for making all possible efforts to get me there, and even host me for one of the nights. I definitely recommend attending this event if you are looking for a reason why being indie is so much better than the mainstream industry.

Some highlights:

VIP Opening Party

The first night a party was thrown that featured food, drinks, and all finalists presenting their games in 3:12 minutes each:

Indiecade 2009 Awards

Moon Stories received the “Jury Award”! In this picture: John Sharp, Brenda Braithwaite, me and Jonathan Blow.

Brenda Braithwaite, Eddy (Osmos), Tyler (Closure), and Andy (Osmos).

Closing Party
Last night of the event Robin Hunicke boldly invited the whole bunch of us to a closing party at her place, which was one of the best thing that happened during this trip. Robin is the ultimate social hub of the industry:

All in all, I very happy to have attended this event and made me feel even more confident about the future of the indie universe.

Today I Die and I Wish I Were the Moon were selected as finalists for Indiecade 2009, an independent games festival at Culver City, California.

I will be attending the event, participating in a Pecha-Kucha style presentation (12 powerpoint slides, 16 seconds each) and a presentation about “Games and Emotions” that sounds very exciting, provided I figure out what it really means.

During the event, I will be showing some prototypes I’ve been working on, and make an interesting announcement related to Today I Die.

I will try to keep things updated through Twitter (http://twitter.com/danielben).

Update: I am including the list of finalists, following Edmund’s lead:

Aether, Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel
Akrasia, Team Aha!
Classic Night, Akarolls
Cogs, Lazy 8 Studios
Closure, Tyler Glaiel & Jon Schubbe
Dear Esther, The Chinese Room
Deep Sleep Initiative, The, ARx
Eliss, Steph Thirion
Everybody Dies, Jim Munroe
Global Conflicts: Latin America, Serious Games Interactive
Gray, Mike Boxleiter & Greg Wohlwend
Maw, Twisted Pixel Games
Mightier, Lucas Pope and Keiko Ishizaka
Minor Battle, Andre Clark
Moon Stories, Daniel Benmergui
Nanobots, Erin Robinson
Osmos, Hemisphere Games
Papermint, Avaloop
Path, The, Tale of Tales
Radio Flare, studio radiolaris
Ruben & Lullaby, Erik Loyer
Shadow Physics, Steve Swink & Scott Anderson
Sowlar, Odd Man In
Spectre, Vaguely Spectacular Team
Train, Brenda Brathwaite
Tuning, cactus / Jonatan Soderstrom
You get me, Blast Theory
Zeno Clash, ACE Team Software
Modal Kombat, David Hindman

I am very happy with the repercussions of the publication of Today I Die… as with I Wish I Were the Moon, I had no idea how would everyone react to the game beforehand.

The reaction was beyond expected… I keep getting mails each day from people who found the experience of playing it important to them. Even though I can’t answer every single mail, or comment in every blog that talked about the game, I think I read pretty much everything that google could find out there, even on very foreign languages!

I kinda distrust the stats of my hosting, but apparently the game got more than 400,000 gameplays, and counting.

The game is self-published in an serene, clean website, and it can be played for free.

But in order to fund my next game, I decided to accept donations and allow regular people to become my sponsors. They will have the chance to know about my next game before everyone else, and will be listed in the game credits.

So far there’s enough for me to live for a couple more months working exclusively on my own games, so huge thanks to all of you!

The game was positively covered by Kotaku, JayIsGames (apparently it’s one of the best rated games there), RockPaperShotgun, Destructoid, TIGSource, Offworld, AV Club, and Jeff Vogel himself (I play his games).

There’s a walkthrough, thanks to Tasselfoot.

I’ve just updated the game to version 1.1:

• Game translated to Spanish, Portuguese (Janos Biro), Czech (Jarnik), German (Kirill Gettmann), French (David Callé and Guillaume Patrux) and Italian (Elisa Di Fiore).
• Some small changes to improve on the meaning of the game objects.
• I installed a bot that helps me collect statistics on how many times the game is played, since I don’t trust the logging of my hosting very much…

In the future I will make another version of this game with deeper changes I already know will make the game much better, but I’ll let some time go by so I can have a perspective on it.

Also, Leticia Vilela made a wallpaper:

Finally, Today I Die is now released and you can play it here.

You might notice it’s actually self-hosted. I built a package including I Wish I Were the Moon, Storyteller, Today I Die and its soundtrack, which you can download from the downloads page, where you can help me by donating!

This was not an easy game to make, and I involved a lot of people I want to thank. I’m sure I’ll forget someone… remind me at daniel@ludomancy.com!

Tembac for the initial idea of playing with poem words is his. Him, Egar Almeida and Patrick Dugan for the initial feedback. Edmund McMillen for his obsession with helping me out, Jason Rohrer, Terry Cavanagh, Ian Bogost, John Sharp, Martín Sebastián Wain, Heather Kelley, Darius Kazemi, Anthony Burch, Juan Becerril, Jonathan Blow, Nick Montfort, Gregory Weir, Chris Hecker, Stephen Lavelle, Mike Treanor, PixelJam, Marco Mustapic, Rod Humble, Anna Anthropy for their critical feedback.

Guadalupe, whose handwriting you can see in the game.

And very special thanks to the “sponsor” of this game, who went out of his way to make it possible for me release the game in a quiet, ad-free website.

Enjoy!

This week I start the process of looking for a sponsor to “Today I Die”, my current game. It will be released as soon as that happens.

It’s about the daily choice of waking up in the morning.

The music track being made by Hernán Rozenwasser (Night Raveler) is wonderful, and you can Download it.

Click screenshot to play

Gregory from Ludus Novus made a vignette Game called I Fell in Love With the Majesty of Colors. It’s a dramatization (or should I say gamification) of a dream he had, and so it has that oniric taste that I think is severely underexplored in games.

You control a cthulhu-esque tentacle in the bottom of Gregory’s unconscious sea and you can grab stuff in an attempt to discover every ending that you can reach, like Moon does. And that similarity in format made some people treat him a little scornfully, and that’s why I’m writing this.

Not only I feel personally very flattered by Gregory’s open acceptance of the influence of Moon, but I am also surprised by the game he came up with. It made me consider exploring dreams a bit more, and I think he took the vignette concept a little further. Also, controlling a huge tentacle to grab things is a very clever and effective idea.

I am not trying to build a trademark. I’m trying to make games that affect people. And if something I make inspires something new that I myself find surprising, there’s no media award that could match that success. So thanks for your work, Gregory.

Since I wanted to be a contender in this year’s IGF, I worked a bit on I wish I were the Moon and submitted it.

This new version has more endings, some tweaks and fixes all over the place, and a secret ending. You can play it in Kongregate.

I will link to the most beautiful video walkthrough I get, so if you make one, let me know!

On other news:

• There is a video for my presentation at Japan’s Sense of Wonder Night
• EVA, the argentinian GDC is on this weekend. I’ll be presenting CODEAR, our indie contest, including the Banner Games Contest, Single Screen RPG and the results of Project 2008!

I’m on my way back home from Japan, after one of the best trips in my life. I left the writeup until now since I’ve been travelling like crazy the last 15 days:

The Tokyo Game Show is a huge circus of lights, noise, screaming, booth babes and cosplayers, but I didn’t find anything inspiring at all. Most of it was about Tekken 7, Biohazard 5, Monster Hunter 3 and Final Fantasy (14?). There were hidden gems every now and then, but the whole show tired me up and didn’t really feel like hunting for gold.

The Sense of Wonder Night was a completely different experience. We were all gathered in a restaurant showroom while each of us showed our games in front of an audience that was set in the mood by being giving free alcohol and food. They were given a toy that makes noise when you wave it, with the instructions of using it when a game evoked a sense of wonder. I think that concept made it very fun both for us presenters and the audience. Ian’s The Unfinished Swan and Gomibako really excited everybody.

I severely cut down my presentation when they told us that the translation would not be simultaneous but intertwined. So I only said three things: I wanted to make a game about people and not objects, small and short in scope and gametime, and not using text or movies to propel the game forward.

I enjoyed presenting despite being a little anxious of standing in front of an audience completely alien to me. I was relieved when the reaction was enthusiastic.

My only complaint was that I wish we presenters had some sort of private meeting afterwards or before… since half of us were westerns and the other japanese, there were not much opportunity for bonding across the language barrier in the middle of the event. But being the first edition of this event, I think it was great. If you are a creative game developer looking for an excuse to spend the money to visit Japan, go for SOWN next year!

If there is anything you want to ask about SOWN, TGS or Japan, I’ll happily answer here.

I have a crappy clip of the intro.

Recently I uploaded I wish I were the Moon and Storyteller to Kongregate.

My goal was to figure out if it’s a good platform to publish my work, since Ludomancy is very limited on the people it’s reaching now.

I figured that the people of Kongregate would be accustomed to Armor Games-sponsored Tower Defense, Stick Games and casual RPGs, so I expected Moon and Storyteller to rate very low and only get comments like “gay” and “wtf not a game 1/5″.

So I was really surprised by the reaction… Moon got a high rating, plenty of positive comments, and it survived on the homepage of Kongregate as a “Hot New Game” for at least a couple days. This was truly heartwarming for me, and I appreciate the open heart of the Kongregate community.

As for Kongregate itself, I think it needs more work on the developer relations… the developer forum is not searchable, the documentation insufficient to explain badges, and there are almost no statistics. But the bigger problem is the business model… I personally despise ads, and I would love to see other options for making money, or disconnecting ads completely. If you were wondering, after 66,000 gameplays, Moon made… 45 bucks (it can be increased by implementing the Kongregate API and sigining exclusively, but still).

Having said that, I will probably release every game I make on Kongregate because you always learn something from feedback when you are trying something new.

Update: it got around 90,000+ gameplays now.
Update2: made it to the front page of newgrounds too.
Update3: it got around 97,700+ gameplays and 92 US dollars now. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be implementing the Kongregate API to enable badges and see what happens with the comments, the rate and the gameplays. I had the numbers I wanted from the “pure” release anyway.