The TIGSource Commonplace Book Competition didn't really receive as much attention, mostly due to IGF and the fact that everyone's super busy around this time of the year (seriously, other than IndieGames and TIGSource, every other indie gaming blog/site stopped updating, this one included, lolz). All that is about to change, for below is a look at some of the games from the competition!

Before we begin, let's talk a little bit about the competition first. The goal of the competition is to design a game based on one of the ideas from H.P. Lovecraft's Commonplace Book. From TIGSource:

Renowned horror novelist H.P. Lovecraft kept a notebook, called "The Commonplace Book, in which he jotted "ideas, images, & quotations hastily jotted down for possible future use in weird fiction. ...Their sources are various—dreams, things read, casual incidents, idle conceptions, & so on." As you might expect, these notes are fragmented, cryptic, and extremely creepy.

Anyway, there were 35 entries, and below is the winner and the first 9 losers (j/k but true):

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Well, well, well, the PGC, also known as the Procedural Generation Competition. is finally in its final stage. With a whopping 60 submissions, boy are there some gems among the submissions. TIGSource should really do these kind of contests more often. The only downside is the deadline--seems like many projects could have done a lot better with more time.

For me, one of the themes of this competition seems to be the unplayability of games, whether due to some stupid .NET compatibility or others...and judging by reader feedbacks in the competition forum, I'm not the only one.

I've listed some games below that I've been keeping my eyes on throughout the competition. Note I've played/tried all of the submissions (other than the ones I can't get to run, of course, thanks to crappy computers in China), and the ones below have made a pretty big impression on me.

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Indie game super site TIGSource recently held a competition called the Video Game Name Generator Competition, or simply "The VGNG Competition." To enter the competition, you'll have to create a game based on a name generated by Video Game Name Generator, which, unsurprisingly, tend to spew out ridiculous names that makes as much sense as a penguin going to a hot spring in Japan.

Of course, being late as always, the winner of the competition has already been announced before we could post something meaningful about the competition...nonetheless, below are some interesting entries that caught my attention, so I'm going to write about them whether they won the competition or not.

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According to Introversion, their popular (and award-winning) game Darwinia and the upcoming multiplayer Multiwinia: Survival of the Flattest will be made available on Microsoft's Xbox LIVE® Arcade service.

BusinessWeek has launched a new feature called BusinessWeek Arcade, where BusinessWeek rounds up some of the "Web's best free, independently produced games." The new column features quite a few high-quality free games, well worth checking out.

The Art of Play, an event put together by Heather Kelley, will take place at Carnegie Mellon University on March 31st and April 1st. According to the official website, "The aim of this Symposium and Arcade is to survey the games that brought us to this moment with their unique creative vision, and to frame the field moving forward, as game makers finally abandon the question "CAN games be art," and begin to ask ourselves in how many ways they WILL be."

New some screenshots and video of JADE has been released by Thomas Biskup.

Voting for the VGNG Compo has begun!

TIGSource, one of the premier blogs on independent gaming, has just announced the launch of TIGdb (in case you're curious, it stands for "The Indie Game Database"), a database for indie games that not only provides basic info and download link to indie games, but also lets users rate the games:

One thing that's pretty cool is that we have a rating system. Anyone can sign up for an account and start rating games (out of five stars). Eventually, these accounts will let you do more, like keep track of your favorite games or submit games to the database. The task of populating the database is a monumental one, so it'd be great to crowd-source this... but until we have some controls in place, me and Terry (and perhaps a few other people) will be adding the games. I will, however, take submissions/suggestions very seriously! See this thread for details.

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