In this week’s Indie Flash: LGBTQ film Gaming In Color has released, Zoe Quinn’s Rebel Jam has been announced, the Storium Kickstarter has a week left, and Game Music Bundle 7 is out now. Indie Flash is a small look into this week in indie games.
Gaming In Color Releases For $1
A few weeks ago we put a spotlight on the highly anticipated LGBTQ film Gaming In Color. With the tag-line “Out of the closet and into the arcade!” Gaming in Color showcases the story of queer gamers, the rise of gaymer culture and events, and the proliferation (and lack thereof) of LGBTQ themes in video games.
Philip Jones’s ambitious documentary is available for download at gamingincolor.vhx.tv and is following a pay-what-you-want model of digital distribution (minimum $1). The suggested price for the 62min-long film is $15. The film is accessible, entertaining, visually interesting, and is ground breaking as the first LGBTQ-focused game documentary.
“GAMING IN COLOR exists for anyone who believes that the pixelated world can be a better place for everyone, no matter who they are. It is not too uncommon a tale where a bullied, abused youth seeks solace in a video game, only to find that their one hope of sanctuary, their escape into a virtual universe, is plagued with floods of more vitriol and hatred. This exists doubly so for anyone who is a minority, including people of color, women, and members of the LGBTQ community.”
GaminginColor.vhx.tv
Zoe Quinn’s Rebel Jam Is Official
Motivated by the failure of the controversial and now-infamous Polaris GAME_JAM debacle a few weeks ago, Zoe Quinn, one of the two female developers from the GAME_JAM, has created her own game jam. Quinn has taken notes from the errors of Mountain Dew representatives who ruined the last event and the new jam seeks to get back to the collaborative roots of the indie gaming world. The Rebel Jam will bring together indie developers for a 3-day long game jam that will be filmed, documented, uploaded to YouTube for free, and this time will not be sponsored by PepsiCo Products. Fancy that.
checking the analytics on the Rebel Jam form and fucking laughing my ass off on the last question pic.twitter.com/0YtX5YBXcC
— Zoë Ê»CatPianoʼ Quinn (@ZoeQuinnzel) April 22, 2014
The Rebel Jam is all about the indie community and invites anyone and everyone to participate in whatever vein possible. YouTube personalities, filmmakers, video editors, developers, and any other interested persons are invited to apply on the website to be involved in the jam. Supporters are also invited to put their money where their mouths are and donate to help fund the project.
Storium Kickstarter Has a Week Left
Storium is a new Kickstarter project and a pretty exciting one. Storium is not so much a game as it is a storytelling and story creating platform. The unique browser-based platform breaks storytelling into manageable and easily manipulatable chunks of HTML for users to interact with. The goal is to turn the writing process into a multiplayer experience, where a narrator player controls the ebb and flow of a story while allowing other Storium users to fill in the actions and dialogue of a story’s individual characters. Essentially, Storium digitizes the collaborative storytelling nature of old-school Dungeons and Dragons and streamlines the creative process.
Initially asking for $25,000, the Kickstarter already has a massive amount of steam thrown into it, attracting over 3,000 backers and raising over $110,000 in the past three weeks. The last week of funding is about to start and there are still a few remaining stretch goals to hit – including a lofty $200k goal that would bring Storium into schools as an education tool. The platform already has a functional live version and, for $10, backers gain instant access to the current Storium beta.
Game Music Bundle 7 Rocks
Grab your headphones and a couple of bucks and finally stop leaving Banner Saga open just for the background music. This most recent seventh iteration of the Game Music Bundle features two tiers of tunes and an excellent selection of 25 different game soundtracks and game-related albums. The first tier is unlocked at only $1 and features albums for the following 5 games (96 songs, 4.14 hours):
- The Banner Saga
- DEVICE 6
- Broken Age
- The Floor is Jelly
- Luftrausers
The second tier unlocks at $10 and delivers a massive amount of more tunes, featuring the previous 5 plus an additional 15 albums (346 songs, 17.46 hours):
- Journey
- Starbound
- The Yawgh
- Magnetic By Nature
- Escape Goat 2
- Curious Merchandise
- Winnose
- Eldritch
- Bardbarian
- Tribes: Ascend
- Into the Box
- Soul Fjord
- Dragon Fantasy Book II
- Ether
- The Music of Junk Jack X
Game Music Bundle 7 will end on Friday, May 2nd, and if you’re not 100% sold on the music you can listen to samples provided on the website.
As always, if you have a positive or negative reaction to anything in this Indie Flash, let me know in the comments below!
