AKA Free/cheap indie things, which may or may not be games, available to download on itch.io or elsewhere.

I've become a bit disillusioned with much of modern game design recently, and I've started to favour more loose and free feeling concepts, and despite the flaws and incompleteness that tends to come along with this sort of experimental stuff I find them more compelling somehow. I've enjoyed the excellent Priceless Play section on RPS for a while now, there's been no end of things that I've seen on there that I've wanted to check out but never got around to.

So I've started actually checking out the various things that interest me, there's some real gems hidden around. itch.io seems very much like the game equivalent of Bandcamp, which is a big plus IMO. I still have yet to get a PS4 to be able to play Dreams, but playing some of these little vignettes and tech demo type things it reminds me of that homebrew spirit a fair bit.

I definitely recommend a perusal, you don't even need an account to download stuff. Here's a few things that I've liked -


Neo-Brutalism Of Tomorrow -



Short art gallery thing, resets after a short while so you run to one exhibit at a time and repeat. Neat.


Birthplace of Ossian -



Very chilled walkabout across a vast mountainscape filled with mist and some intriguing monuments.


New Zealand Recreation -



Chilled little walkabout through a pretty forest.


Evolution -



I bloody love this. Build a basic assembleage of joints, bones and muscles, then set a bunch of them off to run, jump or climb. Creatures that perform best get selected and the genes passed to the next set with some mutations. Uses neural networks and genetic algorithms to make a shuffling mess into something recognisably lifelike. This is how robots and locomotive systems will be designed in the future, I think this sort of thing has been done for while actually. Super cool. The above gif is a few things I've made, I like the bipedal thing, you can do very abstract stuff though. Still can't crack the climbing mode though. This is so much fun to mess around with, as long as I can spare the CPU cycles I think I will be running this in the background for a while to come.

I also just want to rep Darwin Pond (and also Gene Pool though it was never my fave) by Jeffrey Ventrella, he's got all sorts of neat widgets and things on there, check it out. I got into artificial life simulation things and cellular automata when I was back in school, used to love all that stuff. You could start off a big primordial mess in Darwin pond, set the ecology parameters and just leave life to find a way.. Great fun, I would leave it running all day to come back to it and see what had evolved. Seems like it might be a little broken on modern PCs though.. probably needs a little tweaking.


Worlds (a world history simulator) -



This is neat to look at, but very limited atm. When I fired it up I was expecting to see civilisations rise and fall, and for flashes of nuclear death and such to occur eventually with a repeating cycle. Sadly currently it just has basic tribes that pretty much stay in stasis. But the potential for this kind of thing is pretty big I think, and the roadmap has plenty of cool features.


Pyramid Builder -



This is lovely, beautiful ASCII graphics with a gorgeous day/night cycle. Really simple little game, as the title suggests you build a pyramid, I think you can get it done quicker if you build fields and houses for the little workers optimally. Chirpy 8 bit tune too.


Take a wander, if you spot owt good chuck it in here.