Renga | |
---|---|
Developer(s) | wallFour |
Publisher(s) | wallFour |
Release | 2012 |
Genre(s) | Shoot 'em up |
Mode(s) | Multiplayer |
Renga is a shoot 'em up video game developed and published by British studio wallFour. Designed for movie theaters for up to one hundred players, players are given laser pointers and are tasked with cooperatively building and defending a space ship. It was showcased at 2012's Indiecade, where it won the Developers Choice Award.
Renga is a "theatrical co-op" game. It is designed to be played in a movie theater with up to one hundred players, with each player holding a laser pointer. [1] Players must pilot a space ship by hitting one of four arrows, which causes the ship to move. At the same time, players must also defend the ship from objects such as pentagons and hexagons. Defeating a pentagon, for example, requires five players to hit the five points of the shape simultaneously in order to destroy it. Destroying the hexagons earns the players blocks, which can be used to build engines or silos, the latter of which can capture more blocks. [2]
Renga was created by wallFour, former video game industry employees Adam Russell, previously of Lionhead Studios and John Sear, previously of Codemasters. The inspiration for the game came from works of ProjectorGames and Graffiti Research Lab's L.A.S.E.R. Tag. [1]
Renga was selected as one of thirty-six finalists at Indiecade in 2012. [3] It was later featured at Indiecade East in 2013 at the Museum of the Moving Image. [4] It was also shown at the Game Developers Conference, SXSW, New York Film Festival and the GameCity Festival. [1]
At 2012's Indiecade, Renga was awarded the Developers Choice Award. [5] It also received an honorable mention for the Nuovo Award at 2013's Independent Games Festival. [6]
Luke Larsen from Paste placed it first on his list of "Exciting Games from IndieCade 2012", saying that "it was the one game that had us most convinced of the communal power of video games." [7]
John Walker from Rock, Paper, Shotgun considered the concept of the game to be "splendid". [8]
Eric Zimmerman is a game designer and the co-founder and CEO of Gamelab, a computer game development company based in Manhattan. GameLab is known for the game Diner Dash. Each year Zimmerman hosts the Game Design Challenge at the Game Developers Conference. He is also the co-author of four books including Rules of Play with Katie Salen, which was published in November 2004. Eric Zimmerman has written at least 24 essays and whitepapers since 1996, mostly pertaining to game development from an academic standpoint. He's currently a founding faculty at the NYU Game Center.
Antichamber is a first-person puzzle-platform game created by Australian developer Alexander "Demruth" Bruce. Many of the puzzles are based on phenomena that occur within impossible objects created by the game engine, such as passages that lead the player to different locations depending on which way they face, and structures that seem otherwise impossible within normal three-dimensional space. The game includes elements of psychological exploration through brief messages of advice to help the player figure out solutions to the puzzles as well as adages for real life. The game was released on Steam for Microsoft Windows on 31 January 2013. A version originally sold with the Humble Indie Bundle 11 in February 2014 added support for Linux and OS X.
Ian Bogost is an American academic and video game designer. He holds a joint professorship in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and in Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Chair in Media Studies.
IndieCade or Indiecade is an international juried festival of independent games. IndieCade is known as "the video game industry's Sundance." At IndieCade, independent video game developers are selected to screen and promote their work at the annual IndieCade festival and showcase events. In 2009, IndieCade launched a conference track featuring classes, panels, workshops, and keynotes. The conference has since become a major attraction for indie developers and others in the industry.
VVVVVV is a 2010 puzzle-platform video game created by Terry Cavanagh. In the game, the player controls Captain Viridian, who must rescue their spacecrew after a teleporter malfunction caused them to be separated in Dimension VVVVVV. The gameplay is characterized by the inability of the player to jump, instead opting on controlling the direction of gravity, causing the player to fall upwards or downwards. The game consists of more than 400 individual rooms, and also supports the creation of user-created levels.
Limbo is a puzzle-platform video game developed by independent studio Playdead. The game was released in July 2010 on Xbox Live Arcade, and has since been ported to several other systems, including the PlayStation 3, Linux and Microsoft Windows. Limbo is a 2D side-scroller, incorporating a physics system that governs environmental objects and the player character. The player guides an unnamed boy through dangerous environments and traps as he searches for his sister. The developer built the game's puzzles expecting the player to fail before finding the correct solution. Playdead called the style of play "trial and death", and used gruesome imagery for the boy's deaths to steer the player from unworkable solutions.
FTL: Faster Than Light is a space-based top-down real-time strategy roguelike game created by indie developer Subset Games, which was released for Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux in September 2012. In the game, the player controls the crew of a single spacecraft, holding critical information to be delivered to an allied fleet, while being pursued by a large rebel fleet. The player must guide the spacecraft over eight sectors, each with planetary systems and events procedurally generated in a roguelike fashion, while facing rebel and other hostile forces, recruiting new crew, and outfitting and upgrading their ship. Combat takes place in pausable real time, and if the ship is destroyed or all of its crew lost, the game ends, forcing the player to restart with a new ship.
Sportsfriends is a party video game created by the Danish independent developer collective Die Gute Fabrik. It consists of four games: Johann Sebastian Joust, Super Pole Riders, BaraBariBall, and Hokra. Planned for release on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Windows, Mac, and Linux, the game was funded through Kickstarter and received over US$150,000 from backers.
Quadrilateral Cowboy is a first-person puzzle-adventure video game by independent developer Blendo Games. The game was released on July 25, 2016 for Microsoft Windows, and on October 1, 2016 for macOS and Linux.
Philippe Poisson, better known as Phil Fish, is a French-Canadian former indie game designer best known for his work on the 2012 platform game Fez. He was born and raised in Quebec, where his experiences with Nintendo games in his youth would later influence his game design. He studied game design at the Montreal National Animation and Design Centre, and worked at Ubisoft and Artificial Mind and Movement before starting Polytron in 2008.
Porpentine Charity Heartscape is a video game designer, new media artist, writer and curator based in Oakland, California. She is primarily a developer of hypertext games and interactive fiction mainly built using Twine. She has been awarded a Creative Capital grant, a Rhizome.org commission, the Prix Net Art, and a Sundance Institute's New Frontier Story Lab Fellowship. Her work was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. She was an editor for freeindiegam.es, a curated collection of free, independently produced games. She was a columnist for online PC gaming magazine Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
Proteus is a 2013 exploration and walking simulator video game designed and created by Ed Key and David Kanaga for Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita. In the game, the player traverses a procedurally generated environment without prescribed goals. The world's flora and fauna emit unique musical signatures, combinations of which cause dynamic shifts in audio based on the player's surroundings.
Terry Cavanagh is an Irish video game designer based in London, England. After studying mathematics at Trinity College in Dublin, Cavanagh worked briefly as a market risk analyst before focusing on game development full-time. His titles all share a primitive, minimalist aesthetic. He has created over two dozen games, most notably VVVVVV, Super Hexagon, and Dicey Dungeons. He is credited as a programmer for Alphaland, a platform game by Jonas Kyratzes.
Gorogoa is a puzzle video game developed by Jason Roberts and published by Annapurna Interactive. The game was released for Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, and iOS on 14 December 2017, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in March 2018, and shortly thereafter an Android and Kindle Fire release.
Adam Saltsman, also known as Adam Atomic, is an American indie video game designer best known for creating the endless runner Canabalt. He is a founder of Semi Secret Software and Finji video game studios.
Mattie Brice is an independent video game designer, critic, and industry activist. Her games and writing focus on diversity initiatives in the games industry, discussing the perspective of marginalized minority voices to publications like Paste, Kotaku, and The Border House. Her games are freeware and do not require programming to create.
Old Man's Journey is an adventure video game developed and published by Broken Rules. The game was released for Android, iOS, macOS and Windows in 2017, the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 in 2018 and the Xbox One in 2019.
Conarium is a Lovecraftian horror adventure video game, inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's novella At The Mountains of Madness. The game was developed by Turkish game development studio Zoetrope Interactive, published by Dutch indie game publisher Iceberg Interactive, and was released in June 2017.
Walden, a game is a first-person open world video game developed by Tracy Fullerton and the USC Game Innovation Lab for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and PlayStation 4. Released on itch.io on July 4, 2017 for PC/Mac and PlayStation 4 on May 15, 2018, the game translates the experience of naturalist and author Henry David Thoreau's stay at Walden Pond in 1845–47 to a video game. The game was announced for PlayStation 4 at the 2017 PlayStation Experience.
Cathriona "Cat" Tobin is a game designer and publisher based in West Cork, Ireland. She co-owns the London-based Pelgrane Press with Simon J Rogers and is a significant contributor to the roleplaying game industry in the UK.