I am glad to annouce the preview from Krystian Majewskis upcoming game “Trauma“, that will be released for free later that year. He worked at it for really a long time now – and renamed the game now from “Illucinated” to “TRAUMA”. The game is a little bit like a “point and click adventure”, but it focus is on “creating a rich experience rather than an elaborate puzzle challenge”. The game is meant to be played by a literate and mature audience. The game features an unconventional approach, telling the story of a woman, that tries to get herself after having a car accident. Watch the video, to get convinced, that this game follows more higher reasons, than just to please for some minutes of fun.

Majewski submitted TRAUMA to the Independend Games Festival (IGF). The good news are: in any way, this game will be available for free in a Flash-enables browser near you by the end of 2009.

Uh, I almost forgot… The game features real pictures from the Cologne-cityscape. There are work-in-progress pictures available.

What a wonderful short movie. This is almost a little bit too extremely cute. I love it! More of this stuff at the site of Jonathan Kim. He says about himself at his page the insanely brilliant words: “I can save my progress ANYWHERE.” So go for it!

The Independent Gaming Source is heading for another very interesting indie-game competition. This time it is two-part:

1. In the first part, artists and musicians will have a month to create as many art and music assets as they wish. These assets will be voted on at the end of the month based on the quantity, quality, and variety of the assets provided.

2. In the second part, designers and programmers will have a month to take the assets created in part one and make games with them (assets used need not be limited to one person or team). The programmers cannot make any changes to the assets unless it’s done during runtime. The best game will be voted on in the normal fashion.

I really love this kind of “constraint” setup, that forced people to be creative. (And to add some lovely easter-eggs into the assets for the coders). Read everything in details at the TIGSource blog or the forum.

I found a Facebook-Album, that utilized the game Farmville to execute very famous video game characters. See the rest of the picture here. 21th century kind of thinking: There are cubes, hm let’s make some kind of pixels…

Wild Wind is the title of an accurate pixel-animation short, that shows a very, very everyday-situation (for the other half) I guess nobody really likes. It could be the perfectly opener for a perfectly accurate game. I think that much of the sounds are doing the magic at this shortmovie. Wild Wild was made by Leonardo Campasso – in pixels. Like Drawn says, the guy is only 21, making Flash stuff since the age of 12.

Nintendo DS homebrewers will love this new synth, that is about to be released officially. The Tonesynth DS looks like a fancy “all in one” music tools, combing current trends of mobile- and webbased music-creation like “ToneMatrix” or “Korg DS-10″ with a crisp classic tone-generation. (via)

Screenshot from Small Worlds.

The results of the Casual Gameplay Design Competition 6 are ready to play. I just tested a few of the games until now, but they looks all nice, playable and atmospheric. So go for it and have a play yourself!