In our estimation he’s one of the best and most undersung interactive artists working in videogames today, and this Thursday, December 4th, at 7:00PM at Austin’s North Door, we’ll take a look back at the work of New York based artist Vectorpark, including the debut of his upcoming iOS game, Metamorphabet.

[ RSVP FOR THIS EVENT AND INVITE YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK BY CLICKING HERE! ]

Probably best known for his 2009 adventure game Windosill on iOS and Steam (pictured below), Vectorpark was a pioneer of interactive web art, and is a reigning champion at creating both dreamlike environments and creatures which inhabit them that all feel unbelievably tactile and alive.

We’ll have a number of these early and more recent works on display at the ND, and will also be giving Austin the first chance to play his latest game, Metamorphabet, an “interactive, animated alphabet” which, says Vectorpark, “presents the 26 letters of the alphabet as a series of luminous and unexpected transformations, inviting playful participation from kids and adults alike.”

All the games will be playable beginning this Thursday, December 4th, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public, so come join us as we drink, play and meet the people changing the way we think about games!

Every month, as part of the regular monthly meetings of JUEGOS RANCHEROS, we do a very casual & chatty rundown of the ten or so games from the previous month for the audience, to give people — especially those outside the indie community itself — a look at what they may have missed. The featured games are both local and global, and both indie and, on occasion, a bit-bigger-budget — what binds them together is simply that they’re all amazing.

In keeping with the tongue-in-tobacco-packed-cheek tone, we call these run-downs A Fistful of Indies, which are presented here for your reference.

(more…)

Want to spend your Thursday night wrestling a pitbull to the ground & high-fiving a pizza as you lose yourself in a ‘giddy apocalypse’? Then come join us this Thursday, October 2nd, at 7:00PM at Austin’s North Door as we present the local double-feature premiere of Kevin Cancienne’s local multiplayer dog-em-up Dog Park & Jane Friedhoff’s Slam City Oracles.

[ RSVP FOR THIS EVENT AND INVITE YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK BY CLICKING HERE! ]

Developer Cancienne — also known for his design work on area/code’s early classic iPhone puzzle game Drop7 — has described Dog Park as “a fighting game without the fighting”, a four-‘person’ brawler where players choose their dog & score points for chasing, wrestling, cavorting & gamboling in perfectly-pitched canine fashion.

Various JUEGOS RANCHEROS organizers have also described it as “omg the best game ever”.

In addition to Dog Park, we’ll also be showing Slam City Oracles, a two-player body-slammer by Jane Friedhoff, with art by Jenny Jiao Hsia & music by Prophets & Kings.

Already drawing a number of favorable comparisons to Katamari Damacy from sites like Kotaku for its cheerfully chaotic cartoony slapstick physicality, Oracles is a vertically-oriented game where two girls have four minutes to joyfully & wantonly break the entire world around them.

Both games were commissioned for the NYU Game Center’s No Quarter exhibition — the yearly local-multiplayer focused show which has spawned games like Nidhogg, Bara Bari Ball & Bennett Foddy’s Speed Chess — and were first debuted there September 19th, alongside Naomi Clark‘s consensual card game Consentacle and Corporate Vandals, a physical game from Shawn Allen, creator of Treachery in Beatdown City.

Both games will be making their local debut Thursday, October 2nd, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public, so come join us as we drink, play and meet the people changing the way we think about games!

Can’t make it to this year’s Fantastic Arcade or want to get a leg up on the competition? Come join us next Thursday, September 4th, at 7:00PM at Austin’s North Door as we present a special preview of some of this year’s best tournament games, including Gang Beasts, Push Me Pull You and Astro Duel.

[ RSVP FOR THIS EVENT AND INVITE YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK BY CLICKING HERE! ]

Headlining the event will be Boneloaf’s upcoming slapstick party-game Gang Beasts, already a verified indie cult hit, where players “grab, push, pull, punch, and throw their friends from wrestling rings, speeding trucks, and suspended platforms” with “doughy ragdoll physics and horrific environmental hazards.” We’ve previewed this one a bit before, and it became an instant favorite.

We’ll also be running Push Me Pull You, House House’s “2v2 sports game about friendship and wrestling” where connected snake-y worm-y contestants “love each other, work together, communicate and coordinate” as they use their shared body to “wrap, writhe, and wrestle the ball into your half of the court.”

And finally, we’ll be showing Astro Duel, the competitive multiplayer tabletop game from Austin’s own Rusty Moyher, where 2 to 4 players “blast each other using asteroid-style ships”, in fast-paced rounds “inspired by endless nights of Super Bomberman.

All three games will be run in tournament play during this year’s Fantastic Arcade, so come join us as we drink, play and get ready to better face your competition, Thursday, September 4th, at 7:00PM at North Door, 501 Brushy Street, Austin, TX 78702! The show is free and open to all the public!

If you thought the Adventure Time Game Jam was going to be hard to top, we might just have done it: organizers of Fantastic Arcade have just announced the Barfcade Game Jam, a two-week jam open to developers world wide to create a ton of two-player head-to-head games based on food, cooking, eating and (obviously) barfing.

Why barf and why now? Fantastic Arcade’s special guest this year will be Thu Tran, frequent Babycastles collaborator and creator of the super amazing cooking/puppet show Food Party (above) and its MTV2 followup Late Night Munchies.

Thu will be providing the special secret ingredient required in all the jam games, which will be announced just before the jam begins on Saturday, August 30th, and will be co-hosting the Barfcade proper, a live game-show event held on September 21st that will be streamed for the rest of the world to see on Venus Patrol’s Twitch channel.

Games for the jam are meant to be fast, competitive, and no longer than 30 seconds each — the best of these will be strung together for the Barfcade event, giving the live competition a sort of head-to-head WarioWare vibe. Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman has created a brand new example game (pictured above), which you can play at the Barfcade website to get a sense of where to head!

The jam will run Saturday, August 30th through Sunday, September 14th — more details are available at the Barfcade site, which will be where you can also find the secret ingredient at launch. Can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Every month, as part of the regular monthly meetings of JUEGOS RANCHEROS, we do a very casual & chatty rundown of the ten or so games from the previous month for the audience, to give people — especially those outside the indie community itself — a look at what they may have missed. The featured games are both local and global, and both indie and, on occasion, a bit-bigger-budget — what binds them together is simply that they’re all amazing.

In keeping with the tongue-in-tobacco-packed-cheek tone, we call these run-downs A Fistful of Indies, which are presented here for your reference.

(more…)