Let’s play Indie Game Bingo!

Yeah, so I’m a year or so behind on this one. Sue me. I saw this on an old thread on TIGsource here and a not terribly well populated blog here.

Here’s the blank sheet so you can follow along (or fill it out for your own games!):

Now, how does Dredmor fare?

• “Neo Retro”: Yep, we have pixel-art and roguelike-inspired gameplay. I almost feel that we’re full-on retro because there isn’t a heck of a lot that’s neo about anything. Have you seen the obsolete sprite format our animations are held in? This wasn’t done for irony or retro-cred; it’s just how it is. (Yes, moving to png series as quickly as possible.)
• Procedural Generation: Dredmor is all about this, from dungeon layouts to items to quests. Guilty as charged. Very roguelike. This bingo sheet might benefit from a “rips off Dwarf Fortress”, because we’d easily catch that square too.
• No Instructions: This isn’t really true, but no one even notices the tutorial indicators so it’s effectively true. We’re actually going to do a lot with tooltips here to have all relevant instructions be accessible in-game, so this won’t ultimately be the case.

Runners up:

• “Lo-Fi”: Crappy pixel art might fall into this, but I don’t think it’s actually crappy art. People were paid to do the sprites, even! My self-expression is legitimate!
• Generic Mortality Message: There’s sure as hell mortality, but definitely no message. Quite a stretch.
• Gentle Piano Music: We’ve probably got a track or two in here that counts.
• 15 Minutes or Less: There’s no hard cap at all, but if you really get screwed … well, it’s pretty easy to die in a minute or two.
• Silly Title: We discussed this but I really don’t think “Dungeons of Dredmor” is that silly. It’s more of a classic game title, earnest and artless.

In conclusion, there’s a lot we could be doing to make a better indie game.

[And this bingo sheet could use some updating, the game references are a couple years old and it ought to have “is a platformer” somewhere, and maybe “is Minecraft”.]