Josh over at Tiny Frog Software has published his list of top games of the 00s.

Since there has been an awful lot of free stuff I've enjoyed this decade, I decided to start just with my top freeware games. I recommend you play them all if you haven't already, so each of these is linked through to a place where it can be downloaded.

10. Seiklus (Cartoon Platformer by Autofish)

A pleasant exploration game set in a non-hostile, cartoony world. The first decent game I played that was made in GameMaker!

9. Afterburner 3D (Shooter by Brodaroda)

An exciting 3D remake of the Sega classic, not too dissimilar to Afterburner Climax which was released later. Difficult to get to work on Vista I'm afraid.

8. Ben Jordan series (Horror Adventure by Grundislav Games)

A series of ten games (Still in production) about the adventures of a sensitive, new age kind of guy who travels around the world solving cases about the paranormal, while uncovering the truth behind a globe spanning conspiracy.

7. Robocop 2D Trilogy (Sci-Fi Shooter by Park Productions)

A trilogy of shooter games based on the classic Robocop games by Data East and Ocean. The first was an adaptation of the first film, the second introduces Robocop to the Terminator universe and the third is an original story. The third game is bit of a let down, but the other two are utterly brilliant.

6. Mondo Nation (Art Puzzle by Cactus)

A series of bizarre first person games that revolve around illogical puzzles, featuring greyscale environments, people with televisions for heads and endings that come out of the left field. If David Lynch was a video game designer, this is what he would make.

5. 1213 (Sci-Fi Platformer by Yahtzee)

A highly experimental platformer developed in the Adventure Game Studio engine(!) 1213 is a tale about an amnesiac prisoner who seeks to discover the circumstances behind his incarceration, only to discover a horrific secret about the fate of humanity. The special edition, which includes Yahtzee's fascinating commentary, is now free as well.

4. Pleurghburg: Dark Ages (Horror Adventure by Gaspop)

Okay, it has terrible graphics and a silly name, but Pleurghburg is a gripping, full length Crime drama set in the not to distant future. Features a day-night cycle, occasional action sequences and CSI style investigations.

3. Jet Set Willy Online (Cartoon Platformer by Ovine by Design)

An insane concept - take a ZX Spectrum classic and make it multiplayer capable - somehow became one of my favorite online games ever. Instantly accessible to casuals, but with enough depth and variety to keep hardcore players entertained.

2. Chzo Mythos (Horror Adventure by Yahtzee)

A series of brilliant horror adventure games revolving around the machinations of the pain elemental Chzo and his slaves, who are opposed by the gentleman thief Trilby and others across a timespan of centuries.

1. Cave Story (Cartoon Platformer by Pixel)

An incredibly well polished Japanese platformer in the Metroidvania subgenre. Cave Story is the bittersweet tale of an amnesiac robot who wakes up in a cave and has to fight to save his new friends. Not just the best freeware game of the 00s, but it may be the best freeware game of all time. A commercial Wiiware version is on the horizon.

(Honourable mentions: Adventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment, Head over Heels, Highway Pursuit)

Well, that is it! I know most people seem to rave about Knytts Stories and Spelunky as being some of the best freeware of all time, but I am ashamed to admit I have never gotten around to spending much time with either of them.

Maybe soon I'll be releasing my list of favorite commercial games of the 00s. Stay tuned.

This might sound crazy, but I haven't been able to get the idea of making my own Freeware Games site out of my head.

I know there are a lot of good freeware games sites out there - Caiman, Curly's World, Game Hippo, freeware.remakes.org and so on. However, I think that these sites need to be improved in the following areas:

1. Flexibility (Most freeware sites lack the ability to easily search and sort)
2. Quantity over Quality (Which is only a bad thing when there's no easy way to filter out the crap games)
3. Multi-platform (Most freeware sites seem to ignore anything from the Mac and Linux world)
4. Tidiness (Most freeware sites seem to be heavily cluttered with advertisements and game categories)
5. Reviews from end users (Most freeware sites only have reviews by the webmaster)

So, I am thinking of starting a new freeware site from scratch, based loosely on the look of game page I made for the Playmaker site but with filtering and sorting options along the top.

My vision for the site is a vast collection of freeware games that can be easily sorted by date, title or rating, or filtered by platform, genre, perspective, multiplayer options or theme, right from the front page.

In short, my site should be able be able to quickly find any game that the user feels like playing at that time.

I want to design it in such a way that if you're looking for, say, a well reviewed comedic multiplayer first person puzzler for Mac, or, say, a recent side scrolling single player RPG with a Sci-Fi theme for linux, then, assuming it exists, you should be able to find it without leaving the front page of the site.

I plan to start setting up a test site soon, but what I am after is feedback on my idea, and also volunteers who can help with populate the site in the early stages.

The Duke Nukem Forever team.

Wired has just posted an article called "Learn to Let Go: How Success Killed Duke Nukem" (Hat Tip: The Escapist)

The story is a fascinating one, and one that deserves to be turned into a full length, esque novel.

Despite 3D Realms formerly being a multi million dollar game development studio, I think the lessons to be learned from its demise are actually more relevant to Indie Gamers then Corporate ones. Indeed, 3D Realms virtually was an Indie game studio, reliant on only its own funding for game development.

From observing various forums, and from reading emails that have been occasionally sent my way, I do believe that there are many Indie game developers with a similar mindset to the head honchos at 3D Realms. So, I have attempted to re-summarise the points from the articles again, in a way that is relevant to Indie game developers. Here are the five symptoms of what I call Duke Nukem Forever syndrome:

1. Lack of a deadline

Duke Nukem Forever's deadline of "When it's done" harmed the development far more then any tangible one could have.

Deadlines create stress, and stress is, unfortunately, a natural necessity for the completion of any task, even ones that are as subtle as getting out of bed in the morning. A deadline not only forces us to work towards getting the game ready for shipping, but also forces us to jettison trivial "Nice to have" elements that are simply not worth the value they bring to the game. A personal example is that I have worked on dozens of game projects, yet the five completed games hosted on this site were all made to one deadline or another.

The reality is no game is ever "Done", every game out there could be improved. To paraphrase George Lucas, games don't get finished, they get abandoned. You just have to let go when you've done enough.

2. Limitless resources

Millions of dollars allowed 3D Realms to develop Duke Nukem Forever over a decade while releasing very few other titles.

Okay, so unlike 3D Realms, most Indie Game teams will never have millions of dollars at their disposal. But they do have a resource that most Corporate Game Developers do not have: Time. If an Indie game developer has a day job, then they can continue living comfortably even if their game will never see the light of day, hence why a deadline does not always get created in the first place.

3. Lack of a plan

According to ex-3D Realm employees who were interviewed for the wired article, there was no plan of what the final game would look like.

Without even a basic plan, Indie game developers can flounder off in any direction on their projects. It is like being a Rugby player who runs around in circles rather then charging for the opposition goal post. A plan does not need to be comprehensive for successful completion of a project, but at any time in development it is helpful to be able to know these two things: The vision of where the end goal lies, and what the next task is.

"A vision without a task is but a dream. A task without a vision is drudgery. A vision with a task is the hope of the world" - Donald Zimmerman

4. Futile pursuit of perfection

The immense expectations placed on the game by both fans and developers, combined with rapidly advancing technology, meant that Duke Nukem Forever could never reach the required level of perfection.

Lots of Indie gamers, particularly ones that have never released a game before, want to make their next one the game that puts them on the map. An example is the Jet Force Gemini 2 fan project, whose track-record-less developers have for years have been promising a game with next-Gen graphical quality, but so far with virtually nothing to show for it (Still, it is good to see that they have apparently switched to UDK rather then trying to build their own engine).

However (And correct me if I am wrong) but no one in the modern era has ever made an Earth shatteringly good game on their first attempt. A game developer shouldn't necessarily judge the success or failure of a project by comparing it to other games, but should instead consider how much the game improved on his or her last.

5. Team size disproportionate to the vision

While the credit sequences in modern games roll on for what seems like an eternity, from the photograph it looks like the names of the entire Duke Nukem Forever team could be placed on a single screen.

There was a time where a small team of developers could produce blockbuster games, perhaps with a single programmer, artist and sound engineer. However, in the modern game development era you need huge teams in order to compete with the amount of content put in games developed by multi million dollar game development juggernauts.

You don't need to have a big team to be an Indie game success - just look at Braid and World of Goo. However, like those games, if you're going to work with a small team then you need to keep the content low-key.

2009 hasn't exactly been a great year for me as far as game development goes. The only new game that I have released this year was 'Heart of Ice' back in February, which is both the shortest and lowest quality game I have publicly released to date.

Other then that all I have really done all year is re-release enhanced versions of games that I had already made. I tried to learn different languages, libraries and frameworks for game development, so that I could make games that were graphically richer and supported on more platforms, yet all with absolutely no success so far.

So lately, I have spent a bit of time soul searching, and asked myself the question 'Why do I bother making games in the first place?'

The expectation of eventually getting financial reward is certainly a factor. I had set myself a goal this year of selling exactly one copy of any game that I made. Although I'm certainly not going to reach that goal, I did make money from game development for the first time this year, by assisting a friend port an old Blitz3D game to BlitzMax.

Also, I'll admit that there is definitely an ego factor. It feels great to get a good review sent to me out of the blue for one of my games. There was a highly positive Derelict review posted on this blog just a couple of nights ago.  Occasionally I do get negative - and sometimes nasty - reviews for my  games, but the hurt I get from those is no where near as great as the joy I get from finding out someone liked a game I made.

Finding out that I am a Dyspraxic a few years back is probably a motivator as well. Since then, part of me has wanted to succeed at game development simply to prove that I am at least as capable at artistic endevour as a neurologically normal person is.

Yet, despite those three influences, I wanted to make games long before I knew about Dyspraxia, or even realised that there could be recognition or financial reward for doing so. I have always, ever since I can remember, wanted to make games. Even though it would be years before I would craft my first game, as a young child sometimes I would jot out level or game ideas in a notebook.

The first games I actually did get to make were always very simplistic. A cut down remake of Taipan in QBasic, or top down 2D 'demakes' of Wing Commander and Destruction Derby in Klik N Play. The vast majority of these games were complete throwaways (none of whom no longer exist) totally amateurish and unsuitable for public consumption, yet I had a ball of a time creating and playing them. Even if I was comfortable with the idea of publicly releasing them, I literally had no way of doing so - I lived in one of the most isolated corners of the South Island at the time, and it would be years before I could get access to the Internet.

So when I started making games, the intended audience was more or less just myself, and a few mates. It was something I did for a single reason - to have fun. However, during the past year or so, I seemed to forget that. For some reason, instead of focusing on making games that I myself would be interested in, I wanted to make games that I thought other people would be interested in. The kind of high technology stuff filled with millions of polygons, dynamic lighting and realistic physics that hardcore gamers seem to be obsessed with.

But I don't really care about that stuff. I just want to make fun and unique games, without having to worry about good graphics, or Mac compatibility, or if anyone else will like it apart from me. The games I want to make include such bizarre and unique ideas as:

• Golf, but played with Rocket Launchers
• Waging Guerilla warfare across the galaxy in a giant robot
• RPG about teenaged Batman wannabies fighting crime while trying to keep their alter-egos secret from their parents
• Platform game about a Princely Pie defending the Kingdom of Pienotopia from corrupt Cookies (Okay, that was my brother's idea, but still it sounds awesome.)

None of those ideas actually needs anything more then Blitz3D, or Game Maker for that matter, to bring to life. I'm not sure if any of those games would be commercially viable, but if they were on Steam right now, I'd stop writing this post and scoop them up immediately.

So, I think that, perhaps my New Years resolution will be to get back to making games primarily for fun from now on, without caring about the underlying technology or what anyone else will think of them.
 

Well, that's enough of my rant, if you make games then I'd love to know why you make games too.