The 5 most exciting games I saw at Busan Indie Connect

Last weekend I had the privilege of speaking at Busan Indie Connect. The event is in its third year, and includes a one day conference, an exhibition, and an awards show.

Work commitments meant I had to leave early and I missed out on plenty, but I wanted to share some of the games I played and people I met.

MATH GAM3 by Jaewon Yoo, Jooeun Hwang, Sun Park

Project99 is a collective that gathers once a month to make weird games and then sells the results as 99 cent bundles. They had six titles on display and the one I was immediately drawn to was M4TH GAM3, with a really unique mechanic. You can buy it through itch.io here.

I talked to Sun Park, one of the developers and also a co-organiser of the SeoulIndies group and the Out of Index festival.

Gassy Mob by Fleepunk

Jaewoo Jeon aka Fleepunk is the solo developer behind Gassy Mob, which is sort of Geometry Wars meets the colorful worlds of Keita Takahashi. You have to eat food to recharge your ability to fart, which kills approaching enemies. The mobile game is published by Devolver Digital, who had a strong presence at BIC.

Who Am I: The Story of Dorothy by Onaemo

In Who Am I, you play a psychologist treating a middle school girl who has disassociative identity disorder, (also called multiple personality disorder). Each session you can talk to Dorothy, as well as the three personalities that reside within her. I was impressed that Onaemo (a student team, one of whom is a psychology major) were interested in tackling such heavy subject matter and had put together such an impressive game in a few months. You can download Who Am I on iOS or Android.

Tiny Clusters by Thibaut Mereu & Valentin Guyet

Tiny Clusters is a mobile puzzler where you rearrange the four pieces of the world to solve puzzles and get a character to the exit. Developer Thibaut Mereu told me that he had toyed with higher number of pieces but found that four was enough to create a great variety of puzzles. I’m really looking forward to playing this when it’s done! Read more here.

Monster Prom by Beautiful Glitch

Monster Prom borrows its mechanics from The YAWHG but uses as its setting a high school for monsters. My aversion to reading in games kind of rules this game out for me personally, but I was charmed nevertheless by the game’s incredible artwork. Developer Julian Guijano was also selling the absolutely gorgeous first volume of Indie G Zine, a fanart tribute to indie games.

Other Cool Things

One of the main reasons I love to go to conferences like these is to meet new people. I had a wonderful conversation with Jongwoo Kim of Kitfox Games, on game design, crunch, and growing up Asian in a western country.

Despite working in the same building as some of my Melbourne peers, sometimes I only get time to see their games at conferences. It was great to see the progress on The Voxel Agents’ The Gardens Between, Funomena’s Luna and Samurai Punk’s The American Dream. Here’s me with Samurai Punk’s Nick trying Korea’s interpretation of a hot dog (it’s been dipped in sugar).

I met legendary Japanese game designer Swery (D4, Deadly Premonition) who gave an amazing talk in both English and Japanese about his creative process. Swery was not impressed by the food truck cold drip coffee. His new game The Good Life looks weird/amazing and is currently being crowdfunded on Fig, check it out!

Shin Imai of IGN Japan was wearing this amazing bootleg tshirt.

As the conference was coming to a close a typhoon was approaching! This was a constant source of discussion and worry. But a few people were also concerned about nuclear war, just so you know.

Look at all these bulbas.

I unfortunately did not have time for Mom’s Touch. Maybe next year! Thank you to everyone who helped put the event together, especially Marc Flury!