📰 2023 November Zine Issue and Wrap-Up!

Written by Renkon

November sure went by in a hurry! The changing seasons brought with it a lot of, well, change, for me and Daikon. We want to thank you all for being so patient and understanding as we got this month’s issue together, and hope that you enjoy reading about these great games and developers! Without further delay, here is the インディー通信 Indie Tsushin 2023 November zine issue!

The zine is viewable in browser on itch, and available for download in PDF, ePub, and MOBI formats on itch and Ko-Fi. We also have digital postcards (PDF and PNG) and the インタビュー特集 (Japanese interview edition) for download. Our zine is on a pay-what-you-want system so anyone can read it! We really hope that you will check it out!

Here’s what’s inside:

2023 November インディー通信 Indie Tsushin Zine Issue

👑 Pickup! Dejigehaku 2023

We checked out twenty interesting games from the Digital Games Expo (デジゲー博) on November 12!

🎮 HAZAMA_QUEEN

Daikon wrote about HAZAMA_QUEEN by Bhaskara, a cute-grotesque boomer shooter about storming through Hell and defeating enemies with the power of YAMI!

🎮 ROBO OH

Game profile of ROBO OH by Foxy Boxy Games, a retro-styled fighting game to find who will crowned the King of Robots!

🎮 QUESTER

Daikon wrote about QUESTER by Thousand Games! A grungy retrofuturist dungeon crawler set in the mutant-infested bowels of the Tokyo Metro. Can you find enough food and resources to survive another day?

🎤 Interview with Bhaskara

We got the chance to speak with Bhaskara about their deep love of old-school and frantic FPS games, hosting the How’s Your Game Going? JAM, and of course, what it was like working on the cute and gory HAZAMA_QUEEN!

🎤 Interview with Foxy Boxy Games

We were delighted to be able to speak with Foxy Boxy Games about working on the retro robot fighting game, ROBO OH! We also got to hear more about their upcoming collaboration with uchuzine, including the souped-up sequel, Super ROBO OH!

🎤 Interview with Nekobungi Sumire

We had the opportunity to speak with Nekobungi Sumire, a manga artist who recently released the emotional and beautiful Neko Can Dream in English! We got to talk about telling queer stories in both manga and video game format, and addressing contemporary themes through retro limitations!

Announcements

🎂 One-Year Anniversary of Indie Tsushin

December 1st marks the launch of the current form of インディー通信 Indie Tsushin! It’s been a wild and fun ride for us. I am still working on getting a little something together to mark the occasion (!!), and I hope to get that done before the New Year. And speaking of the New Year, Daikon and I plan to ring it in with another marathon stream of indie games!

🫙 リブートジャム // Reboot Jam in January

We’re cooking up another game jam to take place during the month of 2024 January! The idea is “reboot,” which can mean:

1. Revisiting an old project that you started but never finished, or
2. Making a new game that incorporates “reboot” as some kind of theme or motif

We’re still working on all the details, and I will post more about this in the coming weeks!

☃️ Winter Holiday

Just a heads up that we are planning to combine our December and January issues and release it on December 29, with the next release after that in February. This is so that we can have a bit of a winter break! We may still update the blog during January, but if we do, those articles will go in the February issue, and we will be skipping the January release.

ICYMI

🖥 Website overhaul

Indie Tsushin is now being powered by Eleventy! This means that things should load much more quickly since pages no longer rely on JavaScript to show the site navigation. Additionally, I have broken up the Blog Archives into categories, so it should be easier to find stuff now. Please let me know if you run into any bugs and I will get them fixed as soon as possible!

🫙 勉強会ジャム // Study Buddy Jam Results

We had our very first game jam in October, the 勉強会ジャム // Study Buddy Jam! It was a jam about learning something new for the first time and gaining the confidence to break out of your comfort zone. We were really happy with the turnout, and collated all of the entries into this page. We hope that you will consider joining our January jam as well!

🎁 2023 Summer Collection

We released the June-July, August, and September issues into the 2023 Summer Collection on itch! Get all three issues for $10!

📰 2023 October issue

Check out the 2023 October issue and its games if you haven’t yet. And be sure to look through our full catalog for more great stuff!

🍸 Happy Hour!

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and tune in every Thursday from 9PM UTC+9 for Happy Hour, a bilingual show introducing some indie games!

And now, a word from our sponsors

Just kidding! インディー通信 Indie Tsushin is ad-free, does not (and will never!) run sponsored content, and is mostly made by two people in their spare time. We write the articles, buy the games out of pocket, conduct and translate the interviews, lay out and edit the website and zines, pay for hosting and recording equipment, and so on. We do all this because we are gigantic nerds and hope that more people can play and appreciate Japanese indie games and their developers. We would gladly do it even if we never made a single yen from this.

BUT! If you enjoyed the zine, please consider buying our zines! Any amount would be more than enough, and would go a long way towards boosting our morale and keeping us going. Not only that, it lets us pay guest writers to appear in the zine! If you can’t afford to donate, don’t even worry about it! Indie Tsushin will always be available to read for free and will never go behind a paywall. You can help us a ton just by sharing our articles and videos, or rating and reviewing our zines on itch.io. Thank you so much for all of your kind support!

We also have a Ko-Fi where you can make a one-time donation or sign up for our ¥‎300/month tier.

🙏 Thanks for reading!

That’s all for now, but be sure to check the インディー通信 Indie Tsushin blog for the latest articles, follow our Steam curator account, subscribe to the RSS feed, and sign up for our monthly e-mail digest so you don’t miss anything! Hope you enjoy the issue and games!

Comments