📰 2024 February Zine Issue and Wrap-Up!

Written by Renkon

Happy Year of the Dragon! We’ve been dealing with a lot of chaos behind the scenes (new job! health issues! general holiday stress!) but we hope that things will settle down soon so that we can get back into the swing of things. And without further ado, today we’ve got the インディー通信 Indie Tsushin 2024 February 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:

2024 February インディー通信 Indie Tsushin Zine Issue

🎮 Magicube

Guest writer Squimmy talks about the thinky puzzle game Magicube, a game by nebu soku that works within the limitations of the PICO-8 engine and simple game mechanics to create dozens of challenging puzzle levels!

🎮 里山のおと 夏草こみち (Satoyama Note: Natsukusa Komichi)

Head into the peaceful countryside of Japan with Satoyama Note: Natsukusa Komichi by nyacchu and michi of satoyama note! Brush up on your knowledge of animals, traditional Japanese customs, and natural phenomena as you follow the summertime story of Fox, Tanuki, and Frog. Can you pass the Tanuki University exam?

🎮 Death Palette

Daikon plays through the horror adventure game, Death Palette by SleepingMuseum! Who is this mysterious girl in the cursed painting, and can you finish her portrait without meeting an untimely demise?

🌟 Spotlight on Furige 20XX

We look back at Furige 20XX, an annual event from 2008 to 2023 where people could vote for and share their favorite free games. We spoke with organizer Yatarou Akamatsu about running the event, about free games, about online bubbles of video game discourse, and much more.

🎤 Interview with nebu soku

We had the chance to pick the brain of thinky puzzler nebu soku! We talked about designing puzzle mechanics and levels using PuzzleScript and PICO-8, and about working on their first full-fledged release, Magicube!

🎤 Interview with satoyama note

We spoke with nyacchu and michi of satoyama note about making games that capture the feeling of the present-day Japanese countryside in the lovely visual novel, Satoyama Note: Natsukusa Komichi!

🎤 Interview with SleepingMuseum

We could bear-ly (sorry) contain our glee when SleepingMuseum agreed to speak with us about the horror adventure game, Death Palette! We also talked about their previous escape room games and auto-runners, and where they got the idea of bargaining with paintings. Check it out, kuma!

ICYMI

🫙 リブートジャム // Reboot Jam Results

For the month of 2024 January, we ran the リブートジャム // Reboot Jam! This was a game jam about rebooting a project they had started on in the past but never finished. We also asked that all participants write about the things they learned during this process. It was a lot of fun, and we had a great time learning that we could make cool stuff by trying something new! Thanks again to everyone for participating, and we hope to see again in future jams!

🍂 2023 Autumn Collection

We released the 2023 October, November, and December-January issues into the 2023 Autumn Collection on itch! It contains no bonus content, but is a way to support the site for a minimum of $10 and get all three issues in one convenient itch page.

📖 インディー通信 Indie Tsushin: Year 1

We are pleased to announce インディー通信 Indie Tsushin: Year 1, a digital book that includes all of our material from 2022 to 2023. The gorgeous cover was done by none other than Ruby May Valentine! The book is available on itch and Ko-Fi.

📰 2023 December-January issue

Check out the 2023 December-January 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!

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