📰 2024 March-April Zine Issue and Wrap-Up!
2024年 4月 29日Hello and welcome back to Indie Tsushin! Sorry for the impromptu break, I have been battling some health issues as well as general hay fever misery (augh!). I hope you’re ready for Golden Week and for the インディー通信 Indie Tsushin 2024 March-April 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 March-April インディー通信 Indie Tsushin Zine Issue
🎮 3文字限定・対戦クロスワード (Three-Character Limit: Battle Crossword)
Daikon wrote about 3文字限定・対戦クロスワード (Three-Character Limit: Battle Crossword), a competitive crossword puzzle game by Motteke! Find and place as many three-character words on the board before you run out of time. Who will be the last one standing in this battle of wits?
🎮 MOTION●REC
We looked at MOTION⚫︎REC, a puzzle platformer made in PICO-8 by Shoma, with cute one-bit pixel art by m7kenji! Record your actions using a giant magic tape player, then play back and rewind the cassette to move through the world!
🃏 SIGN
Daikon talks about the communicative card game SIGN, created by the staff of a local board game café, Asobiba! Players try to convey a secret keyword using word association, and then discuss their reasoning why. Let’s make a constellation together!
🎮 DriveCrazy
Daikon drives us up the walls (literally!) in the kei truck action game, DriveCrazy by TubezGamez! Tear your way through this bizarre and high octane world of aliens, rampaging vacuum cleaners, and kaiju bears!
🌟 Developer Spotlight: nizakashii
Guest writer GSK goes over the many and quite varied works of nizakashii and how they reflect the storied history that traditionally went into making shooting games!
🎤 Interview with Motteke
We got to speak with puzzle maker Motteke about creating challenging mobile games like the competitive word game, Battle Crossword!
🎤 Interview with Shoma
We spoke with Shoma about doing game jams, working in PICO-8, and making the cassette-themed puzzle platformer, MOTION⚫︎REC!
🎤 Interview with nizakashii
We had the opportunity to speak with nizakashii about old school STGs, loving and hating your hometown, and making games as a means of creative expression!
🎤 Interview with Naoki Sekino
We spoke with Naoki Sekino of the board game shop Asobiba about what it’s like working together with the rest of the shop staff to create the word-association card game, SIGN!
🎤 Interview with Takao
We had a chance to talk with Takao of TubezGamez about working on the bombastic kei truck action game, DriveCrazy!
Announcements
🎪 Tokyo Game Dungeon 5 this weekend!
The next Tokyo Game Dungeon is happening this Saturday! This time, we don’t have a booth, but we will be roaming around and checking out cool games. Be sure to check out the full exhibitor list and see all the neat stuff that people have made!
📋 Steam Curator page
Indie Tsushin now has a Steam curator page that lists all of the games we’ve showcased on our site that have Steam pages! If you are interested, please give us a follow and check out these games!
💽 Moved servers
We recently moved servers from Neocities to NearlyFreeSpeech.NET! You may have noticed some weird server issues last week, and that’s why. Hopefully things have migrated over by now. You shouldn’t need to re-subscribe to our RSS feed, but if you haven’t been seeing recent updates, please check the RSS URL. If you run into any broken links or the like, please don’t hesitate to let us know!
ICYMI
📰 2024 February issue
Check out the 2024 February 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!
