Rain slick precipice

The game by the creators of penny arcade webcomic is due out in five days. Am I excited? Yes. Of course I am.

I've always been fond of their peculiar brand of humor. Some would find many of them to be a bit crude, but I like them nonetheless. It's like junk food. There will be problem if I ate only junk food all the time, but if I started skipping out on all forms of less than nutritious delicacies I would go mad faster than you can say hatter!

The problem with the game is, at this stage, I don't think I'll have time to play it through. Sure, I have enough time to play it, but enough time to pull it through multiple hours and reach the end of an episode? And remember, this is only a single 'episode', implying that there will be more than one. And I know that once I get hooked on the stuff, I'll probably end up getting every last one of them, for the sake of peculiar humor and lovely lovecraftian knock-off settings.


On the other note, the 'greenhouse' service being promoted by penny arcade (through the release of their game on that very channel) sounds promising. Industrial focus to amateur game developing has a lot of rewards to offer. Think iPods. Soon after the iPods became the 'thing' of the times, almost a symbolic icon of the era, people started getting iPods simply because it was readily available through variety of commercial channels. The ads were everywhere, the people everywhere were leaking some sort of white rubber strand out of their ears like the proverbial brain leaking out of ears, to the point that iPod became synonymous with mp3 player. The problem with quite a number of indie games aren't really the problem of quality. It's the problem of distribution and availability, the idea of availability being applicable in both physical and cultural senses. Maybe greenhouse might be able to become a 'thing' of indie gaming.

There are a lot of hurdles to cover, however. Like the eponymous service called 'Steam' which already has an independent game distribution branch of sorts, meager at the moment, but certainly with some potential simply due to the accessibility of the service itself. How would greenhouse be able to pull it off?