Friday evening is time for washing away the dirt of the week by pointing, clicking and dragging shapes to the beat. Or having some friends over for a good old P.A.R.T.Y. Or maybe both! Your choice, really.

Klikwerk provides the former, with high scores awarded to players who get their mouse pointer moving the fastest, with a healthy dose of the space bar every now and again. Do it quick enough and you'll unlock a bonus round.

It's all about fast reactions and is relatively good fun. At any rate, it'll fill five minutes of your time while you try to think of something else to do. Find it over at Bonte Games.

Today's collection of independent game links includes an article about pixel art, Emily Short's analysis of the freeware visual novel Digital: A Love Story, plus results for the Jennifer Ann's Group's Life. Love. Game Design Challenge Contest. (image source)

Cipher Prime Blog: Fractal is Finally Here
"Fractal is available right now for the super low price of $14.99. The game is PC and Mac download compatible."

Joystiq: ESRB rates Limbo for PS3 and PC
"Assuming the recent ESRB listing is accurate, Playdead's terrifying, striking platformer is also headed to the PlayStation 3 and PC." [UPDATE: The listing now says Xbox 360 only. Curses.]

Jennifer Ann's Group: 2010 Life. Love. Game Design Challenge Contest Winners
"•Congratulations to the winners of our 2010 Game Design Challenge - check out the winning entries here."

Indie Review: Beautiful Escape - Dungeoneer Review
"I've never played a low res game that has gotten me this disturbed before. Dungeoneer is both a clever puzzle game and a psychological thriller paying homage to torture films like Saw and Hostel that should be on everyone's must-play list for this summer."

Hojamaka Games: Mamono Sweeper Huge and Blind Modes
More variations of Manomo Sweeper to play with. The A and D keys can be used to mark tiles now.

Opposable Thumbs: 8-bit heroes, Ars explores the resurgence of pixel art
"Why do many developers, artists, and gamers prefer pixels when more realistic, detailed art styles are available? Ars spoke to some of the field's independent artists and developers to find out."

Gamasutra: Examining Digital - A Love Story
"Digital: A Love Story gives us only the simulated interface of the computer on which the protagonist is working: an object from within the fictional world, captured as accurately as possible while limiting the affordances of that object to what can be done in the game."

Games Dammit: The Rise of Indie
"Independent studios want to make money, but they also want to make games for the sake of making games. This is what the game industry needs; for people outside the mainstream to take video games seriously."

If you just let out a big sigh, you need a big slap over the head - pay-what-you-want schemes are the new thing! Get with the programme, gramps! etc.

This week, it's the turn of Elecorn's terraforming platform blaster Caster, and Boss Baddie's Lunar Pack, which includes Lunnye Devitsy (review here) and Wake, plus the extended Tormishire soundtrack. All three of these games are lovely and definitely worth a gander, so make sure you put some money down.

In an exciting week for new job postings, Gamasutra's jobs board plays host to roles across the world and in every major discipline, including opportunities at Insomniac, Sledgehammer, Relic, and many more.

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted this week include:

Insomniac Games: SFX Artist
"Insomniac Games is an independent videogame developer with award-winning hits for the PS, PS2 and PS3. We created the first three Spyro the Dragon games, and the Ratchet and Clank franchise. We are also the team behind Resistance: Fall of Man, Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, Resistance 2, and most recently - Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time! If that's not enough, we've also have been named one of the Best Small Companies to work for, and have two fantastic studios - one in Burbank, CA and one in Durham, North Carolina. Come check us out!"

Relic Entertainment: Senior Artist/Lighter
"At Relic Entertainment we are developing an original game for PS3 and Xbox 360 and continue to build on our history of award winning games - games like Company of Heroes, Dawn of War, and Homeworld. Experience freedom of creativity and know your contribution is valued and recognized by the Relic team and also by gamers and industry experts around the globe.

"Life outside of Relic? You bet. We know, it's a novel idea, but one we not only embrace, we enforce. If you are going to live in Vancouver, you better have time away from work to take advantage of all this city has to offer. Vancouver is consistently ranked in the top most livable cities in the world. Where else can you get up and choose between beach volleyball, city nightlife, or boarding the glacier, all within 90 minutes? We've got mountains. We've got ocean. We've got a chill studio in the heart of downtown. And... We've got donuts every Friday. What more could you ask for?"

Here's a short film based on Molleindustria's Every Day the Same Dream from late last year. You really need to have played the game before watching this, so head here to do so. It's powerful stuff, with music from Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto, Takahiro Kido and Sylvain Chauveau.

Source

If you've been following the Give-Whatever-You-Want Indie Bundle saga over the last couple of days, you'll know it all became a bit of a mess. This morning the bundle site was taken down due to "technical problems".

After the Child's Play charity was removed from the site, I decided to do a bit of digging and contacted all the other charities involved. Kinderkrebsstiftung got back to me stating that "we were rather astonished to see our logo on the website 'givewhateveryouwant.com'. We weren't informed about that."

Rebecca Jeschke from the Electronic Frontier Foundation then told me: "We recently received an email that we would be a beneficiary on this site. We haven't answered the email yet, or had any further contact or agreement. We've read your coverage of this issue, and the concerns raised there, so we're looking into this further."

Hence, it would appear certain charities were contacted, but nothing formal was actually arranged. I was also discussing it all with Jaz McDougall at PC Gamer, and he decided to get straight answers from the individual behind it all - there's a lengthy interview here that's definitely worth reading.

It's a sad state of affairs, and hopefully what has happened here will make other developers a bit more wary when diving into this kind of thing. We still want more indie bundles though, please!

Today's collection of independent game links includes a podcast chat with the developers of Super Meat Boy, a new set of tutorials for Chevy Ray's free ActionScript 3 library, and a tiny bit of update on Zombie Cow's upcoming twin-stick shooter Privates.

FlashPunk: Creating Flash Games in FlashPunk
"A new set of beginner tutorials to help people get started creating Flash games in FlashPunk."

SavyGamer: Privates Not allowed on the Xbox
"Channel 4 wanted a game about sex education, so that’s what we made. We always knew the Xbox version would be touch-and-go, you never know how people are going to react when it’s in review."

GameSetWatch: Indie Chinese RPG Rainblood Released In English
"Three years after its release in China and about half a million downloads from the official site, indie RPG Rainblood: Town of Death is finally available in English."

RoboAwesome: Interview with Team Meat (audio)
"For RoboCast 007 Carl and I sat down with Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes; the diabolical minds behind the upcoming and independently developed Super Meat Boy. We discussed a variety of things, ranging from retro games, how to survive as an independent game maker, diabetes, and the 2010 census."

Infinite Ammo: Marian on CBC Radio (audio)
"Alec Holowka lands an interview on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Radio. You can listen to the recording here."

Game Design Scrapbook: Kernel Panic Podcast
"I have teamed up with a developer from Cologne to bring TRAUMA to the iPad. He is currently working on a first prototype."

post-hype: VVVVVV's Lesson
"There's a sequence in VVVVVV that deserves to be famous. Everyone who plays the game will remember it. It's the titular sequence of rooms called Veni, Vidi, Vici!, and in it you learn how to play games again."

Hello Games has released two videos of the near-complete Joe Danger - the above shows a coin run level, and the one beneath the cut is the level editor in action.

The release date and pricing for the PSN game are to be announced sometime next week, so we can assume the game will follow closely behind. Excitement!

I'm not sure I've ever played as a turnip before, so I'm definitely looking forward to Action Turnip. There's a Canabalt-style scoring system going on and lots of strange creatures to shoot down (are those flying onions? I really can't tell, but they're a little freaky).

I particularly liked how the ground became the words GAME OVER after death - hopefully that's part of the game and not just done for the video. Coming soon to a PC near you!

Jigsaw is a puzzle platformer made for Arthur Lee's Action 52 cart-themed game development jam, featuring two worlds to explore and a healthy number of checkpoints that automatically saves your progress up to that point. The playable character in this remake has a gun that fires nails, which is mainly used for defeating the enemies he encounters and building small steps for him to scale walls with.

It is important to note that only a maximum of three nails can be had on the screen as steps, so if a fourth nail is impaled on a wall then the first nail will disappear as well. This leads to some interesting switch puzzles later, since a switch will only be on when a nail is still stuck to it. Download Jigsaw here. (Windows, 1.70MB)