Perhaps you have, or perhaps you haven’t heard of BlindSide: The Audio Adventure Video Game. If you have yet to, head over to the successfully funded, still open Kickstarter page to read a bit about the project and watch the video pitch. It caught my eye originally because of the concept’s unique nature–a game to be experienced identically by sighted and visually impaired players alike–but what caught both eyes was the fact that my good acquaintance Aaron Rasmussen was part of the tandem (along with Michael T. Astolfi) developing the no graphics episodic title.

Well I just had to talk to him about it, and lucky for us he was nice enough to respond in full to my laundry list of questions regarding the game. In the following interview we discuss the upcoming title’s survival horror elements, the challenges of developing a world that can’t be seen by its players, and overall sources of inspiration. Including Aaron’s own personal brush with blindness.

One of the more anticipated upcoming indie platformers is finally closing in on release. Fez from Polytron is the perspective shifting platformer all about playing a 2D character interacting with a 3D world, and it’s due out on XBLA early next year. The game’s designer Phil Fish was at GameCity festival to let the groups of the public have an exclusive early hands on with Fez, and I grabbed him for a quick chat too. Here’s how the conversation went down:

Among the exhibitors at GameCity this year were winners of Dare To Be Digital 2010, Angry Mango. They were there with a preview build of their Windows Phone 7 puzzle platformer, Mush. I caught up with Programmer Ahmed Zaman and Lead Artist Kate Killick for a chat:

Yesterday I published my preview of Konjak’s most recent build of The Iconoclasts, a gorgeous Metroidvania title that I enjoyed tremendously.

Today, I bring you a full on interview with Joakim Sandberg, the fellow behind Konjak! At the time of the interview I was pretty “high” on The Iconoclasts so that’s what I mainly questioned him about and we covered a lot of topics: his recent IGF submission, future updates for the game, release strategy, etc.

Long awaited retro-homage, pixelated open world ‘em up, Retro City Rampage, is nearing release. This started as a part time hobby project for Brian Provinciano of Vblank Entertainment, but it has now grown into something much bigger. He visited Nottingham last week to join in on the fun at GameCity, and I borrowed a few minutes of his time to shove a microphone in his face and ask him some questions. Here’s what he said:

DIYgamer: How many people make up Vblank Entertainment?

Provinciano: I’m the full time guy, and I’ve got another artist helping out, and three music guys.

DIYgamer: It’s a long time you’ve been working on this game, how long is it in total?

Provinciano: It’s been two years full time, and part time: many, many years.

DIYgamer: It seems like a real labour of love? It’s been in your life a long time.

Provinciano: Absolutely, I don’t know how I’ve live when it’s done, it will be really very weird. But it’s a pure labour of love, it’s my dream game. The homage thing is because I got into the industry because of specific games that I love, and I dreamed to one day work on my own Commander Keen, Mario, whatever. So by doing this, I’m really able to integrate doing all of these different genres, all these different styles of games, in this one game. The open world was the perfect medium for it.

DIYgamer: Are there any references to old games that decided to take out, because maybe it didn’t quite work, or it wasn’t as funny as it seemed?

Provinciano: Yeah, there were a few things. I really focussed on fun, and there were some joke that would have been funny, and when I tell them to people they will just laugh like crazy, but they just didn’t really work. Like a Desert Bus joke, the Penn and Teller Desert Bus game, I had designed a mission around that, but it’s just not fun. There’s no point in torturing people, because they’re not going to find it that funny.

DIYgamer: What platforms is it coming to?

Provinciano: It’s coming to XBLA and WiiWare. There’s a possibility of some others, but we’ll see.

DIYgamer: WiiWare? I’ve not heard a huge number of success stories from there recently.

Provinciano: No. I’m purely doing it for the fans. WiiWare is dead. There’s really not much money to be made on there. I’m really just doing it for the fans, and I’m really appreciative of the fans that have been supportive of this. I’ve received a lot of flaming from people that are mad because it’s been delayed or whatever. It’s not the best business advice to be releasing on WiiWare at this point, so it’s just for the fans, I hope they appreciate it.

DIYgamer: It seems to me because of the retro aesthetic, you’ve been able to cram a huge amount of things in there, because it doesn’t take you a huge amount of time to generate assets.

Provinciano: Yeah, the pixel art stuff has been real handy. It’s really amazing how quickly I can throw together an animation. If I’m making a mission, and I’m writing some dialogue, it really is am improv process, just like comedians on stage. I’ll be whipping up a mission, and then as I’m playing it, I’ll think: It would be really great if I could add this little animation there, and I can do that, that’s a huge advantage I have being an artist/designer/programmer. There other thing there too is that once I made a much more data driven system for art, I was able to add much more animation to it, on the technical aspect.

DIYgamer: So you’re on the home stretch now, what are your plans post release? What might your next projects consist of?

Provinciano: I’ve got a lot of ideas. I will be busy for the next while porting, and finishing up the Wii version, and marketing and all that. But I’ve got ideas. There are two specific open world games that aren’t Retro City that I want to do. I don’t think I’ll do those right away, because I think I want to do something different next, then I’ll go back to doing more open world stuff later.

DIYgamer: Projected release date?

Provinciano: It’ll come out in the beginning of 2012. Possibly late January or Feburary.

DIYgamer: Thanks a lot.

[Vblank Entertainment]

Matthew Hanlon and Kieran Nee of Bit by Bit Games have created Trail, a Windows-based life after permadeath platformer made using XNA. Trail is available for free download now and is waiting judgment as part of the IGF 2012 competition.

These two developers left Lionhead Studios to form their company and have made two games to date. Endless Lines was an iOS puzzle game, and now they have moved onto another staple genre: platforming. However, Matthew shares that the devs were not going to settle with a mere Mario clone. Trail not only has a message, but the entire game is the message. For Matthew that message has stuck for several years now, and only through indie development has he been able to bring it to life, and death, through the medium of video games.

You think I would have been satisfied after we scored a solid hands-on session and brief chat with March Ten Bosch regarding his in-development puzzle platformer Miegakure, but I wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong, the game looks, sounds, and feels great. Marc’s a pleasure to talk with too of course, but Miegakure is as mysterious as indie games come.

Subscribing to Jonathan Blow’s design philosophy (create a unique mechanic, and then fully explore it), it isn’t surprising that his title has been in development for over two years, and still is just a vague riddle thousands of gamers can’t wait to unwrap. While we’ll have to remain patient for a PC/console release, Marc was nice enough to enlighten us on all the aforementioned. Divulging a bit on a content creation system in mind for the game as well.

I had the immense pleasure of attending the fabulous GameCity festival in Nottingham last week, and have play of a bunch of games, and a good old natter with some devs whilst I was there. Here’s the first bit of coverage from the event, a chat with Mike Bithell, creator of the minimalistic puzzle platformer Thomas Was Alone. Read on for the inside scoop on the game.

DIYgamer: The first impression of Thomas Was Alone I got was that you don’t like drawing, you like jumping and platforming and puzzling, and those kind of things.

Bithell: Absolutely, absolutely. I think gamers look at the world in a much more simplified way. I think we look at the world as blocks, as the interactions we see between character collisions and the world, and Tetris basically. So I wanted to make a game which focused on that.

DIYgamer: It seems like you’re celebrating it almost.

Bithell: I love it, and it’s fun. I tried to do it in a way that looks good, not just like I hadn’t bothered. I had some cool colour in there, some amazing music a guy called David Housden, who is just this amazing composer who has done a procedural score for the game. It looks lovely.

DIYgamer: It is definitely a stylish game even through it’s got simple elements to it. From what I’ve seen so far, the unique mechanic seems to be switching between different characters to solve puzzles. How did that come about?

Bithell: It’s an interesting one. It’s an idea I was playing with a little while ago. The idea of a game almost like a buddy cop platformer, where you had these two different characters with two different abilities. I made two of them, then I came up with another mechanic, and I thought “OK, I’ll have three”, another mechanic, so four, then five, and then I just kind of scaled it up. I made a prototype, which I think your site very kindly covered [he's not wrong, we totally did], which went up a while ago. I got a really good response for it, but there was lots of bugs, the controls were appalling, but I took it forward, and developed it into a full Unity based games.

DIYgamer: So it’s running in Unity, what are your platform plans at the moment?

Bithell: Initially Windows and Mac, then if those go well maybe iOS as well, maybe even consoles down the line. I’m going to take it and see how much people want to play it. If people want to play it enough that I can take it to other platforms, then why not?

DIYgamer: Is this the first game you’ve worked on by yourself?

Bithell: It’s my first indie game. I’ve been working in the industry for about four years now. I used to work as a level designer and pitch designer at Blitz Studios, who do a lot of license games. Recently I moved down to London, now I’m lead designer at Bossa Studios, which is a social games company, and there’s lots of very cool games we’re working on there. Yeah, this is my kind of hobby project I’ve done on my own: it’s an evenings and weekends deal, and obviously I’m here at GameCity talking to people about it, but yeah, it’s going well.

DIYgamer: Are Bossa fine with you working on side projects? Not all studios are happy for their staff to work on things on the side.

Bithell: Bossa are amazingly supportive, they’ve been absolutely fantastic. They like the game, so they want to see the game go forward.

DIYgamer: It must be really nice to have that support

Bithell: It’s amazing, they’re a really great bunch of guys, they’ve been massively supporting.

DIYgamer: So how close to completion are we at the minute?

Bithell: We’ll see. I’m currently hoping for March/April for a release date next year, for the PC/Mac version. It’s going to be a downloadable game for a relatively low price, it’s a small game, it’s not massive. I’m going to be starting talking to places like Steam and all the digital distributors to see if I can get onto those services.

DIYgamer: Thanks a lot!

Here’s a trailer for your to wrap your eyes around:

[Thomas Was Alone]

Last week, IndieGames.com and Desura presented a new fortnightly event called Indie Royale. For those who haven’t checked it out yet, the idea is pretty simple. A bundle of 4 games are presented for a price of $2.00. As the bundle sells more the price steadily increases. But if users pay more for the game than the minimum the price will be reduced.

It’s definitely interesting to see how the indie games bundle market has expanded since the Humble Bundle started the trend a couple years ago.

Vlambeer‘s Global Game Jam jury and audience awards winner GlitchHiker is now dead on arrival at the virtual footsteps of the IGF 2012 judges.The developers took the Jam’s theme of extinction literally and created a game that at once existed but had eventually become permanently wiped out.

GlitchHiker’s life hinged on the abilities of its audience; every time a player played GlitchHiker and died, a life was deducted from the system. For every hundred points a player scored in GlitchHiker, a life was added. But as most people do as newcomers, they sucked. Yes, they literally sucked the life out of GlitchHiker until it became unplayable… extinct.