For the fourth, and hopefully not the last, time, the Cabrera Brothers have assembled another Free Bundle. Featuring five games from various genres, there is something in it for everyone…especially since it doesn’t cost a penny. Or even…a pence. (See, I’m globalizing!)
The lineup includes:
Bear Surfin Mega Wave from Normalen Baren You Have To Win The Game from J. Kyle Pittman Dirty Split from dreamagination team Vicinity from Vicinity Team Mega Man 8-bit Deathmatch from CutmanMike and Team MM8BDM
As of this writing a little under 13,000 Free Bundles 4s have been downloaded. There are still thirteen days left. Previous bundles, (which are still available) have been downloaded approximately 320,000 times.
The Free Bundle 4 also promotes the Kickstarter campaign for Ithaka of the Clouds, and other indie media outlets. The Cabrera Brothers are unaffiliated with anything but the assembly of the bundle.
“Like always, [we] won’t be getting a dime from this Indiegogo campaign,” the Cabrera Brothers explain on the bundle page. “His sales are his sales alone. We are doing this for the sole purpose of helping a fellow indie developer and hopefully, to encourage others to join us.”
Visit the Free Bundle 4′s official website and instantly download the games, for free.
If you know of (or developed) a free game that you’d like to see in the next bundle, email the Cabrera Brothers at tip[at]cabrerabrothers[dot]com.
There’s more to game development than just making the game, and today’s Developer Links cover some of the more abstract aspects… like the legalities of copying gameplay, and how much it really costs to make a game.
Clone Wars: The Five Most Important Cases Every Game Developer Should Know (Gamasutra)
“‘How courts treat developers copying ideas for video games, however, has quietly but dramatically evolved over the past year,’ writes attorney Stephen McArthur, who takes a look at how the legal precedent on cloning has changed over the years — from Asteroids through Triple Town.”
First Person Spectate In Natural Selection 2 (Unknown Worlds)
“The neologism ‘eSport’ has come to be somewhat of a buzzword for the games industry. Some games launch with overt eSport aspirations, with developers or publishers paying out significant sums to seed competitive play ecosystems (Think Shootmania). Others don’t receive any official eSport support at all, but develop their own competitive communities on the back of the strength of the game (Think the original Natural Selection). Natural Selection 2 falls somewhere in between.”
Bientôt l’été Soundtrack Available (Tale of Tales)
“The luminous soundtrack to our videogame Bientôt l’été is now available for your listening pleasure on many popular music download services.”
Rocket Report #7 (Rocket Bear Games Blog)
“This week’s report is going to be fairly short. I’ve been working on campaign missions and the latest one is a re-worked structures tutorial. My aim has been not to make tutorials be cumbersome, so this is more like a mission where you see turrets for the first time.”
Twine Bundle, Birthday Edition (Auntie Pixelante)
“here are some twine games about feminine empowerment i have played in the past few weeks. OH MY GODDESS, let us pause and reflect on the thing i just typed. here are some VIDEOGAMES ABOUT FEMININE POWER i have played IN THE PAST FEW WEEKS. tomorrow’s my birthday, i’m turning thirty. i can think of no better birthday present than the amazing way twine is transforming the landscape of videogames.”
The Cost Of Game Development (Zeboyd Games)
“There’s a bit of a disconnect between how much games cost to make and how much gamers think they cost to make. Indie game with 2D art? Must be dirt cheap to make. Except when it’s not, as Skullgirls illustrates with its $1.7 million budget. And even that $1.7 million budget looks pretty small compared to the kind of development cost for your average retail game…”
The idea of side scrolling running games is nothing new, and in the modern market we have seen so many different variants on them but none can compete on a style front like The Button Affair does.
Created by Helana Santos, Chris Randle, Jonathan Mann and Ollie Clarke The Button Affair is a hyper stylised heist game that has you ducking dodging and jumping over all manner of traps trying to stop you dead in your tracks.
The gameplay is a great deal of fun as you try and escape with the jewel and luckily the controls are very responsive and work perfectly meaning you will not get too frustrated by failing to avoid various traps.
It really is a whole load of fun to play with the music and visuals really adding a great deal to the game overall creating this very polished and interesting game that you will love from start to finish.
Average play time – less then an hour
The Button Affair is a whole load of fun and the best part is it’s totally free to play (despite looking this good). If you would like to download the game and play it for yourself be sure to head over to the official site now and give it a go.
If you are a developer with A fun indie game that can be played over a coffee break, we want to hear from you! Private message us on twitter @IndieGameMag or shoot us an email at editors@indiegamemag.com with the subject “Indie Intermission” and you could be our indie intermission pick of the day!
Today’s Indie Links include six top ten lists, and nine top five lists. So… I guess you can pick your top five or ten top ten/five lists, if you really want to.
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Ravaged (Joystiq)
“Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We believe they deserve a wider audience with the Joystiq Indie Pitch: This week, 2 Dawn Games’ Carsten Boserup talks crowdfunding and indie publishing with his Steam game (now on sale!), Ravaged.”
Little Inferno (Indie Gamer Chick)
“Tis the season of gifts. Or, if you want to be a killjoy, the season to burn toys in a fireplace. That’s the idea behind Little Inferno, an independent game for the Wii U. It’s by the guys behind World of Goo, which was probably the best digital-download game on the original Wii. But World of Goo got by on being a quirky, addictive physics-puzzler. Little Inferno, on the other hand, feels like the type of time-sink you would find on the iPhone market. In fact, there are lots mechanical issues with Little Inferno that make me think it started life as a micro transaction-oriented mobile game, like Doodle God for arsonists. Only such games typically cost $1 or less and make their money by nickle-and-diming you to speed up the gameplay. Little Inferno charges you $15 upfront, and keeps the action nice-and-slow.”
Top 10 Best Indie Games of 2012, Honorable Mentions and IGR’s Most Anticipated Games of 2013 (Indie Game Reviewer)
“At IndieGameReviewer.com, we began compiling our Top Ten indie Games 2012 edition sometime around June. This is because we wanted to remember the impact of the games that came out in the first half of the year, and from that point forward, we looked at every game that crossed our path with the same consideration, regardless of its size…”
Music of the Spheres – Mathematical Beauty in Action (Independent Gaming)
“What kind of person are you, that you hunt angels?! Er, sorry. Music of the Spheres is certainly a simple concept at first glance, and is always interesting. But it gets more complicated. The theme certainly isn’t angel genocide, but something much more beautiful.”
Live Free, Play Hard: The Week’s Finest Free Indie Games (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
“First off, lists are bullshit. But these are indie games, not some Triple A Shooter that everyone knows about already, so we threw together our top 5 in the following categories to entice you to take a second look at some of the best games of the year.”
Top 10 Indie Horror Games of 2012 (IndieGames)
“Horror, just like humor, is an ancient, fickle and hard to tame beast. Going beyond mere jump-scares and evoking the feeling of proper fear can be particularly tough, but more than a few indie developers seem ready to tackle such tasks. This particular roundup hopes to cover the best and, well, most scary horror releases of 2012 and is featuring both freeware and commercial titles for a variety of platforms.”
The Sequel To The Best Reverse-Tower-Defense Game Is Superb, If Barely A Sequel (Kotaku)
“Anomaly Korea is actually very, very much like 2011′s Anomaly: Warzone Earth, the reverse tower-defense game. You still command a slow-rolling column of tanks and transports through a maze of evil enemy towers. You can still map out your route through the city streets using your fingers. You can still tap special power-ups into existence to briefly buff your vehicles or baffle your foes. You can still kill towers, collect money and upgrade your vehicles. You still need to get to a goal point with some vehicles. The game still checkpoints, makes you think, plan and re-plan, getting tough nice and quickly.”
Anyone who has ever played a squad based game is more than aware of just how bad AI can go wrong and this often ends in frustrating restarts. Now it is time to actually create your own AI from the ground up as Var And The Vikings: Smash Robots & Learn AI (Var) actually educates you on how to make AI and allows you complete control over it.
It’s interesting to see a game in development that encourages learning of vital programming skills in a fun way that make learning fun. In Var you control one central Viking (although you can take a step back and even build AI for all of them) whilst you must construct behaviour trees for your AI Vikings. These trees resemble elements that are used in real game programming and because of this allow a great deal of learning to be had whilst having fun.
This gives you complete control over what your allies do and for a change it is now your fault when they decide to run off and get killed, but you can also change that with some subtle changes. The concept is a great idea and once put into a fun game about Vikings smashing robots you can’t go too wrong with the execution.
Brainworth have had a great deal of support from the gaming industry and have some exceptionally talented people on board the project and have been working with some of the top art and music creates in the industry. However they desperately require extra funding to ensure that Var is completed and beyond that the team have a great deal of excellent ideas on how to create an even better game. With extra funding Brainworth hope to add a full level designer, Player Vs Player multiplayer, Extra character classes, and even an iPad version.
Var And The Vikings: Smash Robots & Learn AI looks to be an educational game that actually provides a great deal of fun to both young and old creating a new standard of educational gaming. To find out more be sure to visit the Kickstarter page or try the demo! If you like what you see consider funding this very interesting new project.
Today’s game to blow away the Monday blues is Excitement by Loren Bednar. Loren Bednar is a developer I have featured hear time and time again here largely because his games are very interesting and always just a little different, and Excitement is no different.
Excitement is a procedurally generated arcade game that feels like some kind of reverse breakout game and is very pretty. The whole idea in Excitement is to collect the stream of particles and prevent the falling stars from hitting the blue bar by dissipating their force with your collected particles.
It really is very different to most games I have came across and because of this it stands out rather well in a market filled with so many games. However don’t expect it to be easy as Excitement requires some serious skill in order to prevent 30 collisions that lead to your demise.
Average play time – 3 minutes
Excitement is anything but boring as in this fast paced arcade style game you will be fighting for you life to prevent these stars from colliding constantly. Its a great little distraction from your day and although rather challenging it is somewhat relaxing at the same time.
If you are a developer with A fun indie game that can be played over a coffee break, we want to hear from you! Private message us on twitter @IndieGameMag or shoot us an email at editors@indiegamemag.com with the subject “Indie Intermission” and you could be our indie intermission pick of the day!
This week has seen some rather interesting games from novel platformers to 3D mazes that just make you want to pull your hair out in rage. They all have their own merits and offer something a little different to one another and should fill up your Sunday nicely.
As always clicking the title will take you to my former article whilst clicking the image will take you to the game, enjoy.
A deeply moody and interesting platformer with a very interesting art style. You come away from a car crash only to realise you are in the middle of nowhere and must run and jump your way back. The gameplay does still need work but overall the idea is great and the art style is easy to love.
A very interesting metroidvania style game that allows you to transverse both love and hate in this somewhat metaphysical game. The art is simple yet quirky and offers a very interesting style that feeds into the games overall great gameplay. If you are a fan of metroidvania style games this is well worth looking at.
I am sure you all get frustrated with games from time to time however here we have a 3D maze that is unrelentingly difficult. Although the premise sounds simple you will be hard pressed to find even 2/3 of these things.
The developer stated he never played Zelda himself however that said the game does have a fair bit of Zelda-like qualities albeit rather different. Its a bit metroidvania a bit Zelda-like and it comes together in this game that is just too awesome to even have a real title. There is a lot of neat ideas here and it has been all pulled off rather well and is well worth ago.
A very abstract game that puts a whole new perspective on stealth. The idea is you are a block who is able to blend into other blocks close by to sneak past them and if you don’t blend in they all start violently hitting you around. It’s a great idea and shows a great level of creativity that a lot of games these days lack.
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And thus concludes yet another week of gaming and the last week in February. Be sure to join me on Monday for an all new game to try and chase away that Monday gloom.
If you are a developer with A fun indie game that can be played over a coffee break, we want to hear from you! Private message us on twitter @IndieGameMag or shoot us an email at editors@indiegamemag.com with the subject “Indie Intermission” and you could be our indie intermission pick of the day!
Today’s Developer Links talk about garbage collection, tool development, a lighting technique, and a suggestion for how to classify RPGs.
The Top 10 Mistakes Tool Developers Make (Gamasutra)
“Since 1999, I’ve had the luck to work in the game middleware industry. It’s been extremely interesting, but something of a crusade. Why? Probably because game middleware is one of the hardest things to market and sell.”
Implementing Voxel Cone Tracing (AltDevBlogADay)
“In last year SIGGRAPH, Epic games presented their real time GI solution which based on voxel cone tracing. They showed some nice results which attract me to implement the technique and my implementation runs at around 22~30fps at 1024×768 screen resolution using a 256x256x256 voxel volume on my GTX460 graphic card. The demo program can be downloaded here which requires a DX11 GPU to run.”
Garbage Collection And Memory Allocation Sizes (AltDevBlogADay)
“As a performance conscious programmer in a soft-realtime environment I’ve never been too fond of garbage collection. Incremental garbage collectors (like the one in Lua) make it tolerable (you get rid of the horrible garbage collection stalls), but there is still something unsettling about it. I keep looking at the garbage collection time in the profiler, and I can’t shake the feeling that all that time is wasted, because it doesn’t really do anything.”
A Better Classification System For RPGs (Zeboyd Games)
“The labels JRPG and Western RPG are commonly used genre labels that don’t do a lot of good in actually telling anyone what the game in question is like because there is so much variety between games that are arguably in the same genre. For that matter, some people still can’t agree whether these terms should apply strictly to the location of the developer that made the game or to the style of game. Surely, we can do better. Here are 9 criteria you can use to classify just about any RPG.”
Attempt Quest 1 (Auntie Pixelante)
“attempt quest 1 is an abstract, autobiographical game i made in 2004 – i would have been around 21. i can’t remember showing it to anyone, posting it anywhere. i don’t remember making it, didn’t remember that it existed until i found it in an old corner of my web host. but playing it, i could identify it as mine, like deja vu, or like being shown a drawing you did as a kid. at that time in my life, i was dealing with isolation, depression, sorting out my identity, and a fear of my own mortality that has never left me, just transformed. i put all these into this little game that i was too scared to show anyone.”
Announcing “Roger Steel and the Human Element” (Computer Games)
“‘It’s 1936 and the sun is still shining brightly on a steam-powered British Empire. Ann Trevelyan, a naïve but headstrong 21-year-old English girl, is exiled to Kashmir from the sultry streets of Calcutta in the aftermath of a forbidden love affair. Accompanied by her technology-obsessed brother, Arthur, who has been coerced into chaperoning her, and their lifelong Welsh friends, Christina and Neville Mortimer, the four expect nothing but boredom away from the glamour of the big city…”
What Are Games (Proteus)
“I find this rather burdensome to write, but it feels necessary to set out my thoughts given recent rumblings, and specifically to respond to this article and its comments. I don’t call Proteus an antigame* or a notgame. I call it a game, but obviously I am at pains to make it clear that it doesn’t have explicit challenge or ‘winning.’”
Together, the games discussed in today’s Indie Links include more than sixteen million levels! Okay, that’s largely because one of the games discussed in today’s Indie Links has more than sixteen million levels by itself, but the other games may have much to recommend them as well.
Austin Wintory’s Journey to the 2013 Grammys (Joystiq)
“On the day Grammy nominations were scheduled to be announced, Austin Wintory didn’t get much work done. As the composer for Journey, Wintory had an inkling that he might be nominated in Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media, and he was distracted all day, constantly refreshing the Grammy page, scanning for his name. By evening the list still wasn’t posted and he gave up on trying to focus. He got in his car, determined to go home, make dinner and then check the page again.”
Top Indie Games of 2012: Dev Redux Part 1 (IndieGames)
“The developers from our Top 10 Indie Games of 2012 (+2!) list have agreed to share their must-play games of 2012. Today’s list features the picks of Jonas Kyratzes, Anna Anthropy, Vince Twelve, Jim Crawford, Justin Ma, and Matthew Davis.”
Project Gert: Recon (Indie Gamer Chick)
“There’s exactly one good thing I can say about Project Gert: Recon. The paintings featured in the game’s cutscenes are beautiful. So at least one person involved in this project has an amazing talent. Seriously, watch the trailer below. The actual in-game graphics are spoiled by awful animation and piss-poor collision detection, but the paintings are spectacular. I would totally commission this guy to do a portrait. But that’s where any complements end. Project Gert is yet another December entrant to the ‘potential worst game of the year’ category.”
Review: Teleglitch – A Fast-Paced Arcade-Style Roguelike. Yes, It Is. (Indie Game Reviewer)
“Sometimes roguelikes are not always turn-based. Sometimes shooters are not always First Person. Three years in the making, Teleglitch is both and neither. It is at once a fast-paced arcade-style action game inspired by DOOM, and a randomly generated, single-life, intense roguelike.”
The Game With Sixteen and a Half Million Levels – The Review (Independent Gaming)
“This game has 16,777,216 levels. I didn’t beat the game before I wrote this, just warning you. This is a totally new concept to me, and I like it, if only the execution was better. The Game with Sixteen and a Half Million Levels is an game made in Engine 001 by tower07.”
A Common Thread: Renaud Bédard (Quote Unquote)
“My name is Renaud Bédard. I’m a 27 years old tall, skinny guy from Montréal, Québec, now living in Toronto. I’m mainly a C# programmer but will use other languages if forced to do so. I’ve been working with XNA a lot in the past few years, but FEZ, the project I’m known for, was my first project using XNA. Before that I was using an engine called TrueVision3D, and now I’m into Unity when doing game jams and personal projects.
Scoregasm (PixelProspector)
“Scoregasm is one of the best arena shooters I have ever played (and I have played a lot of them). The game was over 2 years in development and it really shows: Smooth controls, super fun gameplay, colorful graphics, a great variety of levels and well thought out bullet patterns.”
On Friday, I was lucky enough to be sent a preview-build of Pixelscopic’s upcoming platformer-roguelike, Delver’s Drop. You might remember us discussing Delver’s Drop, earlier this month when the Kickstarter campaign and new website, went live. In preparation for PAX East later this month, and more than likely to get an extra boost of well-deserved publicity, Pixelscopic sent out a preview-build of Delver’s Drop’s “Endless Drop” mode.
As this was my first hands-on experience with Delver’s Drop, I was able to see first-hand that the artistic talent at Pixelscopic is a force to be reckoned with; Delver’s Drop is gorgeous. The style is very cartoony, but every aspect of it is perfect, and nothing feels out of place. The shadows, the pieces of slain enemies flying about, the bobbing of the protagonist as he runs to and fro, everything all comes together beautifully.
How the Endless Drop mode works is that players are given the simple task of seeing how far they can drop. Each level has a pit that Delver can fall into, that takes him to the next level. Sometimes the pits are closed and only open when all the enemies in a particular level are cleared out, other times Delver must trip a switch that opens the closed pit, and sometimes the pit is already open and players must simply survive the level long enough to get to the pit. In Delver’s way are various enemies, like phantoms and giant rats, and obstacles like pits (not the kind you are trying to fall into) and auto-firing cannons. Luckily, scattered through the levels are crates and pots to smash that will occasionally contain weaponry and life-replenishing ham shanks.
“The big differences from the main campaign,” Pixelscopic CEO and co-founder, Coby Utter, explained to me in regards to this secondary game mode, “is not having contiguous rooms and levels, and thus [there is] no exploration, no narrative, and only a very loose sense of progress. We decided to send out this mode, as it was easier for us to ensure that fewer WIP things would be shown/noticeable, because there are still large chunks of things missing from the main campaign.”
The preview build only allowed me to play as the rogue character, but that’s fine, as that is what I would have picked anyway. At first, I was a little thrown-off by how slippery the rogue maneuvered about. It felt like I was running on ice. However, I quickly got used to the carried momentum and everything was fine in no time. Using my Xbox 360 controller made things much easier for me to control, and I ended up doing better than when I tried playing with the mouse and keyboard. Both ways controlled great, it is simply a matter of preference.
I asked Coby how the other two revealed character classes (sorcerer and barbarian) would feel, in comparison to the rogue.
“The sorcerer actually floats a bit,” Coby explained, “so he has an innate advantage when it comes to pits, but he will also be a bit more difficult to control…The barbarian will feel the least “slippery” out of all the characters. He’ll have a very high grip, but lower acceleration and top speeds. In some ways, he will be easier to control, but also difficult to move nimbly.”
The rogue, the sorcerer, and the barbarian are just three of the five character classes that will be available upon the game’s launch. Pixelscopic is letting the Kicksterter funders choose what the fourth and fifth characters will be. Coby told me that they have a handful of options for those fourth and fifth characters, and that the team would be releasing them soon, as they are finishing up some concept art for them.
As an incentive to fund the game, Pixelscopic is offering a bonus, sixth, character for people who back the game at the $50 mark. For more information on incentive rewards, do visit the Kickstarter page for Delver’s Drop. The campaign has a little over a week left, and Pixelscopic is just around $12,700 under their goal. Help out if you can, and if you can’t spare the change, spread the word.
