Anyone who has been following the game jam scene for even just a year will have seen many great games created in a flurried weekend become fully fledged games. Many hugely successful indie games started life in game jams and I guess this is largely due to the jams inspiring a great deal of creativity from developers.

It comes as no surprise that Evoland, a game developed by Shiro Games for Ludum Dare 24 (LD24) has since be put onto Greenlight. Evoland received much critical praise during LD24 and attracted a great deal of attention.

Evoland follows the theme of “evolution” which was set out for the LD24 competition, taking the concept and running with this unique style fantastically. In Evoland you progress through the evolution of RPGs starting in a Gameboy styled top down monochrome visual, gradually progressing up to 3D rendered models.

It’s a great concept and it is easy to see The Legend Of Zelda and Final Fantasy influences here, taking a great deal of inspiration from both. This not only creates a great evolution throughout the game but also meshes two very distinctive gameplay styles together. In Evoland you get the chance to play in an Action RPG setting like Zelda where events all happen in real time alongside the much more turn based setting of Final Fantasy creating an ever changing and evolving game.

It truly is great to see an RPG that invokes many unique ideas and manages to get them across in a compelling and interesting manner. Although the full game will be a significant improvement on the already hugely successful Ludum Dare entry and aims to really develop the concept brought about in the Jam.

If you are as interested in Evoland as me be sure to check out the official site to find out more about the game. If you would like to see Evoland on Steam get voting for it on Greenlight now!

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Play Through Video Game Evolution In ‘Evoland’ A Unique Look At RPGs

We’ve seen many remakes of retro titles in recent years, although rarely in the indie space. As such, it is interesting to hear of Black Lab Games’ current project — a remake of the 1993 computer RPG Trial By Magic. The original game was written for DOS, and was developed in 1993/1994 by Silver Lightning Software, a studio founded by Paul Turbett. Paul now develops games independently as Black Lab Games, and has decided to re-imagine his early project in Unity. With the benefit of modern tools, hopefully Trial By Magic can surpass the original version whilst maintaining its sensibilities of retro role-playing design. Below is a screenshot of the game in its original form.

Trial by Magic is very different to the role-playing games of today. It has a distinctly old-school sense of pared down scale, and its concept is refreshingly minimal: a wizard known as ‘The Trialmaster’ presents a huge fortune as a prize for whoever can descend all 25 levels of his dungeon, surviving the monsters on each level. The game is set decades after the challenge was first laid down, and still nobody has returned alive. This is where your character comes in, the plucky adventurer who thinks he’s got what it takes to buck the trend. You choose from Warrior, Spellcaster, Ranger, and Thief classes, roll some stats and you’re good to go!

This is the kind of no-nonsense approach that I appreciate in my games, and it is a truly stark contrast to the intimidating complexity of lore in some modern RPGs. There is something about the purity of old-school RPG design which is appealing, as the lack of focus on narrative depth and environmental frills means the gameplay takes center stage. The Trial by Magic remake is in the early stages of its development, so details are relatively scarce right now (remember to bear in mind that the screenshots featured here are of the 1995 original, not the remake). However, the limited information we have so far, along with the fact that Black Lab Games’ previous title was the excellent Star Hammer Tactics, has been enough to pique my excitement.

You will hear more from us about Trial by Magic as development continues, as I definitely plan on continuing coverage of this title. Nonetheless, if you want the information straight from the horse’s mouth you should check out the Black Lab Games devlog here. You can also follow @blacklabgames for updates via Twitter. Oh, and you should totally buy Star Hammer Tactics too! It’s available for a pittance via Desura here.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – ‘Trial By Magic’: An RPG Remade 18 Years On

Back when we reviewed the game, it still had some issues, mostly due to the combat controls being a little finicky, and that it was a little too easy to get stun-locked and mauled to death by the great many enemies you’ll encounter. Several updates later, and the game is a far more polished thing. Still resolutely low-fi, but in a more consistent sorta way. There’s even a new quest that has been snuck in with the latest patch – version 1.3 – making a good, lengthy game even better and bigger. Feel free to mentally add a percentage point or two to the review score while you’re at it.

The Real Texas is for Windows, Mac & Linux PCs, and is available now direct from the developer for $15. Nicely, you can get another 30% off that by checking out the Greenlight page, where you can find a promo code to shave a hefty chunk off the price. Make sure you vote for the game while you’re at it – it’s excellent, and deserves a shot at a wider, more mainstream audience.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Oddball RPG ‘The Real Texas’ Expands, Improves, Still Seeking Greenlighting

No sign of a download quite yet, but this long-awaited update should be up for both Steam and DRM-free (via GOG et al) versions of the game within the next few hours. We gave retro dungeon crawler Legend of Grimrock a glowing review earlier this year, and later took a peek at the beta version of the upcoming dungeon creation suite. All signs are pointing to this game having a very long life ahead of it. The toolset contains everything used to create the original dungeon, and supports importing fan-made content such as new graphical tilesets, sounds, items, monsters and more.

In the few weeks since our editor preview, Almost Human have polished up, refined and tuned the editor further, and produced a concise but helpful series of official tutorials teaching newcomers everything from the basic UI to the scripting system. In addition, they’ve bundled together every resource they had legal access to redistribute (the sound effects are excluded, sadly) as a starting point for modders to use in producing new content for the game. You can find all of these on the official Modding page for the game here, and a series of video tutorials on Youtube in this playlist here.

While a powerful editing suite is great news in itself, the real news here is that there’s already an integrated framework for distributing mods created in it. On the Steam side of things, the game has full Workshop integration, letting you upload content straight from the editor, and download directly into the game. For those with the DRM-free version (bought direct or via GOG), the Nexus network have set up a mod hosting page for the game, alongside their hugely popular Elder Scrolls and Fallout modding sites. You can find out more and see an official change-log since the editor beta here, and the editor should be released in full later today.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Eternally Dungeon Crawling – ‘Legend Of Grimrock’ Editor Released Today

Yesterday, Punchbag Entertainment released a new content pack for their Xbox Live game, Brimstone, entitled Heroes’ Might.

The content pack, which is free for everyone who already owns Brimstone, features the addition of ranged weapons, healing weapons, freezing weapons, a new difficulty mode, new character appearances (one of which is female), and a list of all the players in the current session to the map overlay.

A number of tweaks and fixes were implemented through the release of this content pack, including: balanced loot drops that depend on difficulty, new penalty system which takes care of players who block doorways for too long, the removal of the Koroz exploit, and players will no longer need to re-equip items upon starting the game, in order to re-activate their bonuses.

Brimstone released this past summer on the Xbox Live Indie Marketplace for 80 Microsoft Points. The game is a classic top-down hack-and-slash RPG which supports up to eight players through Xbox Live. There are thousands of item variations and the procedurally generated dungeons ensure that there are a seemingly infinite amount of dungeons to explore. The enemy types and layouts are also procedurally generated, giving Brimstone a very high replay value.

The Heroes’ Might content pack for Brimstone is out now on the Xbox Live Indie Marketplace.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – ‘Brimstone’ Gets Free Content Pack, Adds Ranged Weapons

Today’s Targets: Shepherd Slaughter by Blindhack Software and Zombie Football Carnage by Milkstone Studios. Both are for Windows PCs only, and both carry an RRP of around $3-4. Both are also in the massive Indiefort Championship bundle, which is just entering its final day.

Shepherd Slaughter is a roguelike. You’ve got a magical macguffin to assemble, and bits of it have been scattered around a far-off land and hidden away in ten dungeons. You’ve got almost no equipment, just one life to do it in, and the entire continent is crawling with hundreds of monsters. Good luck!

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of roguelikes in general, whether they be traditionalist, action-oriented, 2D, 3D or anything inbetween. The core experience of delving into increasingly dangerous labyrinths and tunnels, seeking glory, loot and character progression is an addictive combination, and that’s largely what Shepherd Slaughter gets right. There’s the heart of a good game in here, but it’s wrapped in production values that do it no good at all.

I have nothing against ugly games, or even games without graphics at all. Brogue is a masterclass in design, showing that you can practically drown the player in useful, pertinent information without using a single sprite. Despite using animated sprite graphics, Shepherd Slaughter‘s main issue is that it conveys almost nothing clearly. The sprites themselves are crude beyond reason, almost reminiscent of the Atari 2600 era, where enemies were so abstract that the manual had to explain what you were even fighting. While it’s possible to learn what each enemy in this game looks like, it really takes a lot of time to clearly differentiate an Orc from a Goblin.

The other main issue with the game is the core combat engine is possibly a little too simple. Enemies tend to walk directly towards you, and you hit the button to swing your melee weapon (which looks like you’re just waggling it randomly in front of yourself) which knocks your enemy back and does damage. Then you do it again and again until it dies. Ranged combat is effectively identical, only with a projectile instead of a waving damage-field. There’s just no subtlety or weight to it. This isn’t helped by the apparent complete lack of sound effects. There’s some generic RPG adventurin’ tunes burbling away in the background, but not a single clanging sword or monster growl to be heard.

There’s some interesting extra elements, such as a survival/defense mode where you’re guarding a flock of sheep (hence the title), but even that’s a rather limited single-screen affair, and the building interface you’re given to help fence in your wooly friends is bare-bones at best. There’s some good concepts here – the world is large, the dungeons complex, and the environment destructible through the use of the right tools – but the crude graphics and awkward combat hurt it badly. So, moving on…

After several rounds of Zombie Football Carnage, I don’t think I’ve seen a single zombie. Sure, I’d killed mummies, robots, hellhounds, floating eyeballs, golems, dinosaur heads with motorcycle wheels and some other seriously weird creature designs, but not a single zombie, despite them featuring prominently on the box-art. Odd indeed.

Also odd is the choice of using an American Football theme on a very basic arena shooter. Any comparisons to the classic Mutant League Football are immediately crushed. The entire game is a wave-based survival shooter, where you run around the screen blatting increasingly tough sets of monsters using a homing, auto-targetting projectile football, which can be comboed into multiple rapid hits by tapping the fire button again just as the ball hits its mark. You also have a dodge move that lets you pass through enemy groups without harm, a charge attack that does close range AoE damage, and can pick up a variety of single-use offensive and defensive powerups.

The decision to have a global leaderboard is undermined by almost every design decision in the game itself. Enemy waves are randomly chosen, and the difficulty of them wildly varies depending on enemy types, with a horde of slow-moving melee enemies being a cakewalk, and a randomly spawning mob of projectile-spitting critters being almost impossible to avoid damage from. Item hand-outs are similarly random, and can either be game-winning or completely useless.

The final nail in the coffin for anything approaching a balanced scoreboard is the persistent upgrade store which lets you spend money accrued across all playthroughs to boost all your stats, weapon power levels and more. These are permanent, and without any penalty to score, no matter how much you grind, and no matter how much you repeat. The production values on this one are high, and the spritework is charming and imaginative, but Zombie Football Carnage really doesn’t seem to know what it’s trying to be.

At $4, Milkstone are probably asking for too much. The game is a refugee from the faltering Xbox Live Indie Games store, where it was originally priced at just a single dollar. Back on home turf, it had the likes of I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1 to compete with, and within the same price bracket. On the PC, you can get the likes of Alien Shooter 2 – a game which offers a modicum of depth on top of some cataclysmic monster-grinding carnage – for just a dollar more, and there’s a whole raft of polished Flash and Unity games that you can play for free on Newgrounds or Kongregate with more depth and smarter design.

The Verdict: Sad to say, but I just can’t recommend these two. In both cases, there are better games available both as freeware and commercial offerings. Shepherd Slaughter has a solid underlying design but is held back badly by the overly-simplistic art style and low production values all round, and while Zombie Football Carnage has great art and presentation the game itself is haphazardly thrown together. It feels like a quick attempt to push out a game on XBLIG – it might have been able to survive there, but not on PC. Keep an eye on IGM tomorrow for yet another game on… The Chopping Block.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – The Chopping Block – ‘Shepherd Slaughter’ & ‘Zombie Football Carnage’

After the success of ‘Loren the Amazon Princess’, developer Winter Wolves, has decided to expand upon the game, by releasing the expansion: The Castle of N’mar.

With the expansion, the core game is enriched with additional non-linear quests through unexplored lands and also with the introduction of several new playable characters. Brand new quests offer fresh insight into existing characters, and the multiple endings will ensure that one play through is simply not enough.

The story of The Castle of N’mar begins when Amazon scouts go missing while investigating disturbances in the haunted land of N’mar. All evidence points to the vampire-infested Castle of N’mar.  It falls to Loren and her companions to find out what is really going on within the land.

Sauzer, Mesphit, and Chambara from the original game are now playable. They each feature different combat behaviors and two pairs of them come with complete romance arcs which have the potential to change the main story: romance Chambara and Mesphit with either Saren or Elenor.

The Castle Of N’Mar is not the only new zone included with the expansion. Also included are the Catacombs, the Orcish Village, The Tomb Of Twilight, Cyclopes Hunting Grounds, The Haunted Mines and more, with new enemies and boss fights for each area.

The expansion also comes with additional tweaks and rebalances to provide a better gaming experience.

The Castle of N’mar requires ‘Loren the Amazon Princess’ to play. The game is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

A free demo is available on the official website, here.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Expansion for ‘Loren the Amazon Princess’ Released

As a huge fan of Arcen Games’ previous outing – AI War: Fleet Command – I really didn’t go into A Valley Without Wind wanting to dislike it, but the experience just left me cold. The underlying concepts were enticing, but the art style felt like a mash-up of default Poser models and Photoshop effects, the core gameplay felt poorly defined, and there was just something about the way that the game moved that gave me blinding headaches after just a couple hours of play. While the latter point seems to be just limited to myself, the critical reaction to the game was fairly muted across the board. It seems a good decision, then, that Arcen are officially calling a Mulligan on the first release of the game, and are skipping straight to the sequel.

As revealed in this extensive development blog-post, AVWW2 will be free for anyone with the original game. Not only is the game getting a complete visual overhaul (the above picture being a mock-up gameplay shot using the new art assets), but the core gameplay is getting reworked as well. The biggest change is actually a return from the beta era of AVWW – city-building is coming back. Heavily inspired by the SNES platform/strategy hybrid Actraiser, you’ll be alternating between expanding your town and adventuring out in the field. At home you’ll be assigning citizens to duties around the homestead, producing resources and gear, and gearing up for adventures. On the platforming side, you’ll be fighting enemies and clearing new lands for colonization.

There’s going to be a much heavier focus on victory this time. Where AVWW was effectively an infinite treadmill, AVWW2 sets you a goal right from the start – kill the evil overlord of the continent and his five lieutenants and free the land. Game flow on the overworld will play out as a turn-based strategy game, with enemy forces pushing at your borders. The on-foot action sounds more interesting as well, with the levels being randomly generated once more, but this time using hand-built building blocks rather than being a fractal maze. Think along the lines of Spelunky, with its familiar chambers but random arrangements of them each time.

Even the controls are getting a massive overhaul, lending more weight to the Metroid/Actraiser inspirations. Free mouse aiming is no longer in, and is being replaced with pure keyboard/gamepad-driven platforming action. If the levels and combat are designed with this in mind, it could result in a much more satisfying game to play. The core theme seems to be traditional metroidvania gameplay married to a suite of Actraiser-style strategy elements in a persistent world and a constant, singular threat to deal with, as in AI War.

AVWW2 won’t be ready to show to the world for some time, but Arcen hope that the first beta builds will be rolling out sometime this November. I knew that no matter what state AVWW launched in, that Arcen would give it all the post-release support it needs. It seems that they’re going above and beyond people’s highest expectations with this new take on the formula, though. I wish them good luck and a following wind, and can’t wait to try out the revised, refreshed and redesigned AVWW2 later this year. Keep an eye on IGM for more news on this fascinating project as it unfolds.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Arcen Games Announce ‘A Valley Without Wind 2′ As A Free Reboot For Existing AVWW Players

A little after four years since Castle Crashers released on Xbox Live, the game has finally made its way onto the PC and Mac.

Castle Crashers is a casual side scrolling hack-and-slash, set in a cartoony hand-drawn version of the Middle Ages. The Behemoth developed Castle Crashers, receiving acclaim for the game on both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Castle Crashers became known for it’s easy to play co-op, and lighthearted action. The game tells the story of four knights on a crusade to rescue a handful of princesses from an evil wizard. Each player controls one knight, and each knight (red knight, blue knight, yellow knight, and green knight) have slightly different abilities at their disposal.

The game is broken into zones, and each zone contains a handful of levels which progressively tell the tale of the rescuing of the captured princesses. Experience is gained by slaying enemies and the larger bosses scattered throughout the zones. The experience points eventually level up the knight and new abilities can be unlocked to aid players through their crusade.

Through Steam, Castle Crashers supports single-player, multiplayer, cross-platform multiplayer, local co-op, Steam Achievements, Steam Leaderboards, and the use of Steam Cloud storage.

Castle Crashers has two DLC packs available, both featuring an additional character not included in the regular game. ‘The Blacksmith’ and the ‘Pink Knight’ DLC are both available on Steam for an additional 99 cents.

Follow the developers on Twitter: @thebehemoth and check out Castle Crashers in the Steam Store, here.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – ‘Castle Crashers’ Finally Arrives on PC/Mac

In the current time when all things zombie have ignited the pop culture circles it is often hard to not find a story pertaining to zombies in any way shape or form. InSignia Studios are yet continuing this current zombie trend with their latest game Total Decay a turn based strategy game.

Total Decay is still under heavy development but at least from what InSignia Studios have been saying about it I have high hopes for this new title. Total Decay mixes Turn based strategy, RPG, Empire building, Sandbox and zombie survival assets to allow for a unique title putting a new spin on the zombie apocalypse genre.

The idea of Total Decay is to survive for as long as you can, it is not to win, no one can win but merely survive. It is an interesting idea and I do like this idea as it take a lot of the influence from sandbox titles such as Sim City where eventually you fail but the replayability is in the way you learn and adapt for the next playthrough.

It is a great way to take the zombie scene and although a few games have done this sort of thing in the past it has always been on a more limited scale, or so I found.

Some of the key features are:

• Dozens of weapons, armor and clothing
• A wide range of random events, ranging from bandit attacks to raiding slavers, travelling merchants to fleeing refugees and zombie hordes breaking down your settlement walls
• An unending procedurally generated city
• Leveling system for each individual survivor
• Dozens of unique building that you can upgrade to give you powerful bonuses

The game sounds great from all that I have read, I just hope that the imagining becomes the reality next year with this highly customizable and deep strategy game.

Read up on the entire article on indiedb here, and be sure to check back to The Indie Game Magazine for all the latest news as it breaks.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – First Look At ‘Total Decay’ A New Zombie Strategy