RPG gems on XBLIG, Monaco, Kentucky Route Zero and more – in today’s Indie Links.

Breathe In The Road: Cardboard Computer And Kentucky Route Zero (Polygon)
“With Act 2 of their five-act piece on the horizon, artists Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy discuss their past and their process and speak to their critics.”

Indie platformer Cloudberry Kingdom will be published by Ubisoft, coming this summer (Polygon)
“Indie side-scrolling platformer Cloudberry Kingdom will be published and distributed by Ubisoft this summer, the company announced today. Developed by Pwnee Studios, and successfully crowdfunded via Kickstarter last summer, Cloudberry Kingdom will feature levels that randomly generate each time you enter, presenting players with new challenges for each playtime, and adjustable difficulty ranging from casual to hardcore. Levels will adapt to the player’s skill level and the abilities of the in-game characters. Players will also be able to create their own characters and challenges.”

Guacamelee review: Wrestlevania (Joystiq)
“Is there anything more paltry than the video game chicken? Guacamelee lets you kick the poor featherballs, lock them in your log-like luchador arms, and pile-drive them into the ground so hard they bounce around the room. In the presence of a protagonist, the only thing worse off than a chicken is a vase.”

Monaco review: A good day to spy hard (Joystiq)
“I’m a terrible thief. If ever there were an investigation into a string of high-profile burglaries in my neighborhood, all I’d have to do to clear my name is invite some police officers to sit down, get comfortable, and watch me play Monaco for five minutes. The officers would see my glowing, pixelated character get caught on the walls around doorways while running away from hordes of angry guards with guns; they would laugh as I rushed into rooms full of alarms and set off every single one; and they would leave soon after I forgot, again, that my character could dig through walls, hack locked doors or easily knock out unsuspecting enemies, and I’d be a free woman. Just like I’d planned all along.”

The State of XBLIG RPGs (Independent Gaming)
“RPGs are powerhouses of both the AAA and the indie game industries. That’s no different on the Xbox Live Indie Game Marketplace, where they’re some of the best games on the service. Like RPGs? Here are some XBLIG suggestions for you.”

The Prisoners May Be Innocent in One of 2013′s Most Interesting PC Games (Kotaku)
“I’m already on-record about how fascinating Prison Architect is. Seriously, it’s SimPrison—or ThemePrison, if you will—made by people who seem to be damn near fearless about making video games about uncomfortable topics.”

Indiemon: Earth Nation (Indie Gamer Chick)
“I have an idea for a children’s game. In it, you’ll play as a pre-pubescent lad who will wander the world making animals fight for sport and for fame. You’ll start with one enslaved creature (possibly an adorable mouse-lightning bolt thing, something that just oozes cuteness) and then randomly fight other adorable creatures along the countryside. During a fight, right at the moment before your huggable little animal buddy delivers a merciless death-blow to the creature it just beat into a pulp, you’ll capture the creature in a cage way too small for it to possibly live comfortably in. You’ll then force it to fight creatures that you wish to enslave, with your ultimate aim being to capture one of every creature like some deranged, asexual Noah.”

Getting a start in making games, from the man behind Thirty Flights of Loving (IndieGames.com)
“This week I [was] fortunate enough to be featured in The Humble Weekly Sale. My email inflow has skyrocketed, and amongst them I get a fair amount of messages like this: I’m a student in high school and I’m really interested in making games, but I have no clue where to start. I was wondering if you could offer me some insight into where to start? Everyone’s brain is wired differently. For me, my best suggestion boils down to: Make stuff. Then make more stuff. If you’re not into brevity, I’ll get more specific.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Brick By Brick

Try something new with today’s Indie Links, which include last year’s top 10 (or 25) experimental games of 2012 – or if that doesn’t appeal to you, there are plenty of games of established genres you may not have played much, too.

Top 10 (Free) Experimental Games of 2012 (IndieGames)
“Ten games and another fifteen honorable mentions and we still can’t feel 100% happy with our Top 10 free experimental games of 2012 list. If there is one thing indie developers simply excel at, you see, is not just coming up with, but actually trying out and releasing games based on wild and at times radical ideas. Games so different, so innovative and so unique we can’t help but describe as experimental.”

A Common Thread: Rami Ismail (Quote Unquote)
“My name is Rami Ismail, age 24, and I’m the business & developer guy at Vlambeer, a two-man independent studio in the Netherlands best known for Super Crate Box, Radical Fishing, GUN GODZ and our upcoming game LUFTRAUSERS.”

Review: Medal Wars – Keisers Revenge (Indie Game Reviewer)
“Though Medal Wars provides a decent amount of action and plenty to keep players busy, it feels unpolished in places and suffers from clunky controls.”

Jumping The Kickstarter-Gun (Indie Gamer Chick)
“Kickstarter is not venture capital.  It’s not angel investing.  Pledgers are not looking for a monetary return on their investment.  I do understand this.  And yet, I’m still not a supporter of Kickstarter, because I think it sends the wrong message to potential developers: money is easy to come by.  I believe it’s irresponsible to teach young entrepreneurs that money should be given to them based on a concept and raw enthusiasm.  Funding should only be given on the grounds of actual ability, a proven track record of completed, competent projects, and the willingness to personally sacrifice for the benefit of your project.  It’s shocking to me how people fund games from people who meet none of that criteria.  I’m even more shocked when a developer reaches their Kickstarter goal, gets the money, and within weeks has another ask posted for even more funding.. and gets it.”

Road To The IGF: Blendo Games’ Thirty Flights of Loving (Gamasutra)
“Brendon Chung of Blendo Games has produced some of the most exciting and unique video game experiences of recent years, from the delightful Gravity Bone to IGF 2012 finalist Atom Zombie Smasher. Now the indie dev has yet another game as an IGF finalist. This time around it’s Gravity Bonesequel Thirty Flights of Loving, and it’s just as intriguing as its predecessor.”

Blind Eye Games – Interview With George Sawyer (Independent Gaming)
“I was lucky enough to contact George Sawyer at Blind Eye Games to talk about his upcoming zombie game, Safe Zone, a game where you’re tasked with travelling across the U.S. to get away from the zombie horde.”

‘Indie’ Means Nothing, And It’s Everyone’s Fault (Indie Statik)
“Man, oh man. The big question: What is ‘Indie’? You’d think a publication that has the word ‘Indie’ in its title and is staffed by primarily ‘Indie’ fans, all of whom write exclusively and exhaustively about anything and everything ‘Indie’ under the sun, would sorta know what the bloody word actually meansby now. Well, turns out we don’t. Turns out no one does. Turns out not a week goes by where I don’t hear someone meekly ask their fellow gaming compatriots whether or not GAME X is ‘Indie’ or not, only to be subsequently thrown aback by the crashing waves of wildly conflicting opinions on the matter until they find themselves gasping for air as they plunge deeper into an ocean of bickering, twisted logic and malice. Turns out this is a problem. So I’ve decided that for the good of all the game lovin’ peeps everywhere that I’m gonna figure this shit out right here, right now!”

Live Free, Play Hard: The Week’s Finest Free Indie Games (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
“Multiplayer god poem. HUNT FOR THE GAY PLANET. Super Hallucinogon. Color domming.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Violet Vortex

If you’ve got a need for speed, today’s Indie Links are for you, with the results of the Indie Speed Run game jam… as well as plenty of other fast-paced games, and maybe a few not-so-fast-paced ones too to shake things up.

Light Fighters (Indie Gamer Chick)
“There is nothing really wrong with Light Fighters besides not being fun.  The game didn’t crash.  There weren’t physics glitches.  Everything wrong with it can be boiled down to “this game probably had no chance of being entertaining from the onset and the developer should have recognized that and tried something else.”  Even if the ships were more interesting, or the bullets they fired more exotic, or the AI less unfair, or the reload-rates less painfully slow, or if multiplayer matches didn’t all boil down to glorified button mashers that leave little to no room for strategy, or if it had something to keep track of what your best times are in meteor mode, or if the meteors weren’t so fucking spongy, or all of the above, Light Fighters still would have been boring.”

Atomic Creep Spawner!! And Ore Chasm Are Your Ludum Dare 25 Winners (IndieGames)
“The top overall games from Ludum Dare’s 25th competition have been decided, after judges played through 1,327 entries. deepnight’s Atomic Creep Spawner!! takes home the gold for the 48-hour compo and Black Ships Fill the Sky’s Ore Chasm (I see what you did there) wins gold for the 72-hour jam.”

Joe Danger‘s Most Impressive Stunt Is How Good His Mobile Game Turned Out (Kotaku)
“When I first caught wind of Hello Games bringing their stunt-racing hero Joe Danger to iOS, I imagined a straight port of the original PlayStation Network release, complete with a screen cluttered with virtual controls. Instead they’ve delivered a game that fully embraces the touch-based platform, one that’s as refreshing to play as it was for the company’s founder to develop.”

Play Free Indie Speed Run Games Now (IndieGames)
“Indie Speed Run’s 48-hour jam games are now available to play for free. While they await judgment from the star-studded cast including Minecraft’s Notch, Passage’s Jason Rohrer, Journey’s Kellee Santiago, and Limbo’s Dino Patti, here are just a few highlights of the hundreds of games available (with more being added throughout the day).”

Indie Speed Run Games Now Available For The Public To Play (Polygon)
“Games that were created as part of the Indie Speed Run game jam are now available on the event’s official website for the public to play. The Indie Speed Run is a global game jam where teams of one to four developers create a game in any 48-hour span during the game jam period. The most recent jam ran from Nov. 28, 2012 to Jan. 6, 2013.”

We Can Finally See The Dark Side Of The Moon (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
“Lovely Love-maker Eskil Steenberg has finally revealed what his next project will be. He just popped a video up on Youtube, showing off the prototype for a Dark Side Of The Moon, a “real-time strategy stealth action game”. The video is a quick look at some of the units he’s preparing for the battlefield. It looks like he’ll be focusing on smaller battles, rather than turning out a StarCraft clone.”

Juego Rancheros’ Fistful Of Indies: January 2013 (Venus Patrol)
“Every month, as part of the regular monthly meetings of the Austin, TX independent game community JUEGOS RANCHEROS, we do a very casual & chatty rundown of the ten or so games from the previous month for the audience, to give people — especially those curious onlookers from outside the indie community itself — a look at what they may have missed. The featured games are both local and global, and both indie and, on occasion, a bit-bigger-budget — what binds them together is simply that they’re all amazing.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Interlocked

Today’s Indie Links recipe calls for several cups of platformers, with a heaping tablespoon of fighting games and a soupçon of other genres.

Road to the IGF: Richard Hofmeier’s Cart Life (Gamasutra)
“Richard Hofmeier’s Cart Life was originally released in May 2011, and for a good while it drifted along without all that much attention. This was a huge shame, because the retail simulation title is as brilliant as it is deep. You play as an entrepreneur who is looking to start a business, while also making sure other areas of his or her life are kept in order.”

Platformer From Hell And Little Acorns Deluxe (Indie Gamer Chick)
“Platformer from Hell comes from Hoosier Games, a group of academics from Indiana.  I know, I know.  Academics?  In Indiana?  I went ‘Hah!’ too, but upon further research, they do have institutes of higher learning there.  I’m not sure what is considered higher learning in Indiana.  ‘Cow Tipping 101′ or ‘Why you can’t pork your sister’ I would imagine are on the agenda.  I’m kidding of course.  Actually, I’m quite friendly with project manager Derrick Fuchs (I hope that’s pronounced the way I think it is) and I ranked their previous effort, Warp Shooter, on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.  It was flawed but functional and fun.  I applauded their efforts and looked forward to their next game.  Which is here.  And it sucks.  A lot.”

Play Nifflas’ Nordic Game Jam 2013 Winner Spaceship With A Mace And More For Free (IndieGames)
“The Nordic Game Jam 2013 concluded with, as of this writing, approximately 80 games completed at the reported 470-person event. Nifflas’ multiplayer game Spaceship with a Mace was crowned the Grand Prize winner of the event. Stikbold, another multiplayer only game, was crowned ‘most fun game.’”

Damn It, Owlboy, Why Aren’t You Out Yet (Kotaku)
“It’s been a long time coming. A long, long time, and still no release date in sight. But indie adventure/platformer Owlboy looks worth the wait. This video, released over the weekend, showcases both the music of composer Jonathan Geer and the game’s charming art style, which for want of something more descriptive reminds me of a Genesis version of Wind Waker.”

State of XBLIG Fighting Games (Independent Gaming)
“Fighting games have always been a staple of video games to some extent, whether big or small, but they’ve seemed to disappear in the last decade or so. Seemed to. They’ve started to experience a resurgence in the AAA market; probably with a bit of help from the indie market. Xbox Live indie games have a handful of good fighting games so, without further ado, here are some interesting/fun XBL indie games of the fighting genre, in no particular order.”

Review: Marvin’s Mittens – Rekindle The Joy Of Exploring A Winter Wonderland (Indie Game Reviewer)
“Though aesthetically, Marvin’s Mittens from Canadian developers Breakfall Games may appear to be geared towards a younger audience, there’s something on offer here that could be compelling for any audience, particularly those who fondly remember snow days from their childhood.”

The Soaring Successes, Surprise Endings And Abject Failures Of Crowd-Funded Video Games (Polygon)
“Kickstarter is no longer untested water for game financing. Since the website’s inauguration in April 2009, 3,843 projects have launched in its games category. But what happens to these projects after they leave Kickstarter, either through funding success or funding failure?”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Dental Hygiene

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.”

Skulls of the Shogun Devs Interested in Cross-Platform Purchase Promotion, But Microsoft Can’t Yet Do It (Polygon)
“Buy one version of Skulls of the Shogun, get another for free? Developer 17-Bit would like to make that happen, but CEO Jake Kazdal told Polygon that the indie studio is hamstrung by Microsoft — the company doesn’t have anything like Sony’s PlayStation 3/PlayStation Vita Cross Buy promotion set up across Windows 8, Windows Phone, Windows RT or Xbox Live Arcade titles.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Spin The Wheel

How did an indie studio end up with one of its games as a launch title on the Wii? Some developers really like local multiplayer games. This question and answer are not related to each other, but they’re both related to today’s Indie Links.

Sportsfriends Developers’ Love of Split-Screen Gaming Influenced Their Collaboration (Polygon)
“In an Ask Me Anything on Reddit today, the four indie developers behind games like QWOP and the Sportsfriends Kickstarter project discussed their shared love of local multiplayer and how that influenced their not-yet-funded collaboration.”

Live Free, Play Hard: The Week’s Finest Free Indie Games (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
“Powerful game teens. @’s widow. EVERY DAY I WAKE UP AND OPEN PALM SLAM A KILLER RETORT TO MISOGYNY INTO THE SLOT.”

Delve The Dungeon Crawler Review (Independent Gaming)
“Dungeon crawlers and roguelikes seem to be a favourite type of game to make among indies and while there is lots of innovation and interesting ideas for these types of games (a GTA roguelike!) sometimes they all feel the same after a while.Delve the Dungeon Crawler is different.”

See The Difference A Year Makes For Anomaly: Korea (Kotaku)
“Last year, developer 11 bit studios released a scaled-down version of its reverse tower defense PC game, Anomaly Warzone Earthfor the iPad, and it was wonderful. Look how far they’ve come with the soon-to-be-released sequel, Anomaly Korea.”

How Did Indie Studio Broken Rules Get Chummy With Nintendo? (Gamasutra)
“There are plenty of indie game studios that would kill to work with Nintendo, and release games for the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U home console — but getting the behemoth publisher to notice your team can be far more difficult than it sounds.”

The Prince of Monaco: Andy Schatz Talks Up His Indie “Heist Simulator” (Ars Technica)
“Indie gaming fans are all probably aware of the top-down, half-strategy, half-platformer, half-puzzler (yes, that’s three halves) Monaco. The game rocketed to widespread attention when an early build won the grand prize at the 2010 Independent Games Festival. Its premise is instantly graspable to those who have been bathed in Hollywood from a young age—there are things to be stolen, and it’s up to you and your crack team to pull off the heist. Coupled with a slick retro style and controls that appeared quick to learn, Monaco stole the show—and we’ve been waiting for it ever since.”

The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Unmechanical (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, Jesper Engström of Sweden’s Talawa Games talks his BIG win in Brazil with PC puzzler Unmechanical.”

Review: Air Buccaneers (Indie Game Reviewer)
“With what appears to be the dawn of ship-to-ship crew battle as a genre, we are now privileged to join the ranks of Buccaneers of the Air. In this little ditty you’ll be weaving a tale of your exploits as you carve your legend into the sky with your wits and wile.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Polygonal Polly

In today’s Indie Links: Making a video game out of paper, the end of a doomed journey, and why making your players suffer can be a good thing.

FTL: The Fatal Frontier – The Last Stand (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
“These were the voyages of the Starship Moggy. Its eight-sector mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new weapons and new system upgrades, to boldly go somewhere no-one has come back alive from before (apart from save-scummers).”

The Benefits Of Making Your Players Suffer (And Maybe Throw Up) (Gamasutra)
“Bennett Foddy, creator of QWOP, GIRP, and CLOPamong others, likes to play with his players, and he suggests that more of us should be doing the same. At the top of his talk at IndieCade on Friday, he asserted, ‘I’m going to try to convince you to put more suffering in your games.’”

Double Droids And The Wonder Of Game Development (Hookshot Inc.)
“This weekend I made an award-winning video game. I should probably clarify that.”

Video Game Origami: ‘Derrick The Deathfin’ Goes From Paper To Playstation (The Verge)
“There’s an incredible diversity in the kinds of graphics that video games have presented us with over the years, but developers are still managing to find ways to surprise us. Derrick the Deathfin is a new downloadable title launching today on the PlayStation Network that not only looks it was made out of paper, at one point it actually was. In order to make the art style as realistic as possible, the team at developer Different Tuna crafted papercraft models of each object before making them part of the game world. It’s a lengthy process but one that adds a sense of realism to a game about a cartoon shark. Or as Different Tuna’s Gordon Midwood says, it creates ‘something that’s kind of organic, that doesn’t look like every other video game.’”

TIGSource Devlog: Dom2D’s Visual Showcase Of Awesome New Games, Issue #1 (Venus Patrol)
“Since 2005, TIGSource has hosted the largest forum dedicated to independent game development. Its devlog section, in particular — where developers show their work-in-progress and get feedback from the community — has proven to be a goldmine for amazing design, gorgeous art and constructive criticism. As a game designer and an artist myself, I find these quite inspiring and feel these projects deserve more attention.”

iOS Hit Nihilumbra Coming to PC (IndieGames)
“Beautifun Games’ iOS puzzle platformer hit Nihilumbra is coming to Windows and Mac. Our own Cassandra Khaw appreciated the iOS version’s 10+ hours of gameplay. Additions to the PC versions include improved atmospheric and weather effects, new HD textures, an improved and fully remastered soundtrack with a new song, and minigames.”

Kickstarter Katchup – 6th October 2012 (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
“It’s glum in the Katchup this week and I’ve been spending most of this fine Saturday morning wiping the tears from my eyes with a twenty pound note. If only I’d pledged it to the promise of a game instead of using it as a handkerchief for all these long months. If only! Two of my personal favourites have fallen by the wayside and there’s only one winner, although it is an interesting one by virtue of not being an obvious success story, powered to victory by the presence of a celebrity developer. There are a few projects on the verge of success and if I were writing this on Monday, the ‘Winners’ column would probably be much more satisfactorily populated.”

(Not) Getting Noticed On Steam Greenlight: Incredipede’s Story (Joystiq)
“In the indie world of secret handshakes and underground brunch meetings, there’s a specific phrase for the following complex process, as described by developer Colin Northway: ‘Apply to Steam, be rejected, release without it, get popular, be noticed by Valve, release on Steam.’ This is widely accepted as the ‘Offspring Fling’ submission process. It takes the name of Kyle Pulver’s retro platformer, which launched on Steam in May, months after not launching on Steam, despite Pulver’s attempts. Northway shares this rejection jargon with us in terms of his own puzzle game, Incredipede, and Steam Greenlight:”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie-Links Round Up: Construction Crustaceans

MaK.  Prevail.  Party of Sin.  Edgar Rice Frotteur.  These are all very strange names for video games.  So obviously you want to read today’s Indie Links to find out just what these titles are.

Underrated Indie Games II: Under The Radar (TIGSource)
“After months of effort, Underrated Indie Games II was wrapped up a little while ago. It is part of moshboy’s endeavor to bring attention to overlooked indie games. The videos in this new addition to his series cover a 100 games of a wide variety to give you a glimpse of what you might have missed.”

Size Five On Stealth, Story & Swearing In The Swindle (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
“A few days back, Time Gentlemen, Please and Privates dev, Dan Marshall of Size Five Games,revealed just why his ‘xciting upcoming cyberpunk crime caper The Swindle had gone eerily quiet for a few months. Fearful that the XNA language he’d been working with might not be supported by Windows 8, he started from scratch in Unity. In this second half of our chat, we cover the game itself – how important stealth and gags are to it, its ‘retrospective’ approach to storytelling and why it’s more Grim Fandango than Day of the Tentacle. Also Dishonored, because Dishonored. Also Hitler, because Hitler.”

The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Party of Sin (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, Crankshaft Games’ Daniel Menard talks about his PC co-op puzzle-platformer about breaking out of Hell and storming Heaven, Party of Sin.”

Off The Vine: A Closer Look At Grinding Game Edgar Rice Frotteur (Venus Patrol)
“Swedish designer & developer Adam Henriksson — last seen providingvideo documentation of the debut of Mega-GIRP — has just uploaded a beautifully shot longer look at the 48-hour game he helped create at the 2012 Nordic Game Jam with Thomas Perl, Johann Sebastian Joust creatorDoug Wilson, and Proteus musician David Kanaga.”

The Time You Killed Playing Super Hexagon Lives Again (Kotaku)
“This week I played Super Hexagon in the office of my insurance agent, financial advisor, and attorney, as I settled up matters relating to the sale of a house. That should establish the game’s cred as an outstanding time-killer.”

FTL: The Fatal Frontier, Sector 7 (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
“And so my FTL campaign, the flight of the starship Moggy, limps to the game’s penultimate sector. It seems impossible that we’re still alive at this point – let alone that we now have seven crew, three guns and NO-ONE IS DEAD. The looming question is whether or not we’re anything like equipped for the final showdown in Sector 8 – but then again it’s foolish to go asking that before we’ve survived Sector 7.”

MaK (PixelProspector)
“MaK is “a physics sandbox with tethers, rockets, explosives, teleportation, relative gravity and potentially unlimited room for creativity” that reminds of Super Mario Galaxy. RPs wrote a bit about the game and the developers explain the game in more detail in this 5 minute gameplay video.”

Petit Planets: Johnny Two Shoes Shows Off Their iPhone Adventure, Prevail (Venus Patrol)
“I spy a little bit of Glitch‘s free-wandering & subdued landscape, a little bit of GodFinger‘s deformable terrain, a healthy dose of predecessorPlunderland‘s highly physics-based platforming, and maybe just a touch ofSpore‘s explorable ecologies in this new gameplay video of Prevail, the latest from UK indies Johnny Two Shoes.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Out The Window

Sung to the tune of “My Favorite Things”, from The Sound of Music:

Games based on Bosch, or on playing the cello,
History told by a puppet that’s yellow,
Hear what the team behind Octodad thinks.
These are a few of today’s Indie Links.

There, now try getting that awfulness out of your head with these:

Gimme Indie Game: The Improbable History Of TheCatamites’ Pleasure Dromes Of Kubla Khan (Venus Patrol)
“The Pleasuredromes of Kubla Khan, just released as a free PC download, continues right where Murder Dog left off: a brief but hilarious interactive history lesson of the Mongol emperor’s Xanadu. Like a modern-day punk Encarta (and as with Murder Dog), its best feature is its frantic and entirely unreliable Muppet-esque narrator, providing meta-commentary on all your actions (toss yourself off the edge of the world to smash further through the fourth wall), as you find yourself headed straight into the hedonistic heart of the pleasuredrome.”

Live Free, Play Hard: Strategic Torture Simulation (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
“A day late due to, um, let’s say otters, here’s this last week’s finest free indie games. Take it away, Porpentine.  Important historical edutainment game. Strategic torture simulation. What if Kirby were born billions of years ago. Ladder fortresses of jellyfish space. Lynchian piss world.”

City Tuesday’s Pretty Source Code (Hookshot, Inc.)
“The Xbox Live Indie channel may not be the most popular stop on the indie train line, but for that reason it continues to be a go-to destination for those who believe their game has more chance of being noticed there than on the brutal wastelands of Steam and the App Store. City Tuesday certainly stands out among the crowd, borrowing some threads of premise from Duncan Jones’ Source Code – in which a man relives the final few moments of his life before a terrorist attack over and over again, with the chance to change fate if he manages to find the bomb – and presenting it in sharp vector visuals and a generous spattering of Helvetica chic.”

Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Done: Octodad Team Interview (Sugar Gamers)
“Pax Prime allowed me the pleasure of sitting down with Young Horses, Inc., the team behind Octodad: Dadliest Catch, the sequel to OCTODAD.”

Forget Rock Band, Here’s Cello Fortress (Gamasutra)
“Cello Fortress is a work-in-progress by Proundeveloper and Ronimo designer Joost van Dongen, and as far as I’m aware, it’s the first video game to incorporate a classical music instrument (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong!) into the gameplay. The game will first be shown at the Dutch Game Garden Indigo exhibition later this month.”

Boston Festival Of Indie Games Announces Lineup (Joystiq)
“The Boston Festival of Indie Games has revealed the 36 games that will be showcased at the event this Saturday, September 22. Featured games – with developers in tow – include Fire Hose Games’ Go Home Dinosaurs, Owlchemy Labs’ Jack Lumber and many, many others.”

Garden Of Delights: JB500 Opens Call For Hieronymus Bosch-Inspired Games (Venus Patrol)
“As a tyke, I had the extreme fortune of having at my disposal a number of art-history survey textbooks (thanks, dad) which I pored over daily — an early, self-guided & very valuable education in art appreciation — and I have very distinct memories of continually returning to one artist:Hieronymus Bosch, whose landscapes were littered with cartoonish-ly caricatured monsters, animals and half-humans that wouldn’t at all be out of place in a children’s TV show if they weren’t so overtly representative of grim morality tales. It’s with that said that I count myself super lucky to having been asked to be involved with a new art/game initiative from the Jheronimus Bosch 500 Foundation itself — an organization founded to honor the artist on the 500th anniversary of Bosch’s death.”

You Won’t Survive FTL‘s Space Mission, But You’ll Remember It (Kotaku)
“The flames shred through my vessel, eventually overtaking the populated rooms, but it didn’t matter. My men would burn, but there are worse ways to go than ablaze with the virtue of dedication. Of course I couldn’t give up. Not when good men and women spent their last moments proudly showing me the honor of what it means to serve a ship. It wasn’t something I understood before FTL: Faster Than Light, the spaceship roguelike by Subset Games where you command your own ship and its crew under a space exploration mission.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Escalation

A dungeon editor, a movie-themed puzzle racer, and a game about a robot photographer (that is, a robot who takes photographs, not someone who photographs robots): these are some of the subjects of today’s Indie Links.

There’s Something Primal About Super Hexagon (Gamasutra)
“Super Hexagon‘s success on iOS has taken developer Terry Cavanagh very much by surprise. The game, an expansion on Cavanagh’s original Pirate Kart entry Hexagon, sold more than 10,000 copies in its first three days on sale in the App Store — a total that the dev never dreamed was possible for a seemingly niche experience.”

Joe Danger 2 – The Movie Review: High-Ish Voltage (Joystiq)
“Like a lot of film sequels, Joe Danger 2 sounds good on paper, in a bigger-better-more-explosions kind of way. Promoted from stuntman to star, Danger’s garage and scenery are now fuller and more diverse. One minute he’s skiing away from an avalanche, the next he’s jetpacking through a jungle and breaking dinosaur eggs. With an action-packed variety of backdrops and vehicles, the 2D puzzle-racer never looks the same from one level to the next. This is a quality not to be sniffed at; many games would do well to break out of their beloved grey corridors and empty brown plains.”

Friday Flashback #31: Watching It Hatch (Broken Rules)
“Refreshed and filled with new-found energy, we’ve looked at the feedback received during PAX Prime and are back to working our minds off to improve what needs to be improved and polish what needs to be polished. Faster than ever, Chasing Aurora fills up with content and takes more and more shape. It’s a bit like watching a bird hatch from its egg.”

Beyond Minecraft: Notch On Fame, Pressure, Sequels (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
“Notch is Minecraft. Minecraft is Notch. A year ago, those statements might have been true to some extent, but not anymore. The man behind the most pervasive invention since the wheel (which he achieved by simply putting the corners back onto the wheel) hung up his pick axe late last year. That does not mean, however, that he’s escaped from the shadow of the monolith he created. Notch and his creation are still synonymous, for better or worse. And so, during PAX, I spoke with the quick-to-smile yet surprisingly introverted developer about the pressures of overnight fame, having people hang on (and quote) your every word, the current status of 0x10c, and tons more.”

Grimrock Dungeon Editor: Steam Beta (TIGSource)
“After four months of hard work the Legend of Grimrock team has released a level editor beta for their first-person dungeon crawl. Due to Steam’s rapid updating capabilities, the editor is currently only available for players who own the Steam version of the Grimrock. To try it out, right-click on ‘Legend of Grimrock’ in your Steam library and select properties. Then click on the ‘Betas’ tab and opt-in to begin downloading the editor.”

Snapshot: Snapshot (PC) (Joystiq)
“Finally, someone made a game for all the Instagram hipsters in the world. All those crazy kids with their fancy smartphones, taking too-close photos of burritos and Starbucks cups, only to crop them, blow out the saturation, and add kitschy comments bookended by less-than-three hearts for all their digital friends to see. Retro Affect’s Snapshot is exactly like all of that, except way cuter and not at all like that.”

Love, Hate, And Xbox Live Indie Games (Gamasutra)
“For all the bad press that the Xbox Live Indie Games platform has received over the years, it’s easy to forget that, for some developers, XBLIG is a dream come true — a way for them to publish their games to a proper home console in a relatively easy manner. And while it’s also easy to dismiss Xbox Live Indie Games as a breeding ground for Minecraftclones and silly Avatar games — as I myself have done numerous times before — there are, in fact, many wonderful gems to be found on the store if you know where to look.”

Interview: 600k Downloads But Gasketball Still “Feels Like A Dud” (Hookshot, Inc.)
“Following the success of Sopliskier, two-man indie team Mikengreg spent a year developing their follow-up: physics puzzler Gasketball. The game released a month ago to positive reviews from both critics and consumers. But the hope that offering their creation as a free download would lead to a dramatic increase in in-game sales hasn’t paid off.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Stone-Faced