Right. Let’s get this clear. I’ve been waiting for Daedalic Entertainment’s newest adventure, Deponia, to be anglicised for the best part of a year and today I discover it’s been available in retail since the end of June? I’m… well… I’m a bit baffled about that. Needless to say, since its German release in January this year I’ve had a hard time tracking the game’s exact coordinates whilst it wormed its way over to this tiny island for which I call home. And clearly I missed it scuttling up the shore.

To be honest though, I’m just happy to say for certain that the game has today seen a Steam release, as well as currently being available to buy from other such scrupulous download services as GameTap and Gamersgate.

If you weren’t previously sure of what Deponia might be then a cursory glance over Daedalic’s past titles, Edna & Harvey, The Whispered World and A New Beginning! might give you some point of reference. In short, these guys are purveyors of beautifully hand-drawn and animated adventure games. And Deponia is no exception.

Here we follow an ill-tempered dreamer, Rufus, as he seeks to rocket himself to the wealthy cities that float above the surface of the garbage world on which he lives. Things go wrong, naturally, when a beautiful maiden drops from the sky and our ‘hero’ decides to rescue her in reward for unthinkable riches.

The game is steampunk in its stylings and the developer has referenced the likes of Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett and Matt Groening as inspiration in this regard. Whether it lives up to this comparison remains to be seen, but be assured we’ll be providing a conclusive review coverage as soon as we can.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Point, Click, Purchase – Deponia Receives Digital English Language Release

It’s that time again, for everyone’s favourite 48-hour development compo to open its jaws once more and clamp them shut around the melange of minds that power the indie development community.

Right now, Ludum Dare 24 is gearing up to open its doors. August 24th is the date and currently anyone – yes, anyone – can submit an idea for a theme that the organisers might fancy pursuing. For LD23, back in April this year, ‘Tiny World’ came up trumps and from that we gained such mad beauties as BEEFWAR, the eye-straining It’s A Tab and the mesmerising Cruel Space. So many great ideas, so fully realised in the minimal time available.

So, what of this year’s entries? Well, I’ve already submitted my suggestions of ‘Fix It’, ‘Servile’ and ‘Don’t Go Outside’, themes which, if combined, could conjure the incredible and heartwarming adventures of a downtrodden, agrophobic mechanic. Sort of an anti-Mario. Quite fitting for a community which thrives on bucking the trends of commercial gaming, but somehow I think there are better, more serviceable suggestions out there. So why not have a go? Just head to the page, here, and let your imagination run wild.

And don’t forget that previous and past competition entries are still online and available to play on a whim. So, if you’ve an entire lifetime to spare and no other urges than to engage in people’s interactive mind-farts, head over to the official site for fun and frolics.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Pick A Theme – Ludum Dare 24 Opens Suggestion Box

If you’re a fan of adventure games then there’s a fair chance you’ll at least be aware of Jonas Kyratzes’ Lands of Dream series. Colourful, clever games with distinctive narratives set in fanciful fantasy lands. The Sea Will Claim Everything is the most recent of the bunch and the first commercial release for Kyratzes – and a demo has today been made available, right here. So, if you were unable to snap the game up when it first appeared in May’s Bundle In A Box you’ll now be able to give it a go for free prior to laying your cash at Mr Kyratzes’ feet.

Thoughtful, text-heavy questing might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but with this particular developer you’re at least guaranteed your money’s worth of the weird and wonderful. Kyratzes has a knack of adding details within details within his games. You’ll find text descriptions of objects and items of scenery that even the most ambitious of adventure games would shy away from. You’ll find noises for the sake of there being noises. And, um… you’ll find a mouse in your backpack. It’s the kind of game you’ll need to relax into to fully appreciate the merits of the world laid before you.

Of course, Kyratzes maintains that the best way to discern if you like his style is to check out the fabulously free The Fabulous Screech online but for those who have the taste and the time for more he has surely catered.

The full version of The Sea Will Claim Everything is available from the developer’s website and is priced at $10.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – I Dreamed A Demo – Free Trial Of ‘The Sea Will Claim Everything’ Is Now Available

Now here’s a rousing testament to both the value of a dedicated and loving fanbase, and also proof positive that you don’t need high-poly graphics, professional sprite art or an orchestral soundtrack to raise some money in the indie sphere. We first reported on Tales of Fallen London: The Silver Tree a few days back, but the Kickstarter itself only went live today, only to shoot straight past the (admittedly small) $10,000 target within hours. With over a month remaining, it’ll be interesting to see just how much they can raise.

A turn-based, narrative (and mostly textual) RPG running on the same game engine behind Fallen London, The Silver Tree is the first in a planned series of standalone (although still browser-based) adventures set in the same universe as Fallen London, but expanding greatly on the lore and other locations that have been coyly hinted at throughout the various tangled plot-threads of the parent game, but never fully explored until now. Here’s the pitch video to lay out the concept for you:

You can put down a preorder on The Silver Tree via the Kickstarter page now, which will get you access to various additional story arcs – the core story itself is going to be completely free – and the higher donation levels bring various perks and rewards to active players of Failbetter Games’ original grand outing, Fallen London; the game formerly known as Echo Bazaar. It’s quite heartening to see so much interest in such an unconventional branch of gaming. Even within RPGs and interactive fiction, Fallen London is a unique and unusual piece of work. It’s good to know there’s a solid (and apparently growing) audience for it.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – ‘Tales of Fallen London: The Silver Tree’ Kickstarter Goes Live, Fully Funded Already

I was interested in talking with Lee Perry, former lead gameplay designer at Epic Games, because his new work with indie studio BitMonster’s first project casual adventure Lili, is such a complete departure from the team’s previous work. The new indie devs behind Lili are six Epic alums, all with experience on the Gears of War franchise, turning their talents to casual iOs adventure game.

Young Lili is a student, researching the island’s magical plants for a school project, and discovering more about herself along the way. The focus seems to be story and environment, and most surprisingly for ex-core developers, promises a non-combat system of defeating enemies. Perry says the game will be is midway between Halfbrick titles (developers of Fruit Ninja, Monster Dash, etc.) and more story-driven sword-and-sorcery games. Looking at Lili’s gorgeous and cartoony tropical environment was, to me, slightly reminiscent of Zelda or even a Monkey Island, complete with silly dialogue and NPCs. Although the game is family-friendly, it’s more a game for players to share with their kids, and not a “children’s game” for parents (and aunts and uncles…) to sit through.

Perry was deliberately vague on the game’s promised non-fighting combat, although he would tell me it’s entirely bloodless and responds to how people are already use their phones.

BitMonster’s future goals are a series of shorter-term projects that will offer high-quality graphics and production values for mobile gamers. The studio brings a lot of experience in the Unreal Engine, and I’m pretty excited to see those graphics turned to indie RPG settings instead of ever more realistic gore.

 While plenty of developers and publishers at Casual Connect have referred to the App Store popularity lottery, or to submitting games to the randomness of app popularity, Perry believes the App Store is a meritocracy, and good, innovative games can succeed.
“There’s never been another platform where you can release cool little indie titles and have the chance for it to take off.” Perry says. He points to the the top apps, and adds that “little projects created by random people are doing well — where else can you find that?”

It’s great to see ex-core developers enthused about turning to a creative indie project, and of course I’m interested in seeing the Unreal Engine used for goofy island residents and gorgeous, escapist environments in Lili.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Leaving Core For Indie: BitMonster Games

Today, the third expansion to exceptionally (and ever-increasingly) silly comedy roguelike/eyebrow simulator Dungeons Of Dredmor is released. While the first expansion added more depth to the dungeon (in the literal sense – it added another five floors of traps, Diggles and other strange critters), and the second one was focused on skill-sets, user customization and modding. Conquest of The Wizardlands seems to be focusing on extra-dimensional adventures and more tangential weirdness. Also, encrusting.

As with previous expansions, it’s a pretty cheap package – $3 – and should throw a whole mess of new stuff into the Random Number Generator that makes the game tick. A no-brainer purchase for fans who are still delving those dungeons, nuking monster zoos and brewing illicit moonshine when they should be slaying monsters. The feature-list is impressively beefy, too, offering a bunch of new skill tracks (including two new weapon types), a pocket dimension for mega-scale item hoarding and a variety of useful Crusts to encrust your weapons with.

The new skill sets, including Communism, Tourism and Lawyering.

All of this will be accompanied by a general update to the game, with some UI and usability improvements scattered around, as well as some refinement to core gameplay elements allowing for stealthier gameplay for those who like to sneak and stab rather than just run screaming down the corridors blatting everything they see. There are also terrifying rumours of a Diggle Hell, which is Totally A Real Place. A dark and forbidden realm, ruled over by the almighty Vlad Digula.

As with the base game and the first expansion, Conquest of The Wizardlands is available to purchase via Steam, Desura & Gamefly, although the second, modding-centric expansion remains tied to the Steam Workshop.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – ‘Dungeons Of Dredmor’ Expands For The 3rd Time In ‘Conquest Of The Wizardlands’

Today’s Developer Links discuss the importance of optional subtitles, getting your program to crash properly, and teambuilding and vacations.

Fun With Subtitles (The Witness)
“Lately I have been doing some difficult puzzle design. Today I woke up and wanted a break from that, so I decided to nail down one of the loose ends that hadn’t been thought about yet: displaying subtitles during the in-game voice recordings (of which there are a lot).”

Friday Flashback #26: Going OnLive (Broken Rules)
“You might have noticed last week’s silence. We apologize for that. Our excuse – we’ve been adding content, features and new stuff in general to Chasing Aurora. The design sessions are crazy-productive and our brains are overheating from all the brilliant ideas we’re hatching. And, not surprisingly, we’ve also come to the point at which a few changes were necessary and just right to give us direction and keep us going.”

Announcing Lunch Bug! (Lost Decade Games)
“Today Geoff and I are very excited to announce our first major game in almost 2 years, Lunch Bug, a free-to-play, strategy puzzle game built using HTML5. Lunch Bug is available to play now on Pokki, the Chrome Web Store, and the open web. It even works in mobile browsers like Mobile Safari and the Android browser! For more information, please see the landing page and media kit.”

The Red Cross (Instant Kingdom)
“This is something we’ve been planning for a long time, and now we’ve finally gotten around to doing it. We’ve decided to donate a significant part of the income from Driftmoon to charity, namely the Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund.”

More Adventures In Failing To Crash Properly (AltDevBlogADay)
“In last week’s episode we discussed how 32-bit processes on 64-bit Windows might corrupt the exception state after a crash, and how any processes on 64-bit Windows might actually continue running after a crash. Serious stuff. This week’s installment of “Failing to Fail” is less dramatic, but still important for developers who want robust software, as we cover failure to terminate and failures to record a crash dump.”

Young Horses Vacay (Octodad Blog)
“People always talk about how important things like team building and vacations are. Around June of this year we realized that we had actually been a team and had been working on Dadliest Catch for an entire year already. We’re always keeping track of how much work is getting done every week and things like that, but to realize you’ve been working on a project for an entire year is sort of a jolt to the brain.”

Lunch Bug 1.20.16 (Lost Decade Games)
“In version 1.20.16, I’ve added the ability to skip the tutorial, as well as an animated hand image to indicate when users are asked to interact with the board instead of a button. These simple changes should help make the game both easier for new players to understand and less frustrating for returning players.”

It’s A Beautiful Evening To Be Hunted (Big Robot)
“James has created a gallery showing off one of our alternate times of day: a pinky dusk. Ooh, lovely. Head below for more. Might make some good desktops, eh?”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Sunset

To get the boilerplate out of the way: Anna is the first game out from Italian developer Dreampainters. It is a horror game with adventure elements built around legends from the Val D’Ayas region of Italy. Anna was built in Unity and is currently only on PC, though other verions are planned for the future. The game is currently available on Desura.

All of that is factual information about Anna, but that doesn’t tell you what Anna is. Let me try to explain.

[This Content is Exclusive for Insider]

Anna can be purchased through Desura.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Anna Delivers Occult Scares and Difficult Puzzles

I must be slipping – a visually creative game with quirky genre-blending gameplay, developed by a crew of ex-Demoscene folks responsible for the particularly stylish/trippy Masagin? How this one got by me, I have no idea. Project Ginshu by Duangle Games is billed as primarily a ‘defence game’, but with aspects of farming, puzzling and adventure, all apparently set in a strange universe known as the Doubt Field – home to the lost (and faintly familiar-sounding) treasure of Dora Do’El.

The game in the early phases of public alphafunding, and those that buy in early at the current price of $20 will get access to builds as and when they’re released. Much like Wolfire, the alphafunding trend-setters that they are, Duangle are making the whole process very open, with a full development blog and regular video updates showing off each new feature as it’s added. Here’s the latest, showing off the first generation of building-devouring critters, and some of the early defences you’ll use against them:

Looking pretty interesting so far, and navigating between the abstract planetoids looks to be a weirdly dizzying experience, but I guess that’s what they’re shooting for. My only reservation at this point is the price tag – while $20 (or more) is a fine price for a finished indie game, I’m just concerned that very few people are going to bite at that price, given that the game is still in Alpha. That aside, I’ll be keeping a beady eye on this one – it could be big.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Space Oddity – ‘Project Ginshu’ Has Building, Defending, Cosmic Weirdness

Now here’s a Kickstarter that I’ve no problem pointing people to. I’ve been a long-time fan of bizarre Russian indie studio Ice-Pick Lodge. They’ve only made a few games to date, but they’ve been three of the most creative and interesting I’ve seen in years. Pathologic was a game about desperation, plague and decay, and despite a cripplingly bad translation (outsourced by the publisher, apparently), a genuinely interesting story. The script won awards in its native Russian, at least.

Their second outing, The Void, was an intense first-person action adventure set in a nightmarish purgatorial realm filled with hideous and twisted guardians known as the Brothers, and a chain of beautiful, siren-like figures known as the Sisters. Neither side is to be entirely trusted, and neither is what they first seem to be. Great translation, too – done in-house by the studio itself.

The third game was the downright loopy Cargo: The Quest For Gravity. Probably their most derivative title (it played a lot like Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts), but held together by a gloriously odd setting, with you playing as a gravelly-voiced female engineer, building machines to navigate the landscape and trying to help the Buddies – the new successor race to mankind after a grand god-spawned funpocalypse – find their way in a potentially lethal world.

Today, Ice-Pick announced their fourth game, Knock-Knock!, and are apparently going fully independent this time. The small Russian outfit aim to raise a fairly small $30,000, and are already just shy of $5k, with a month and a half left on the clock. Interestingly, while the final retail price is set to be $10, a $5 pledge will get you the full game when it’s released, as well as some bonus perks. There’s also a bit of a story behind this one, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

Described as a cartoonish, 2D game of horror hide-and-seek, in Knock-knock! you play as a strange, scraggly-haired hermit living in a shack deep in the forest. Each night, the Visitors come a-knocking. Strange, twisted creatures, ghosts and other forest-dwelling things of weirdness. They don’t seem to be too hostile, given the teaser video above, but coming into contact with them erodes at the protagonists sanity and health, so they’re best avoided.

The strangest part of this whole Kickstarter project is that the concept of the game doesn’t belong to Ice-Pick. Rather, they were supposedly mailed a package containing video clips and notes, detailing a failed and possibly cursed game development project. Along with this nightmare diary, there was a request that Ice-Pick take up the gauntlet and complete the game, and release it to an unsuspecting world. Whether this story is made up or true really doesn’t matter – it makes for a fascinating bit of backstory to the development of the game itself.

As an additional twist to the tale, this archive of spooky data is going to be bundled in with the game. Apparently yet another requirement as stated by The Originator – the name given by the developers to the mysterious malefactor that roped Ice-Pick into this bizarre little bit of game development history.  I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m quite interested in this. It’s a bit corny on paper, but never underestimate how a clever bit of high-tech haunting can get under your skin…

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Ice-Pick Lodge Seeking A Chilling $30k Kickstarter Funding For ‘Knock-Knock!’