Today’s game came in number three in Ludum Dare 26 and brings some awesome ideas to the competition. Minimalismism is a game that has been created by Tayl1r and offers some rather interesting and innovating ideas not commonly seen in video games overall.
Minimalismism is a very interesting 2D platformer that takes place entirely on one screen. The whole objective is to reach the glowing block at the end of each level, once reached the level reforms into something altogether more difficult.
It really is a novel mechanic that creates some very fluid and fun gameplay as you try to figure out the best way to reach the goal. Although the levels overall are not that taxing, and you may only die a handful of times the beauty of the game is in the design and the way it plays out.
Average play time – 5 minutes
Minimalismism as a game concept is a fantastic model and one I feel could go far. Of course it would require a lot more levels, added mechanics, and the ability to lose (or at the very least for it to have some negative affect for when to die too many times).
If you would like to give Minimalismism a go be sure to head over to the Ludum Dare site and download the game for free.
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 I look to the game that managed to break into the fourth position of Ludum Dare 26. Today’s game is Undercolor Agents, created by FarmerGnome.
Undercolor Agents is a fantastic arena based shooter that has a very distinctive minimalistic look to it making for a great all round game. In Undercolor Agents you must (either alone or with up to seven other friends) battle through the streets and take down the Hue invasion that threatens the town.
Of course dealing with this invasion is not for the faint of heart as you must battle these square monsters in order to reach the pylons which contain the Hue’s power.
Undercolor Agents plays very well and offers a great deal of fun either solo or with some close friends. Playing with friends does offer some advantages such as the ability to save your friends from the killer squares by shooting them off of them, in a Left For Dead inspired mechanic.
Average play time – 10 minutes
Undercolor Agent is a very creative arena based shooter that provides a great deal of enjoyment for the time you spend playing it. The addition of local co-op is great and really adds a lot of replayability to the game.
Be sure to check out FamerGnome’s site for the latest download of Undercolor Agent. If you enjoy Undercolor Agent be sure to check out some of his other great games.
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!
Dungeon Dashers is a slick and instantly enjoyable dungeon crawler. It features 4 different characters (Assassin, Knight, Ranger, Wizard) all with their own abilities which can be used for some interesting puzzle solving for each level. The controls are really simple to grasp and as the name implies, the game moves really quickly. The game combines a lot of great things in a streamlined fashion. There is a turn-based combat system which is barely noticeable because of the speed of the turns. Turns actually vanish if you are not in combat so the game can feel like a puzzle game and a roguelike RPG depending on the level and circumstances. It’s quite awesome.
Dungeon Dashers promises traps, multiple styles of play, tons of replayability, additional challenges and objectives and online multiplayer. Honestly, the whole package sounds too good to be true. The graphics are really nostalgic without being too chunky and pixelated. This game is coming along great, be sure to checkout our preview in 2012 for even more impressions and information.
Dungeon Dashers is still in-development but can be purchased in it’s current state for $10 from the game’s official website. Be sure to follow the developer on twitter @JigxorAndy
Murder Dog IV: Trial Of The Murder Dog (Murder Dog) is a rather interesting take on the judicial system that is full of comedy from start to finish. Created by Thecatamites Murder Dog is a point and click adventure through court as you take command of a murderous dog on the look out for blood.
It is up to you to try to get this Dog off the hook, although this will not be easy considering just how much of rampage you have been on prior to this hearing so expect a rather bumpy ride. Full of humours dialogue and awesome witnesses the game feels like a great deal of fun with ever surprising outcomes.
Although the visuals often feel lacking the game seems to have been constructed rather well overall and the dialogue makes up for it creating a rich and interesting game.
Average play time – 10 minutes
Murder Dog is a fun little game that has some rather fun dialogue really transcending the game above the average. With numerous different outcomes for our hero you can spend quite a while trying to figure out ways to play the system and maybe even get the dog off the hook.
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!
Among the games covered in today’s Indie Links are a platformer inspired by the classic Ghosts n’ Goblins, a strategy game starring an undead samurai, a parking simulator that a reviewer apparently finds to be almost as much fun as actually parking a car, and not one but two player-run sandbox RPGs where players can create their own highly customized worlds (is that an upcoming new genre or something?)
Maldita Castilla (TIGSource)
“Like Hydorah before it, Locomalito’s Maldita Castilla stays very close to its inspirations, in this case the venerated platformer series Ghosts n’ Goblins. From the overall look to the invariable jump, you’ll feel very much like you’ve stepped into the greaves of Arthur’s Spanish cousin.”
60 Seconds To Park (Indie Gamer Chick)
“…And I’m sorry to my readers who were looking for a game review and read that nonsense above. But what else can I do with a game like 60 Seconds to Park? There’s almost no actual game here, so I have to fill the space with something. The game is exactly what it sounds like: find an empty parking space within 60 seconds. Every stage, the parking lot gets larger, but there’s only one space that is randomly selected to be empty. Find it, put your car in it. It’s that simple.”
Feeding on Undead Armies in Skulls of the Shogun (Joystiq)
“Here’s your high-concept, catch-all elevator pitch for Skulls of the Shogun: samurai zombies meets turn-based strategy, and a dash of Words With Friends thrown in for flavor. 17-BIT’s charming top-down strategy title captures the action-flavored flow of the Advance Wars series, though it ditches the grid-based world in favor of more natural radial movement. The whole package comes together around an ambitious multi-platform release that features asynchronous multiplayer match-ups and a meaty, multi-hour campaign.”
TIGSource Devlog: Dom2D’s Visual Showcase of Awesome New Games, Issue #11 (Venus Patrol)
“Would you look at all the colors in this week’s issue? In it, we explore the dark corridors of spaceships filled with evil robots in Steam Marines, jump around Another Castle in our brand new jetpack, swim in the crazy seas ofGeisha Novia, and skulk creepily in a foggy forest in Stealth Vampire.”
Indie Pleas: Indie Game Crowd Funding Roundup for December 14, 2012 (indiePub)
“This week’s Indie Pleas include: Galcon 2: Galactic Conquest, a strategy game where you have to conquer the galaxy and defeat the enemy planets; The Red Queen of Oz: Two Fates, an adventure game where you play as Alice and Dorothy through Wornderland and Oz as they try to stop the evil Queen of Heats; Full Bore, a puzzle-adventure game where you play the role of a bore; and finally Epica Rex, a multiplayer sandbox RPG game where players can explore land and even go to war with others.”
Acclaimed Games Festival IndieCade Adds an East Coast Option with IndieCade East (Kotaku)
“Video game gatherings come in a few different flavors. GDC, as the name implies, is mostly for game developers and exists most as a professional networking/workshop space. The medium’s biggest hype machine is E3, where developers, marketers, press and select fans spread the excitement about upcoming games. But IndieCade—which has happened for the last few years in Culver City, Calif.—is arguably my favorite games-centric gathering. So I’m really glad that there will be an East Coast version from February 15th to 17th of next year.”
Oh Godus… Molyneus Has a Kickstarter (Independent Gaming)
“For those of you who haven’t heard of this infamous madman, Molly is the creator ofPopulous, Black and White, and the Fable series. He has become pretty well-known known for being utterly crazy-bananas in terms of hyping games, continually surfing a tidal wave of his own ambition, making promises he cannot keep and just generally leaving a path of rubble in his wake.”
A Common Thread: azurenimbus (Quote Unquote)
“I’m André. I’m a 27 year old starving artist cliché, born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and I do not speak Spanish. For the past two years I’ve been living in New Jersey, Murika with my girlfriend. When I’m not making games or working on other similar starvation-inducing personal projects, I work as a reluctant graphic designer. My aim is to further starve by becoming a full-time independent developer soon.”
We often joke that Zynga-style social games involve clicking virtual cows and spamming friends’ Facebook walls. A new Facebook game, Tip The Cows, uses just these elements as a prototype for a future transmedia game experience.
In CowClicker, Ian Bogost’s Facebook game hilariously satirizing Facebook games, players are asked to click a virtual cow, earn clicks by clicking, or paying premium currency, and then invite their friends to do the same. Players can also share their progress on their Facebook walls, or see their friends’ progress that way. The joke’s on Zynga-style Facebook games, where the vast majority of interactions are not what most of us would consider gameplay. But it’s playable, too, so it causes players to think about player motivations in click-wait-click social games, as they click the cows. (CowClicker has recently taken Farmville satire to a new level, and you now click the empty space where your cow used to be.)
Tip The Cows is less a satire than a proof-of-concept, but it distills the social side of Facebook sharing and leaderboard competition to its most basic elements. The game is part of a capstone creative project by students studying Animation Graphic Game Programming at New Hampshire Technical Institute. Kyle Lambert is the main developer in Flash and Facebook, and Dan Chamberlain is the project backend and server programmer.
Gameplay involves earning points by clicking the cows that appear on your virtual field. Players can then share their scores on their Facebook wall. The game takes a maximum of thirty seconds, but can be played indefinitely, without waiting or paying in.Find and click the golden cow, and you can send special wall spam, er, a special Tip The Cows message to the students’ advisor, Greg Walek, a professor of game animation and design at NHTI.
Disclosure: Greg is my friend from college and while I’m quite interested in his social game experiment, I would also enjoy watching his Facebook wall blow up with game spam. Yeah, yeah, working prototype for a larger experience, blah, blah, student creativity, yeah, the real highlight of this game is spamming my friends.
The developers say that Tip The Cows is an early proof-of-concept in what will become a larger transmedia game experience, creating games based around the idea that “what you do in one game should and will affect another. For example, we are planning to have items only in one game, but usable in another level. “ Walek says.
I hope these Golden Cows I keep tipping onto Greg’s wall will come in handy later on.
Today is the number three placed game in the LD25 top five, although technically this game and yesterdays where both tied in the third place (I just went off the ordering on the LD25 site). End Boss was created by Ditto and has you on the other side of the hail of bullets you normally must navigate.
In End Boss you play as the boss finally in a bullet hell shooter and you must try to crush the enemy space ship and end the hope for the galaxy. It’s a very interesting concept and works well as you spawn more and more bullets across the screen.
End Boss has some great music and a really nice overall aesthetic that really lends itself to a bullet hell shooter. Although the sound effects are rather lacking and the lack of boss variety and pick ups make the game very limited.
Average play time – 5 minutes
End Boss is a nice concept and comes across very well as a small throw away game, however there is a lot of potential to develop this type of gameplay into a full game. Playing through a whole host of bosses in an attempt to crush the good guy with a variety of mechanics would amplify this game greatly.
In its current state End Boss is a fun little bullet hell told from the bad guys side and I would love to see someone take this concept and develop it into a full game as I believe it would be rather unique and fun.
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!
Continuing the Ld25 theme of “you are the villain” today’s game is a rather interesting one that reminds me a great deal of the GTA series. Happy Little Murder Friends is a game created by Paul Greasley AKA Farmergnome and has you in charge of a band of merry murderers.
Happy Little Murder Friends gives you the choice of selecting one of five characters per level for you to inflict your murders with. Each characters has their own stats giving you a small amount of variety on who you pick. You also are able to take perks to better tailor your killing to your own style be it melee or gun you are covered here.
The whole purpose behind each level on Happy Little Murder Friends is to kill off your targets. However if you start mercilessly killing any old civilian your indiscretions will not go unnoticed and the police will slowly start to appear to end your rampage.
Overall Happy Little Murder Friends is a great game full of nice concepts and awesome graphics with enough gameplay to keep you busy for hours.
Average play time – 20 minutes
Happy Little Murder Friends has been created to a very high level, especially for a jam game and really shine because of it. Farmergnome has continued to develop it after the jam and therefore the latest version has a lot of bug fixes and overall improvements making the game even better. If you enjoyed the early GTA games or just have a love for top down shooters this is one you must give 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!
Father’s Day may have come and gone in a flash of ill-fitting socks and suspectly brewed port, but that doesn’t mean that the festivities are over for the papas of the octopus kingdom. That’s thanks to developers The DePaul Gaming Experience, who’ve been so kind as to offer the editing tools for its bizarre, yet hopelessly lovable 3D adventure game, OctoDad.
The so-called OctodadEditor is a freely downloadable editor that allows innovators with an acquired grasp of complex logical and algorithmic concepts to conjure up a theoretically enormous spate of deviations from the classic OctoDad experience. In essence, then, it’s your standard piece of editing software, but I really wanted to season it up with a few pretentiously chosen items of lexis. Don’t judge me.
We mentioned in our quick overview of the games on show at the IndieCade booth at E3 that Steve Swink’s Scale sounds like a promising idea, but little is actually known about it, despite it having been in and out of development for a while now. The principal behind it, we’re told, is that you can manipulate the environment through shrinking and growing it. From this central idea, the gameplay wraps itself around and many different puzzles will be born. Having one strong mechanic such as this usually proves successful – look at Braid and Portal for two of the best known examples. Surely we’re desensitized to such clever ideas now though? Our reaction to seeing Scale in action proves that may not be the case.
As this is the first time Steve has ever shown off Scale to the public, he wants to make sure that it is clear that everything is placeholder for now. The colorful presentation with the blue sky and green islands will stay, and things will just look different by the time the game has finished, which Steve says might be another couple of years away yet. Scale is first person and, yes, you do have a gun in your hand. The ammo, if you like, in this case is something called ‘Scale Juice’. With this, you can shrink and grow objects at will. If you shrink an object, you gain more juice and by growing it you’ll lose some. This restriction is necessary so that puzzles can be based around it, and also so that players cannot go mental and just grow every object out of proportion.
Steve’s interest in the the scaling mechanic comes from his observation of the effects size can have on human perception. His example is that a normal-sized chair is boring; make it huge, however, and some may call it art or at the very least will gaze in amazement. Similarly, shrinking a chair becomes something you want to pick up and examine, even play with as part of a doll house. So how does this translate into the game? Things start off simple, as is always the case; players will be gradually introduced to the kind of things they can achieve through shrinking and growing objects. Something may be blocking a tunnel, in which case you should shrink it so it is no longer a problem. If there’s a ledge you cannot reach, then simply jump on the small pillar in front of it and then grow it so that is lifts you up to the desired height.
A little further into the demo, things get a little more interesting as more physics-based considerations hinge off of the scaling. Of course, as an object gets bigger they gain mass and can be used to weigh down a button on the floor. Momentum is next, with a ball gaining speed the bigger it is and the slower the smaller it is. As movement is introduced, certain obstacles have to reduced in size so that others can get through, thus gradually making the puzzle elements slightly more frantic. Though not implemented in the game yet, Steve also showcases his plans with a dollhouse – something that seems to be a central motif – having the player grow it to go inside and grab another doll house, bring it outside and then put the first dollhouse inside the second dollhouse. Obviously, it needs some work, but there’s something in there.
Another idea brought to the table by Steve evolves from his thinking that the player is creating worlds which were not accessible before. When you grow something that was initially inaccessible to due to the size of the player’s character, you will find new discoveries. For instance, imagine a creature blown up to a much bigger from of itself. You could then enter into its mouth and discover a whole new reality. This is the kind of thing Steve is thinking up in terms of level design now that the gameplay is more or less sorted. His ideas regarding creatures are actually much more exciting than the puzzles based around lifeless objects. In the demo, he scales up a butterfly and jumps on to reach an area across an open stretch of sky, being careful to shrink obstructions on the way. He also amused himself with the idea of making the player have to create a huge spider, just to tease arachnophobes. Futher still, a fresh take on enemies in Mario-like style: stomping on, say, a Goomba’s head would kill it, providing you’re the right size in relation to it so that the mass provides enough downward force.
While all of this is very exciting, Steve went one step further to showcase what we have all been waiting to see – something that makes your lower jaw just every so slightly drop. He built a Grand Canyon level just to showcase how far he was taking the mechanic. How do you pass over the Grand Canyon? By shrinking the entire world, of course, and simply stepping over it. Pretty exciting stuff. It was then that Steve brought in his latest consideration – the manipulation of time. He says that by shrinking the land like he did with the Grand Canyon actually opens up the game to time-based puzzles, because you can skip needlessly long treks by making the distance each step makes bigger. Travelling up mountains can literally be managed with just one step, if you manipulate the land in such a way.
The IndieCade demo was being played with a PC, so a PC release for Scale seems very likely. Steve cannot say anything about any other platform at the moment in time, as that’s not on his mind, but he seems up for a release on consoles, though. We’re pretty sure that once the necessary people see it, Scale will easily secure a console release in some form or another. There’s no official website for Scale yet, but there will be very soon, and you can catch a quick Q&A about the game on this page for now.
