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

Together, the games discussed in today’s Indie Links include more than sixteen million levels! Okay, that’s largely because one of the games discussed in today’s Indie Links has more than sixteen million levels by itself, but the other games may have much to recommend them as well.

Austin Wintory’s Journey to the 2013 Grammys (Joystiq)
“On the day Grammy nominations were scheduled to be announced, Austin Wintory didn’t get much work done. As the composer for Journey, Wintory had an inkling that he might be nominated in Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media, and he was distracted all day, constantly refreshing the Grammy page, scanning for his name. By evening the list still wasn’t posted and he gave up on trying to focus. He got in his car, determined to go home, make dinner and then check the page again.”

Top Indie Games of 2012: Dev Redux Part 1 (IndieGames)
“The developers from our Top 10 Indie Games of 2012 (+2!) list have agreed to share their must-play games of 2012. Today’s list features the picks of Jonas Kyratzes, Anna Anthropy, Vince Twelve, Jim Crawford, Justin Ma, and Matthew Davis.”

Project Gert: Recon (Indie Gamer Chick)
“There’s exactly one good thing I can say about Project Gert: Recon.  The paintings featured in the game’s cutscenes are beautiful.  So at least one person involved in this project has an amazing talent.  Seriously, watch the trailer below.  The actual in-game graphics are spoiled by awful animation and piss-poor collision detection, but the paintings are spectacular.  I would totally commission this guy to do a portrait.  But that’s where any complements end.  Project Gert is yet another December entrant to the ‘potential worst game of the year’ category.”

Review: Teleglitch – A Fast-Paced Arcade-Style Roguelike. Yes, It Is. (Indie Game Reviewer)
“Sometimes roguelikes are not always turn-based. Sometimes shooters are not always First Person. Three years in the making, Teleglitch is both and neither. It is at once a fast-paced arcade-style action game inspired by DOOM, and a randomly generated, single-life, intense roguelike.”

The Game With Sixteen and a Half Million Levels – The Review (Independent Gaming)
“This game has 16,777,216 levels. I didn’t beat the game before I wrote this, just warning you. This is a totally new concept to me, and I like it, if only the execution was better. The Game with Sixteen and a Half Million Levels is an game made in Engine 001 by tower07.”

What AAA Can Learn From Indies — According To Indies (Gamasutra)
“Yesterday we asked some leading indie game developers about the lessons they had learned in the past year. Today, we ask what — if anything — big triple-A publishers could have learned from the indie game community in the last 12 months.”

A Common Thread: Renaud Bédard (Quote Unquote)
“My name is Renaud Bédard. I’m a 27 years old tall, skinny guy from Montréal, Québec, now living in Toronto. I’m mainly a C# programmer but will use other languages if forced to do so. I’ve been working with XNA a lot in the past few years, but FEZ, the project I’m known for, was my first project using XNA. Before that I was using an engine called TrueVision3D, and now I’m into Unity when doing game jams and personal projects.

Scoregasm (PixelProspector)
“Scoregasm is one of the best arena shooters I have ever played (and I have played a lot of them). The game was over 2 years in development and it really shows: Smooth controls, super fun gameplay, colorful graphics, a great variety of levels and well thought out bullet patterns.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Slices of Life

To say video games are an adequate conduit from mind to escapism by way of hands is to say that Piers Morgan is a smug cockalorum. They go without saying, no? And it’s true; the mainstream symposium of gaming products allow us to step into the shoes of wild and wondrous beings from every stretch of the vivid expanse that is the breadth of human imagination. Mages? Robots? Warriors? They’re all commonplace, and even the most seemingly mundane of ideas culminate in the reprisal of the tried-and-true ‘grizzled meathead’ casting sheet.

Digital Rhapsody is none of these things. Instead, it’s a strategic role-playing game in which players assume the role of a college dropout who’s fallen foul of the addictive allure of a brand new online video game. Sound familiar? You bet it does, you miserly plebian, you.

While one can delve into the in-game game at one’s leisure, upon which a grid-based pastiche of mechanics from numerous strategic luminaries will await, there’s also a carefully moulded social simulation mechanic to look out for. When he’s not fizzling away hours of his dwindling life at the hands of his new gaming pastime, the main character, Lucas, can interact with his peers in a system that’s said to be reminiscent of both the Persona and Disgaea series. Lucas can forge relationships, find part-time jobs or simply shut out the harsh exterior world and focus on hiss n00b-slaying endeavours. The choice, as they say, is yours.

The game is undergoing a laborious development process, which begun around four months ago. Its lone developer, Andrew Diamantoukos, a student of the Rochester Institute of Technology, has launched a crowdfunding campaign via Kickstarter as a means of generating the funds needed to hire some artists and musicians to give the game an extra dose of pizzazz before its eventual release. He’s looking for a modest total of $5,000 before the campaign’s deadline of July 18th.

While you can back the project by hopping over to the Kickstarter campaign linked above, the ongoing progress of Digital Rhapsody can be followed through its official development blog, where Diamantoukos has pledged to keep the game’s followers abreast of its status at every given opportunity.

If you’ve always fancied immersing yourself in the world of Magic: The Gathering but had neither the patience nor the tactical intellect to stomach its overly convoluted cavalcade of rules and nuances, I feel your pain. Summon the Insignia of the Lost Tome in order to counter the effects of the Veil of the Ancient Minoutaur Testicle? I’ve no time for such pith. That’s for sociology students with too much time on their sweat-encrusted hands. I want to kill things, darn it.

Descending from the parting Heavens like a stallion with a plate of jam sandwiches, Z., an independently developed card game from Downward Viral. In stark contrast to the complex mythical tripe infesting many such digital products in a day and age in which escapism into fantasy worlds has become the épitomé of mundanity, Z. contents itself with letting players loose with a deck containing zombies, guns and chainsaws. Nothing beats staving off one cliché with another, eh?

Featuring equipment sets, killstreaks and bonuses, Z. harnesses both the intuitive customisation options of the MMO landfill and the compulsive collectibility of almost every other gaming genre in existence. Thankfully, it’s all saved from a terminal descent into stoic formulaity by the addition of an episodic story, driven by a series of live-action cutscenes from the chaps who brought you the spasmodically cool Left 4 Dead 2 short film. Oh, and Tex Murphy will be making a guest cameo. Just thought I’d throw that out there.

Players can choose to play as either a human survivor or a mindless zombie, albeit one with a deck of cards and a sound grasp of turn-based etiquette. With the game being lined up for a  release on both PC and iOS devices, competitors will also be able to enjoy cross-platform play with friends and foes alike. That’s in addition to the option for a Words With Friends-style turn-based setup, through which players can take their turns whenever they please. And who, pray tell, wouldn’t appreciate a little less time pressure in the midst of a zombie apocalypse?

Z. has undergone a Kickstarter campaign, with the developers having set an ambitious funding target of $100,000 before its July 14th deadline. As of this writing, almost a quarter of the game’s target funds have already been accrued, with over 25 days left for backers to get on board. For further information, take a look at the Kickstarter page yourself.

And please don’t hurt me, Magic: The Gathering aficionados. I like it really. Scout’s honour, sir.

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.

Coming off the back of the release of their guide to self-publishing, UK gaming industry trade association, TIGA have now said that they believe self-publishing to be the future of the entire industry. This came as a reaction to a study carried out by PricewaterhouseCooper in which it was said that wireless gaming would be worth a grand sum of $1.3 billion by 2016.

“Digital distribution on platforms such as Steam, the App Store, Google Play, PSN, Xbox Live and WiiWare have made it second nature for consumers to download games direct rather than visit a retailer,” TIGA CEO Richard Wilson said.

“TIGA believes – and the figures in America seem to back us up – that this is the future of gaming and that developers who still rely on traditional routes to market must change with the times. The UK industry is geared up for self-publishing, with more and more developers going it alone and decided on producing games for digital distribution channels.”

Of course, with seemingly everyone looking to self-publish via digital platforms, the competition is increasingly tough. This is why marketing and online interaction is absolutely vital in this day and age, even more so in the future. Establishing a rapport with your players, releasing trailers and screenshots as well as jumping on any opportunity to get you and your game known to the public is without a doubt the most important skills for a self-publisher, also known as an indie game developer. Experimenting with marketing and promotion should sit aside your creative game design ideas.

“Self-publishing is an exciting area filled with challenges, risks but great opportunities,” added TIGA Creative Director Jason Kingsley.

“Developers can increasingly seize control over their own destiny. Self-publishing gives developers more freedom to be creative with content and business models, ultimately driving the industry in the UK forward whilst cementing its reputation for producing innovative products.”

Via PocketGamer

It’s almost here, but that’s no reason to exercise a strict régime of patience. I speak, of course, of Resonance, XII Games’ imminent point-and-click sensation, whose free demo version has now been made available to anyone with an Internet connection.

Having previously only been playable exclusively through GOG’s exclusive four-hour preview version for pre-purchasers, Resonance can now be sampled by any would-be customers by clicking the all-too-obvious “Download Demo” link on Wadjet Eye Games’ official website. If you also need help connecting your mouse or locating the space bar on your keyboard, consult a technician. And so ends basic technical training for today.

Swedish development studio Might and Delight has revealed that its mesmerising pseudo-2D platformer, Pid, is likely to be see a commercial release this August.

In an article over at Joystiq, it was confirmed that the game, originally slated for a December 2011 launch, is now targeting a summer launch through the Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network console services, along with a Steam release on PC. A price point, however, has yet to be decided upon.

“In this gaming landscape where many developers seem to be racing to the bottom, we thought we’d turn it around and raise our prices a little to reflect the value we see in the game.” That’s how Brawsome open up with the news about raising the prices from $4.99 to $6.99 on their two games; Jolly Rover and MacGuffin’s Curse. Like they say, it’s quite an odd stance to take at a time when most indie games are being priced lower and lower, and participating in mass discount offers and sales. They’re not the first to take such a stance though, other developers have called out the “race to the bottom” and the issues it could cause.

It is thought by some to devalue indie games in general, teaching players to wait for a game to go on sale before they purchase it, or perceiving the word “indie” as synonymous with “cheap”. An average indie game at the moment will be sold for just a few dollars – very rarely does a developer go anything beyond that. This is nothing new of course, to put it into perspective, let’s go back a few years to when Aquaria was being sold for $30 and people weren’t prepared to pay the full price as seen in these comments. It was only when the price was dropped that the sales became anything towards decent, and this is a game with a high production value and plenty of content too!

“In making this decision we looked at a number of different games and their prices and weighed up where we think MacGuffin’s Curse and Jolly Rover sits within this range and came to the conclusion that the games were priced too low at $4.99, and that $6.99 was a fairer price point when considering the quality, and length of experience.”

This seems like a reasonable thing to do. The price rise isn’t exactly a steep one and if the games are of a good quality – and feedback has proven that in this case – why shouldn’t you charge a little more for the hard work you’ve put in? Brawsome reveal a new logic behind this decision, one that they hope will appeal to our love of bargains.

“It seems many people are of the mindset that they simply cannot purchase a game unless it is on sale. Which looks better, paying full price for a game at $4.99, or getting 50% off a game at $9.99? Everyone loves a bargain, right? Being transparent about it, we find that the games always sell better when on sale (obviously?), so why not raise the price so that when it does go on sale we’re still getting a fair price, and the people buying the game feel like they’re getting a bargain, while still getting a lot of game for their money.”

To some it might seem a little snide to do this, but perhaps it is just logical thinking and maybe this is the best way to adapt to the market. If people are much more likely to buy a higher priced game while it’s on sale, why not raise the price of your game and put it on sale? Sure that’s got to beat lowering the price until some people notice it and decide it’s gone low enough to justify a purchase? Brawsome will find out soon enough presumably.

You can purchase Macguffin’s Curse and Jolly Rover for their slightly higher prices on their respective websites.

I’m not sure how, but despite being around since 1994, I have somehow remained completely ignorant to MegaZeux‘s existence up until just recently. It’s a game creation kit, akin to Game Maker, but focused entirely on a rather niche era of gaming: early 90s, often-shareware DOS titles using extended ASCII graphics. Bloodlands is one of the latest and greatest, and blends elements of Robotron, Gauntlet and Doom in with the framework of ancient DOS maze-trawling games such as ZZT and Caves of Thor. It also looks absolutely ridiculous and more than a little bit manic, as you can see in the gameplay trailer below.

Despite technically being a DOS game, there are multiple versions of the Megazeux engine, including 64-bit Windows, so you can play it on just about any modern system – or just download the handy pre-packed Windows version of the game, as provided by the developer in the Youtube video description above. Bloodlands is a surprisingly intricate little arcade shooter, with some nice ideas. To maintain the high pace of the action, most of your weapons are lock-on based, so precise aiming isn’t too much of an issue. The focus is on picking the right weapon at the right time, while using the environment to break up enemy swarms so that you can handle them on your own terms.

Oddly, considering the aesthetic, the game is a twin-stick arena shooter at heart with fairly complex controls, so I found it best to make a Joy2Key profile to make the game playable with my 360 controller. Bloodlands is a game with surprising depth overall, and there’s a lot of cute little nuance to the gameplay, like how smartbombs work – if you just press the Bomb button by itself, then you get a circular blast to clear enemies from around you, but fire one while shooting in a direction and it’ll become a focused, shotgun-like blast that does more damage and pushes enemies away.

There’s also an interesting focus on scoring and resource management. You’re stripped of all your gear each level, so you’re best off using everything you collect, and chaining together rapid enemy kills rewards you with special points which can be spent on powerups and health boosts at any time, meaning that fast, efficient play snowballs into more power. It’s pretty easy to die if you get careless, but the score and gear system encourage aggression rather than plinking away at enemies around corners with the default infinite ammo gun. It’s good, well-thought-out gameplay.

Bloodlands has been a remarkably pleasant surprise in general. There’s a lot of clever design here, and it uses the clunky, block-based nature of it’s DOS-era graphics to it’s advantage. The music is solidly atmospheric synth stuff reminiscent of the lower-paced tracks from Doom, and there’s a surprising level of artistry given the blocky style, especially in the impressively large and multi-staged bosses. If you grew up through the DOS era of gaming, then this really is a must-play, marrying nostalgia to modern game design. And if you’ve never played a game like this before, well, consider it a history lesson of sorts.

There’s plenty of other MegaZeux games, of course, and you can find a large archive of them along with reviews and ratings on the official site here. There’s plenty of other arcade games like Bloodlands, but plenty more ZZT-style adventure/maze games, and even a few full-blown RPGs. I’m not entirely sure how I’ve managed to not notice this strange little facet of gaming for literally decades, but it’s a pleasant surprise to stumble upon now, and if nothing else, then it’s a treasure trove of offbeat freeware gaming. Can’t say fairer than that!