What makes Ludum Dare special, indie RPG combat mechanics and abandonware on today’s Indie Links.

Indie Corner (RPGamer)
“Greetings, and welcome to the newest RPGamer column, Indie Corner. This is not a weekly column, but will instead be a sporadic look at the indie RPG development scene. And again, it’s not a typical column. Instead of directly reporting about indie RPGs, we’ll be bringing in the actual creators to talk about development and other aspects of the RPG scene. Interviews, in-depth discussion, talk of inspiration, and other editorial content directly from indie devs will be highlighted here. To start things off, we’ve gotten a few RPG devs to share how they feel about combat and battle systems. We talk about the most important aspects of a battle system, their inspirations, and what combat pitfalls they most worry about falling into and how best to avoid them. Today, we talk with AckkStudios, Sinister Design, Breadbrothers Games, Muteki Corporation, Zeboyd Games, Eden Industries, and Experimental Gamer.”

Surgeon Simulator 2013: death in your hands (VG247)
“Surgeon Simulator 2013 is a strange, almost morbid game that proves VG247′s Dave Cook should never be trusted with a person’s life under any circumstances. Get disturbed here.”

Unfinished Business: Super Hexagon creator reveals his abandonware (Joystiq)
“This Vine represents eight of VVVVVV and Super Hexagon creator Terry Cavanagh’s unfinished projects – the first of three like it recently posted to the game designer’s Twitter account.”

Thomas Was Alone review: Mastering the inverted fall (Joystiq)
“On the surface, Thomas Was Alone appears unremarkable. It breaks platforming mechanics down to their most basic levels, quite literally, replacing characters with colored rectangles and environments with precarious arrangements of black rectangles. To reiterate: Thomas Was Alone is a platformer starring a cast of little, colored blocks.”

Indie Pleas: Indie game crowd funding roundup for April 26, 2013 (IndiePub)
“This week’s Indie Pleas include: A.N.N.E., a metroidvania pixel art adventure; Rex Rocket, a retro sci-fi adventure; My Temple, a fun iOS fitness game; and Ghost of a Tale, where you play as a mouse in a medieval world.”

Andy Schatz talks Monaco’s delay and fan reactions (Edge)
“Last week, Andy Schatz, founder of Pocketwatch games, found a bug in the Xbox 360 build of his game Monaco that caused players to consistently get dropped from multiplayer matches. As a result, he decided to delay its release mere hours before it was slated to come out. We talked to him about the aftermath and how player reaction shapes his development process.”

Piracy or baiting? The thorny legal question of Game Dev Tycoon’s honeypot (Ars Technica)
“Earlier this week, the developers at Greenheart Games distributed a crippled version of its new game Game Dev Tycoon disguised as a “cracked” version of the full game. The little Internet experiment served as an ironic and humorous poke at software pirates and a smart way to call attention to the challenges indie developers face with piracy.”

Here’s what makes Ludum Dare so special (Gamasutra)
“Whether you’re an indie developer or not, you’ll likely have heard of the Ludum Dare 48-hour competition and game jam. Three times a year, hundreds of developers come together online to create games based on a set theme over a single weekend, and subsequently vote for a winner in the weeks after.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Grandfather Clock

Today’s Indie Links include a Boston Festival of Indie Games Kickstarter, a Javier Cabrera interview and what indie means to Thomas Was Alone dev Mike Bithell.

Tha Javier Cabrera Interview (IndieGames.com)
“Javier Cabrera, 50% of the Cabrera Borthers and one of the staunchest supporters of indie gaming I have ever met speaks about the indie community, developing games, The Free Bundle, Cypher and much more. Oh, and he does also mention some interesting plans on the future while never forgetting the past. So, set aside 30 minutes, make yourself a nice cup of tea and read on.”

Boston Festival of Indie Games seeks Kickstarter funds for expanded 2013 event (Polygon)
“Organizers of the 2013 Boston Festival of Indie Games have taken to Kickstarter to raise funds to cover the costs of the expanding celebration of independent studios in the Boston area, according to the event’s Kickstarter page.”

Today I Played: Monaco (Polygon)
“There’s no honor among bumbling fools. Here’s the thing about Monaco: If you’re not an expert, you’re going to have a lot of trouble understanding what the hell is going on in the above video. The stylistic, minimalist HUD and graphics are not exactly friendly to newcomers. That’s a bit of an issue when you’re playing the game, and even more of an issue when you’re watching four zany minutes of goofballs attempting to master its complexities.”

Thomas Was Alone Dev: Indie Means ‘I Get to Do Exactly What I Want’ (Kotaku)
“Mike Bithell’s had a crazy year. He went from being one of a few dozen developers at U.K.-based Bossa Studios to becoming a solo indie creator supporting a game on multiple platformers. What prompted the drastic lifestyle change? The steady climb of acclaim around his minimalist platformer Thomas Was Alone.”

Wot I Think: Don’t Starve (RPS)
“I starved. I feel as bad about disobeying the order as I do about losing my character. A negative imperative – ‘don’t starve’ – is so much more affecting than a positive one ‘orcs must die’. There’s a sense of threat in it, far more of an ‘or else’ than any form of Go Ahead And Do This. Don’t Starve really is about trying not to starve too: not eating is simply not an option. The cold fingers of personal famine are forever on one’s shoulder, and it’s crucial to remember that even as another kind of hunger, the familiar craving for better loot and gear, tries to seize control . When my own imperative was not ‘don’t starve’, and was instead ‘get stuff’, I last significantly less time. All I had to do was not starve: how could I lose sight of that?”

Kickstarter Katchup – April 28th 2013 (RPS)
“Jagged Alliance: Flashback arrives in the Katchup this week. I’ve expected (and hoped for) a Jagged Alliance crowdfunding attempt for some time now. As soon as it became obvious that Kickstarter was a place where old franchises could revive themselves, every week that the mercenaries didn’t appear was slightly more unsettling than the last.”

Magnetic By Nature (Indie Gamer Chick)
“Magnetic By Nature is the latest game from students attending the University of Utah. I know what you’re thinking. “Hey, wait a second. What do people from Utah know about having fun? Didn’t they ban their only form of that in the 40s?” Actually, inappropriate polygamy jokes aside, they know plenty about fun. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell discovered the medium of games as a student at the University of Utah. So in essence, we owe the gaming industry as it exists today to their beautiful, boring, Pac-10 devaluing institution. It makes me happy that the science of creating games is taught there to this day. It would be wrong otherwise, like if Harvard stopped teaching law, or Fresno State stopped teaching binge drinking.”

Recommended Game: Electro Bobble (Independent Gaming)
“Unbeknownst to humans, the insides of thunderclouds harbor entire ecosystems. Small beings called bobbles live off the electricity and leap around as if the clouds were composed of a series of platforms. Sometimes, an invasive species, known as meanies, takes over and sets up house, forcing the native bobbles to find another thundercloud. But one day, one bobble decided that it wasn’t going to be thrown out. This is its story.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Cruel Summer

Today’s Indie Links include games you should have on your radar. Which, to be honest, really isn’t different from any other day.

25 indie games that should be on your radar (ArsTechnica)
“One of the best things about travelling to shows like PAX East and the Game Developers Conference is the chance to check out titles from off-the-beaten-path, independent developers. While shows like E3 are overwhelmed by the presence of multi-million dollar booths from huge publishers, the early-in-the-year shows make a point of highlighting some of the most original and promising game ideas from game makers without big contracts or salaried positions behind them. Freed from the financial responsibilities of the major AAA publishers, these are the titles that are most likely to truly break new ground in gameplay, aesthetics, and subject matter.”

Anna Anthropy and the Twine revolution (The Guardian)
“There’s a growing realisation that games can be as much about personal expression as they are about shooting stuff. We talk to prolific designer Anna Anthropy about her reluctant role at the centre of an emerging scene based around free game making tool, Twine.”

Tigsource Devlog: Dom2D’s Visual Showcase of Awesome New Games, Issue #14 (Venus Patrol)
“This week’s selection shows some love for pixel art, with fourteen games in development showing true skill with the pixel brush! We have Chasm in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign, Tale of the Stolen Rainbow creating an epic Zelda-like adventure with minimalist black and white pixels, and then there’s The Bitter End.. oh wait, it seems to have been made in Hexels!”

Recommended Game: Reunion, A Short Horror Experience (Independent Gaming)
“Explore a dark forest and the darkness of the human mind. In these woods, nothing is as it seems. Reunion is a short horror game that surprised me with its creepy atmosphere, genuine scares, and shocking ending. You control a father searching a forest at night for his son, Waleed, who has fled from home. You must navigate the darkness, using the circle of light surrounding you and the sounds of the things in the woods to stay on a safe path.”

The Long And Brainy Road: An Organ Trail Diary Part 3 (RPS)
“The Organ Trail: Director’s Cut is a zombie pastiche of the old favourite edugame, The Oregon Trail, where you had to get a family of settlers to Portland, Oregon, past the perils of the unconquered western USA. In the Organ Trail, players must get themselves and up to four friends all the way to Portland Oregon without losing any of their innards to rampaging zombie hordes. They’re both mainly asset management games, with bastard-hard minigames included. “

Kickstarter Katchup – April 21st 2013 (RPS)
“Two $100,000 winners this week and a few other projects close to the finish line.”

Itano Alpha Flight and Heart Breaker (Indie Gamer Chick)
“Here’s some quick thoughts on a pair of recent XBLIG titles, Itano Alpha Flight and Heart Breaker. They suck. My boyfriend says I’m not allowed to leave it at that, so I guess I’ll explain why.”

Humans Must Answer (PixelProspector)
“Humans Must Answer is a really promising horizontal shmup with fine visuals and fun looking gameplay that features a nice selection of weapons.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Killer Screen

Today’s Developer Links pass on more good PS4 vibes from indies, along with updates from games including The Witness, Clockwork Empires, and Democracy 3.

PS4 will support indies, agree optimistic devs (Develop Online)
“A number of developers have stepped forward to state their optimism about the PlayStation 4′s support for indies. Speaking to Develop individuals from companies as diverse as Gearbox and nDreams have expressed hope and positivity that, in contrast to previous sony consoles, the PS4 will be accessible and affordable for indies. Their views appear to reflect comments made to Develop by Sony Worldwide Studios SVP Michael Denny, who insisted indies are set to be core to the PS4.”

A Little Something For The Pipe Fanciers Out There (Gaslamp Games)
“From just about the beginning we’ve been into the idea that Clockwork Empires should involve running giant assemblies of pipes and cog-laden axles across settlements to transmit energy and water and completely harmless high-pressure superheated steam between various machines and factories. The basis for this came early: if we’re to embrace the aesthetic we desire we need to fully embrace the visuals of mechanization, of machines and factories and the wonders of technology of this Age of Progress & so forth. If we hide the machines inside the factories then you won’t be able to see any of the Fun gears and pipes. So, the breakthrough: put the machines, the pipes, the gears on the outside of the factory.”

Low-Light Combat Art Asset Overview (Wolfire Games)
“We recently made a charity jam game called Low-Light Combat. In this jam, I wanted to try cutting out the most time-consuming steps of the traditional art asset workflow, to see if it would make any real difference in the final product.”

iPad video update #1 (The Witness)
“Andy’s got the iPad port far enough along that you can sort of play the game now. Here’s a short video…”

More Democracy 3 simulation fun and games (Positech Games)
“The core mechanic of Democracy 3 is going to take a lot of careful explaining in tutorials and tooltips and help windows. Essentially, it’s pretty simple, in that you implement policies, and you can adjust the intensity of a policy using a slider. So with a policy like income tax, the slider adjust the rate of tax from low to high. A series of bars show you the effect this policy has on everything, such as voter happiness, GDP, and so on. Sounds simple so far right? This is where it gets complex because there are three additional factors, which are implementation times, effectiveness and inertia. I’ll explain each one…”

Even Ugly Babies Need Hugs (Dejobaan Games)
“Our good friends at Zapdot and Hybrid Mind have been working hard on Ugly Baby. Ichiro continues to rest as evidenced by this picture from yesterday. This is most excellent news because a rested Ichiro is worth at least 3 times as many points as a tired Ichiro! This week we look at visualizers and also the in-game HUD that tells you when your stunts are X-Games worthy.”

Managing Risk in Video Game Development (Gamasutra)
“How do you best manage risk when creating a game? Using this article and the attached spreadsheet, you can better identify the problem areas in your game and get a sense of whether any decisions you are making actually make business sense.”

The Language of Monetization Design (Gamasutra)
“Automobiles and computers were so simplistic in their first 10 years that today we have a hard time looking back and appreciating just what a leap in technology they were at the time. Like all technology, they benefited from the iterative process, slowly adapting to changes in allied technologies, consumer demands, and infrastructure. Today both cars and computers have components in them that did not even have names 10 or 20 years ago. Before they could be added to these products, they had to be thought about and given names so that they then could be optimized and adapted to various uses.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Pipe Dreams

An indie developer in defense of Microsoft, a spreadsheet RPG, and curious games – all this and more in today’s Indie Links.

The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile dev defends Microsoft (VG247)
“The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile developer Ska Studios has never had any problems working with Microsoft, contrary to ongoing talk of how indies struggle with the platform holder.”

Making an RPG in a Spreadsheet is Easier Than It Sounds, but Takes Longer Than You’d Think (Kotaku)
“Last fall, Cary Walkin was enrolled in business school at York University in Ontario, taking a course called “Advanced Spreadsheet Modeling.” He quickly realized the application could be used for more than just accounting.”

The fear and loathing of N++ (Polygon)
“Metanet’s creative director and co-founder, Mare Sheppard, announced at GDC that after much trepidation the Toronto-based independent developer has decided to develop the final game in the N series. Sheppard told Polygon that the decision to develop N++ was more of a “gradual realization,” than a “lightning strike.””

Dragon Fantasy Book 1 coming to PlayStation 3 and Vita April 16 (Polygon)
“Developer Muteki Corporation’s Book 1 of Dragon Fantasy — a game originally released for mobile devices, Windows PC and Mac — will come to the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita on April 16, Sony announced today.”

Guacamelee review: more behind the mask (Shacknews)
“The ability to boil down a game’s premise to an elevator pitch can easily do it a disservice. Guacamelee has been called Metroid-vania with luchadors, a description Drinkbox hasn’t exactly shied away from. But that description, and its pun-y title, make the game seem more like a gag, and gags don’t have longevity by definition. They’re an object of fleeting fun, and the game is much more inventive and lasting than this glib explanation would suggest.”

BattleBlock Theater review: battles blocked (Shacknews)
“Following the release of Castle Crashers, The Behemoth was riding high as a stalwart of the 2D old guard. It had produced a beat-em-up that lovingly paid homage to its predecessors and injected it with a dose of Monty-Python-styled inanity. Nearly five years later, the studio has finally produced its follow-up, BattleBlock Theater. It leans less on its roots, and while greater ambition gets the better of it, it’s hard not to cheer on more of the developer’s spirit.”

Pippin Barr’s philosophy of developing ‘curious’ games (Joystiq)
“Pippin Barr’s doctoral thesis is titled Video Game Values: Play as Human-Computer Interaction, submitted in 2008 to the Victoria University of Wellington as the final stage of his degree, Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science. In the thesis, Barr highlights the act of playing a computer program rather than simply using one, with case studies in Civilization 3, Fable, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Half-Life 2, and The Sims 2.”

Retro Arcade Adventure Remade (Indie Gamer Chick)
“It’s been a little over a year since I reviewed Retro Arcade Adventure, a hack-and-slasher that was sort of like Smash TV for the dark ages. I didn’t really like the game. It was short, repetitive, and boring. You could see potential in the developer, but the experience was tedious. So I was skeptical when I saw that they had decided to remake the title instead of patching the original. Ballsy for sure, since the first wasn’t very good. It would be like burning a steak and trying to correct it by throwing it back on the grill for ten minutes.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Beat The Spread

The contents of today’s Dev Links come together to demonstrate how many different stages of development there actually are. (Hint: a lot.)

The Making of: ROM City Rampage (8-BIT Hardware Accurate Prototype) (VBlank Entertainment)
“How Retro City Rampage’s core was crunched down to a REAL 8-BIT game and how 8-BIT games are made!”

Yet Another Technology Status Update (Gaslamp Games)
“Last time I wrote a programming team update about Clockwork Empires, I made a comment that was somewhere along the lines of “the game is starting to hit that point where it transitions from a bunch of technology bits to something that looks like a game.” Well, we’re a lot closer to that goal than we were last update.”

Race Selection Screen (StarLife)
“Our new race selection screen. The custom race button will take you to another screen, which I will be working on the next few days.”

More about the complexities of Democracy 3 income… (Positech Games)
“Wealth is a complex thing in Democracy 3. far more so than before. I’ve been wrestling with bugs in it today which have reminded me how intricate the new income simulation is. How does it work? Well here is a rough synopsis.”

XXL Love for Serious Sam Double D (Mommy’s Best Games)
“Serious Sam Double D XXL is out now on XBLA–go download the demo if you’ve not yet! Critics are chiming in with some intense praise, see what they have to say.“

Oddy Smog, Oddy Smog EVERYWHERE (PlayMedusa)
“What a huge week for Oddy Smog’s Misadventure. The game that was our second title, back in 2010, has been released for Android and has received a big update in the App Store.”

The Video Game Kickstarter Report – Week of March 1 (Zeboyd Games)

Playnomics partners with Unity to help indie developers (Polygon)
“Games-focused data science company Playnomics has partnered with the Unity Technologies Asset Store to provide indie developers with better tools to engage audiences and monetize their games, Playnomics announced today.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: A Fresh Start

Games based on depression, an award winning game we’ll never get to play, and other interesting titles in today’s Indie Links.

How Jason Rohrer Won The Game Design Challenge (RPS)
“A real high-point of every GDC is the Game Design Challenge. Well, was. Sadly the tenth year of this annual treat was the last, with organiser Eric Zimmerman bringing proceedings to an end. And wow, did it go out in style. With the apposite topic, “Humanity’s Last Game”, some of the biggest names in the industry put forth their pitches for the last game we’d ever need. And one man entirely stole the show. For a second year, that man was Jason Rohrer.”

Voiceless and forgotten: facing depression through play (VG247)
“Depression Quest and Actual Sunlight are two games based on depression. Dave Owen speaks with their creators to find out how they can help.”

The Cat that Got the Milk sequel revealed, leaps from freeware to commercial (IndieGames.com)
“The Button Affair super stylish developers, now called Modern Dream, have announced The Cat that Got the Milk will receive a sequel. Titled Abstract No.3, it will expand on the series’ twitchy, path-weaving gameplay and will be the team’s first commercial release.”

Mobile review: Ridiculous Fishing (Shacknews)
“Fishing is a tough endeavor, one that isn’t as easy as it looks on TV or in the movies. Homer Simpson once had an idea to dump a plugged-in bug zapper into a lake and it resulted in a whole lot of easy-to-catch (if somewhat high voltage) fish. That’s a ridiculous idea. Yet it’s not as ridiculous as some of the heavy artillery that’s used in Ridiculous Fishing, the latest iOS title from Vlambeer (Super Crate Box), Greg Wohlwend (Puzzlejuice), and Zach Gage (Halcyon).”

Storyteller preview: In the eye of the beholder (Joystiq)
“”Wait, save that. No one’s done it that way before. You made it more complicated.” Daniel Benmergui reached out to grab the mouse and save a screenshot of my panels in his comic-book narrative game, Storyteller, where I had just concocted a tale of love and loss based on the page’s prompt, using a trio of static characters. One click and Benmergui let me regain control – he resumed his place over my shoulder in a quiet room off of the main GDC concourse, paper and pen in hand, taking notes on my visible thought processes as they played out on-screen.”

Preview: Hiversaires (TIGSource)
“After years of releasing engaging short-form games, prolific digital artist Aliceffekt is nearing completion of his first independent commercial project, Hiversaires, for iOS. Committing himself to full time development at the beginning of February, Aliceffekt has worked solo on the game, handling design, code, art, and music.”

Little Inferno scores big sales (Destructoid)
“Little Inferno didn’t have a lot to help it become a financial success. A fireplace simulator made to parody and critique current trends in videogames isn’t exactly what the big publishers would call “a surefire hit with a huge pre-installed fan base.” Thankfully, word of mouth, positive reviews, and the reputation of the game’s all-star development team seemed to have made up for any lack of marketability.”

Second Thoughts with the Chick – Terraria (Indie Gamer Chick)
“I reviewed Terraria for PlayStation Network/Xbox Live Arcade. I said that I did have fun playing the title, but I didn’t recommend it because it was too glitchy and unfinished. I also said that I had lost interest in the game. Since then, there hasn’t been a review up at my blog. Why? Because I’ve been busy playing Terraria. So allow me to eat some crow and do a 180 here. Terraria IS worth your time, glitches and all.”

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

Driftmoon, Ridiculous Fishing, Natural Selection 2… all games that went through long development processes (some more than others), and in today’s Developer Links you can read detailed tales from these processes that you may find enlightening.

Postmortem: Unknown Worlds Entertainment’s Natural Selection 2 (Gamasutra)
“This past Halloween, in 2012 — 10 years after the release of the original Half-Life mod, and after almost going out of business multiple times — we released Natural Selection 2 using our own “Spark” engine on Steam. It went right to Number One and has since sold around 300,000 copies. This article hopes to summarize what we learned during this epic period of toil…”

Indie Tools: Dagon (IndieGames)
“Senscape‘s Dagon engine has been open-sourced! And, yes, it’s the very same and apparently extraordinarily sleek engine that will be powering horror adventure The Asylum and thus an engine specifically designed for the creation of modern, cutting edge adventure games.”

Ridiculous Fishing Is Almost Done! (Vlambeer)
“If you’ve been paying attention, you probably followed the development of Wasteland Kingsduring our participation in the annual Mojam. We’re extremely proud of the $450.000 raised for charity during the whole event and just as grateful for all your support, the nice comments in the chat and your enthusiasm for the game. However, Wasteland Kings was not all we were working on: while Jan Willem and Paul were jamming away on Wasteland Kings, Rami, Zach and Greg wrapped up something else over in New York: we submitted Ridiculous Fishing to Apple.”

Penny Arcade’s On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness 4 – Music Sampler! (Zeboyd Games)
“Over the weekend, Hyperduck submitted final versions of all the Precipice of Darkness 4 songs and we’re dying to share some with you.”

Super Hexagon On Linux (distractionware: devlog)
“One final port announcement! Super Hexagon is now available on Linux. If you’ve got the PC or Mac version of the game on Steam, then you should already have it in your library!”

A Prisoner’s Tale (The Behemoth Development Blog)
“The guard did growleth as he pushed us out, / Catnip stanking up each breath. / ’Your turn has come at last,’ he mewed, / His eyes aglow with death…”

Seven Years Is A Long Time (Driftmoon)
“It took us a while to complete Driftmoon. In fact, it took us over seven years. But we’re here now, and Driftmoon is finally just two days away from official release! Now is a good time to look at our long journey to today.”

Loadtesting For Open Beta, Part 1 (SpyParty)
“Way back in 2011, right before I opened up Early-Access Beta signups, I loadtested and optimized the signup page to make sure it wouldn’t crash if lots of people were trying to submit their name and email and confirm their signup. I always intended to write up a technical post or two about that optimization process because it was an interesting engineering exercise, but I have yet to get around to it. However, I can summarize the learnings here pretty quickly:WordPress is excruciatingly slow, Varnish is incredibly fast, I ♥ Perl,¹ Apache with plain old mod_php (meaning not loading WordPress) was actually way faster than I expected, slightly faster even than nginx + php-fpm in my limited tests, CloudFront is pretty easy to use,² and even cheap and small dedicated servers can handle a lot of traffic if you’re smart about it.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Dear Abbey

Today’s Developer Links talk about garbage collection, tool development, a lighting technique, and a suggestion for how to classify RPGs.

The Top 10 Mistakes Tool Developers Make (Gamasutra)
“Since 1999, I’ve had the luck to work in the game middleware industry. It’s been extremely interesting, but something of a crusade. Why? Probably because game middleware is one of the hardest things to market and sell.”

Implementing Voxel Cone Tracing (AltDevBlogADay)
“In last year SIGGRAPH, Epic games presented their real time GI solution which based on voxel cone tracing. They showed some nice results which attract me to implement the technique and my implementation runs at around 22~30fps at 1024×768 screen resolution using a 256x256x256 voxel volume on my GTX460 graphic card. The demo program can be downloaded here which requires a DX11 GPU to run.”

Garbage Collection And Memory Allocation Sizes (AltDevBlogADay)
“As a performance conscious programmer in a soft-realtime environment I’ve never been too fond of garbage collection. Incremental garbage collectors (like the one in Lua) make it tolerable (you get rid of the horrible garbage collection stalls), but there is still something unsettling about it. I keep looking at the garbage collection time in the profiler, and I can’t shake the feeling that all that time is wasted, because it doesn’t really do anything.”

Dog Game (distractionware: devlog)
“dog game”

A Better Classification System For RPGs (Zeboyd Games)
“The labels JRPG and Western RPG are commonly used genre labels that don’t do a lot of good in actually telling anyone what the game in question is like because there is so much variety between games that are arguably in the same genre. For that matter, some people still can’t agree whether these terms should apply strictly to the location of the developer that made the game or to the style of game. Surely, we can do better. Here are 9 criteria you can use to classify just about any RPG.”

Attempt Quest 1 (Auntie Pixelante)
“attempt quest 1 is an abstract, autobiographical game i made in 2004 – i would have been around 21. i can’t remember showing it to anyone, posting it anywhere. i don’t remember making it, didn’t remember that it existed until i found it in an old corner of my web host. but playing it, i could identify it as mine, like deja vu, or like being shown a drawing you did as a kid. at that time in my life, i was dealing with isolation, depression, sorting out my identity, and a fear of my own mortality that has never left me, just transformed. i put all these into this little game that i was too scared to show anyone.”

Announcing “Roger Steel and the Human Element” (Computer Games)
“‘It’s 1936 and the sun is still shining brightly on a steam-powered British Empire. Ann Trevelyan, a naïve but headstrong 21-year-old English girl, is exiled to Kashmir from the sultry streets of Calcutta in the aftermath of a forbidden love affair. Accompanied by her technology-obsessed brother, Arthur, who has been coerced into chaperoning her, and their lifelong Welsh friends, Christina and Neville Mortimer, the four expect nothing but boredom away from the glamour of the big city…”

What Are Games (Proteus)
“I find this rather burdensome to write, but it feels necessary to set out my thoughts given recent rumblings, and specifically to respond to this article and its comments. I don’t call Proteus an antigame* or a notgame. I call it a game, but obviously I am at pains to make it clear that it doesn’t have explicit challenge or ‘winning.’”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: White Dragon

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