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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is the conventional wisdom about AI in games really so wise?  Today’s Developer Links ask this question, along with discussing multiplayer development and “glorious trainwrecks”.

glorious trainwrecks dot exe (Auntie Pixelante)
“glorious trainwrecks dot exe is exactly the kind of inventiveness i want to see more of. made by mike meyer, it automatically indexes glorioustrainwrecks.com and allows you to browse games by event – whether they were made for last month’s klik of the month or for the gdc pirate kart or whenever – read their descriptions and download and play them instantly. glorioustrainwrecks is an amazing site that empowers everyone to make games, and uses monthly two-hour game-making events to help authors understand that creativity is more important than polish and presentation.”

Gratuitous Controllable Battles (Yes, Really) (Cliffski.com)
“I’ve been working on an expansion pack for Gratuitous Tank Battles, but hit a bit of an admin snag in releasing it right now, which gave me time to do something else. As I’ve had this GSB update pending for ages, I thought I’d get around to finally releasing it for everyone. This isn’t just a minor tweak and bug fix, it adds some good stuff. You might want to update your copy, and try this one…”

Level Lobby ft. The Level Editor [The Sequel] (The Behemoth Development Blog)
“Here’s a follow up post to the previous Level Lobby announcement and with all the fun facts that the first post didn’t have! Questions will be answered, such as: ‘What else is in the level lobby?’ ‘How do I use this thingamabob?’ ‘What do you think about sequels?’”

Q-001: Where Do You Feel Like You Are Being Held Back By The Status Quo In #Gamedev? (AltDevBlogADay)
“This was the question that started my twitter #gamedev Q&A series. As of right now we’re just shy of having discussed 100 questions on twitter. Feel free to join in!”

Cook, Serve, Delicious! Status Update (Vertigo Gaming)
“CSD has been undergoing private beta testing, and so far the results have been excellent. Squashed a lot of bugs, polished the game up quite a bit, and aside from a few bonus galleries the game is essentially complete. I’m definitely going to release it by the end of the month, however there are two things I’m waiting for before going forward with a release date:…”

Guerilla Multiplayer Development (Gamasutra)
“What’s the best way to get a networked game up and running on a smartphone? For his space battle game ErnCon, Ernest Woo investigated existing network techniques and integrated them together, coming up with a solution useful to iOS and Android developers, which he shares within.”

“Flip The Question Around” – Interview With Andy Schatz (Made by Pixelate)
“Andy Schatz has been highly influential and inspiring to the independent game development community for a long time, so I’m delighted to have had the chance to talk to him about Monaco and the Venture Games, the growth of indie games and the most important skill to run an indie studio.”

Over 3 Million Castle Crashers (The Behemoth Development Blog)
“While we were in Seattle for PAX Prime 2012 the XBLA Castle Crashers leaderboards reached 3 million! This means that over three million humans have hacked and slashed their way into a castle in hopes of gaining animated glory! We are tremendously grateful that in four years, we’ve had the continuing opportunity to share this game with the world.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Floorplan

Today’s Indie Links include indie games for the Xbox, games about Slenderman, and games highlighted by the Austin, Texas independent games community.

Slenderman Mythos Coalition Interview: Three Times The Scare (IndieGames.com)
“Developers Parsec Productions, Ethereal Entertainment and Elder Productions have banned together to form the Slenderman Mythos Coalition, a trio that aims to offer three visually and mechanically distinct Slender experiences to horror and jump-scare fans. After the recent viral success of Parsec Production’s beta of Slender: The Eight Pages, several other Slenderman-scare games gained more visibility, as they reached for a piece of that lanky pie.”

Juegos Rancheros’ Fistful Of Indies: August 2012 (Venus Patrol)
“Every month, as part of the regular monthly meetings of the Austin, TX independent game community JUEGOS RANCHEROS, we do a very casual & chatty rundown of the ten or so games from the previous month — both local and global, and both indie and occasionally a bit-bigger-budget — for the audience, to give people — especially those curious onlookers from outside the indie community itself — a look at what they may have missed.”

Getting Some Much-Needed Attention For Xbox’s Best Indie Games (Ars Technica)
“Ask practically any indie game developer, and they’ll tell you that the hardest part of making a successful game isn’t necessarily coming up with a concept, programming it, or even creating the art. It’s getting your game noticed after it’s released. This problem is even more pronounced if you decide to release your game on Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG), the completely open Xbox 360 service that lets anyone with $99 to spring on an annual XNA account become a console game developer.”

Eight Tips For Surviving Longer Than Five Seconds In The Fiendishly Difficult Super Hexagon (Kotaku)
“Super Hexagon—the latest game from the creator of the super-hard VVVVVV that you can find in the iTunes store linked above (or its flash predecessor here)—has been the subject of the past weekend’s many conversations in my circle of video game industry friends and colleagues. And for good reason.”

4 Years, 12 Countries, And A Woodblock Artist: The Incredipede Story (Gamasutra)
“The average game development story is, frankly, a bit dull, no matter how you attempt to spruce it up. Tales of ambition and great inspirational values usually work to cover up the fact that, for the most part, developers sat at computers every day hammering furiously away on keyboards in an entirely unexciting manner. Some game development stories prove a little more intriguing than that. Incredipede, an upcoming physics-based puzzle game from developer Colin Northway, was written in over a dozen different countries while the dev was backpacking around the world with his wife Sarah (who was also creating a game, Rebuild, on the move.)”

Mark Of The Ninja Review: Kneel In The Shadows (Joystiq)
“Mark of the Ninja makes it awfully hard to be an oaf dressed in black. No, it hasn’t been streamlined to the point of auto-play, and the inherent challenge of avoiding detection hasn’t been crushed into a pulp to please the plebes. Rather, developer Klei Entertainment has flattened the genre into a legible, two-dimensional blueprint. That’s why things are more likely to go according to plan.”

Smells Like Indie Spirit: The Official Fantastic Arcade 2012 Trailer (Venus Patrol)
“While I’ve already given a breakdown of the Adventure Time Game Making Frenzy, the Fantastic Arcade-related event coming in just a few short days to Austin, TX and around the globe, next week — from Thursday through Sunday — the Alamo Drafthouse will be hosting Fantastic Arcade proper: a free & public celebration of indie game culture featuring custom arcade cabinets for a selection of showcase games and an even larger field of spotlight games, with panels and developer talks by a number of local and visiting indies including Vlambeer, Terry Cavanagh,Dennaton, White Whale, Stoic & more.”

FTL (TIGSource)
“Continuing the fine TIGSource tradition of posting old news… I’d like to mention that FTL came out earlier this month. The real-time spaceship simulation and ‘roguelikelike’ was released just five months after its successful Kickstarter and is available on Steam, GOG.com, and directly from the developers.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Lurking In Darkness

Want to get funding for your indie game?  One of today’s Developer Links addresses how to approach publishers, while another discusses what’s currently going on with indie games on Kickstarter… and in another, a developer explains why he doesn’t use Kickstarter himself.  Also, a look back at a famous indie game that was released two years ago and is still selling strong, and an indie developer shares some of her earliest, previously unpublished efforts…

Amnesia – Two Years Later (In The Games Of Madness)
“It has now passed a little more than two years since we launched Amnesia and one year since the last report, so time for another! One would think that there is perhaps not much to be said this long after release, especially for a single player game with no built-in social features. But the fact is that Amnesia is still going very strong and 2012 will probably be the best financial year here at Frictional Games, which we would never had expected two years ago.”

My Kickstarter Love/Hate (Cliffski.com)
“So kickstarter has raised a bazillion dollars for games. rejoice hurrah etc! I have a love/hate relationship with the idea. On the one hand, it’s awesome to see indie devs get games made that they didn’t have the money to make otherwise, as the alternative (gradually building up over time) took me about ten years to get to the standard of games most people know me for… On the other hand, it’s selling a dream, and a pretty unlikely and far-off dream at that.”

XNA-To-Unity: The Radiangames Method (Radiangames)
“Now with 4 full games ported to 2 major new platforms (iOS and PC/Mac), an all-new game based on the same XNA-based game structure, and another larger game on the way, I think I can say the transition was a success.  Many more XBLIG developers have made the transition from XNA to Unity, but some are still in the process or are only considering it still.  For them, and for others who prefer a more code-based game structure than Unity normally provides, I’m now going to share more details of my particular XNA-to-Unity path.”

What Publishers Want: 10 Tips For Getting Your Game Funded (Gamasutra)
“In such a competitive landscape, how does a developer possibly stand out when trying to land a deal a game publisher? Perfect World’s VP of business development John Young shares what he looks for in a pitch.”

Indie Tools: Blender (IndieGames.com)
“You may have already heard of Blender, the 3D open source suite, as an excellent option for creating 3D graphics and models. Well, that is definitely true. Blender is a 3D tool that actually makes sense for me (I successfully created an almost passable castle) and everyone seems to agree that is both powerful and pretty straightforward to use… The game creation advantages are pretty obvious, especially for artists and indie devs wanting to impress with shiny 3D stuff, but what really impressed me is the fact that Brender actually comes with a complete Game Engine.”

PAX 10! IndieCade! Freeplay! Oh My! (Cipher Prime)
“PAX Prime was awesome! Big thanks to everyone that came out to see us! It was great meeting some of you for the first time and showing off Splice one-on-one with folks. If you missed out on PAX or weren’t able to stop by the booth, there’s a great write-up on the PAX10 over at Geek’sDreamGirl.”

kid stuff (AuntiePixelante)
“here’s some stuff outta history.”

The Video Game Kickstarter Report – Week Of September 14 (Zeboyd Games)
“The big new kickstarter for this week just started a few hours ago. It’s a new RPG from Obsidian Entertainment called Project Eternity. Goal of $1.1 million but they’re already up to $344k after a few hours so they probably will make it.  The game is designed to be a great homage to classic PC RPGs like Baldur’s Gate & Planescape: Torment and will feature the talents of Chris Avellone, Tim Cain, and Josh Sawyer.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Game Pointer

Along with posts about a number of indie games, today’s Indie Links cover Kickstarter stretch links, Venus Patrol, and how to run your own Minecraft server.

Welcome To Venus Patrol (Venus Patrol)
“Fast forward past an incredibly arduous blur, and Phase One of all that good will & good intention is officially complete: the website before your eyes, designed by Cory Schmitz with background assets graciously provided by indie game developer Neil Thapen‘s not-coincidentally-titled 2009 game Venus Patrol (more on that relationship over here).”

The Shocking Truth Behind Super Hexagon Creator’s Score Scam (Hookshot, Inc.)
“Terry Cavanagh slouches in the quarter-light, his silhouette all puffed defiance. I can’t see his face but I sure can imagine its proud contortions, the winning smirk of the unrepentant cheater.  Why did you do it, Cavanagh?  ’Why did I do what?’ he says. ‘Why are you in my house? Why have you turned all the lights off? I can’t see you properly. Who are you?’”

Steam Users Can Now Buy To The Moon, A Game About Marriage, Memories, And So Much More (Kotaku)
“I put off playing To The Moon for months. Not because I thought it was terrible; far from it. A huge number of people I respect had showered it with glowing praise. It’s just that I knew something of its subject matter: the memories of a man who survived his wife, at the end of his life.”

Review: Lone Survivor – Jasper Byrne Is Playing With Your Expectations (Indie Game Reviewer)
“Created by Jasper Byrne, who has a history of making lovely low-rez games (that may have begun with a tribute to Amiga computer games on which I invested a large portion of my late grade-school years), Lone Survivor is his best outing yet and in kind is getting the attention it deserves, with high visibility on Steam and in major press outlets.”

Snapshot: They Bleed Pixels (PC) (Joystiq)
“I have a soft spot for difficult, precision platformers. Super Meat Boy was my number 2 game of 2010, edged out only by Alan Wake. I also have a soft spot for character action games. 2004′s Ninja Gaiden, for example, is probably my favorite action game of all time. Imagine my delight, then, when I first played They Bleed Pixels, which is both a precision platformer and a character action game.”

Blocks With Friends: How To Run Your Own Minecraft Server (Ars Technica)
“The game has an engrossing single-player component, with a core gameplay mechanism that feels like a LEGO block set—go build stuff!—but it’s much more fun to make things with your friends than to labor alone. Public Minecraft servers are widely available (here’s a good list), but they have an unfortunate dark side: as with any public online game, keeping out folks bent on making mischief is ultimately impossible. If you want to play Minecraft with just your friends, the easiest way to do so is to run your own server.”

Our First Look At The Slenderman In Slender: Source (Kotaku)
“Ever since we learned that there’s a multiplayer, source-engine take on the Slenderman game in the works, I’ve been hoping see more of the game in action. This video, which was shared on the Slender: Source Steam Greenlight page, gives a first look at the Slenderman in the game, as well as a hint of the effects that will happen when he closes in.”

Kickstarter: Stretch Goals (TIGSource)
“Even though the following three Kickstarters have been fully funded, I thought you might still be interested in hearing about the projects or getting in at the last moment to obtain prizes and help the developers reach their ‘stretch goals’.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Red-Handed

In today’s Developer Links: Why people love indie developers.  Also, PAX on a budget, how an indie game has progressed in a year, and a tool to help indie developers talk to the press.

Indies Collaborate On Tools To Make Talking To The Press Easier (Gamasutra)
“If you want easily-distracted players to stay with your game, to give it a chance and discover all the work you’ve labored over, you make it as approachable and as easy to pick up as possible, right? That’s the same attitude indie developers should take when it comes to attracting the attention of the press, to ensure people are helping others find out about your game. That’s where the press kit comes in.”

I Can Almost Hear The (News)Hounds: Sir News! (Big Robot)
“Two updates for you: One is this interview with Jim on Gaming Nexus, the other is this profile of Sir on the main Unity site, with quotes from Tom and Jim. Go take a look! Meanwhile, Tom is back from his time in the wilderness of a house move, and now we’re motoring again. That means fixing the last of the major issues with terrain generation, putting the UI in, and pouring more time into the hunters themselves.”

Horse Talk: Clip Clop Questions With Kevin Zuhn (Octodad Blog)
“‘Why hello there and thanks for asking! I’m Kevin Zuhn, the Creative Director on Octodad: Dadliest Catch. I was also the Project Lead on the first Octodad. As director of creativities, I’m ultimately responsible for what content goes into the game, and for communicating the vision of the game to the rest of the team. In that respect, much of my job involves taking in all of the wacky ideas we Young Horses spit out and shaping them into an Octodad game. I also lead the design team (and get hands on in level design), I do the high-level writing of the game’s story, and I model a lot of the objects and furnitures that you’ll find scattered around the world of Octodad!’”

So, You Want To Take Your Indie Game To PAX On A Budget (Andy Moore)
“Earlier this week, BitFlip Games made a blog post saying that their PAX booth cost them $12K. Afterwards, they edited in a preface that says PAX is still one of the cheapest conferences, and they meant it as positive praise for the conference… but the rest of the article doesn’t read like that… So I wanted to share my story and my costs, as a shoestring Indie Developer.”

Doing It Wrong (Maia Blog)
“…But I’m not sure what I’ve learnt from all this. I don’t have a demo out, I’m still refusing to take preorders and my media releases are patchy. I’m yet to write a single press release. The website is painful to read and makes irritating noises. In fact, by conventional standards, I’d say I’m probably doing everything wrong.”

Why I Love Indie Devs (Reddit)
“Why I love Indie devs: told Lazy Brain about a lack of windowed mode in a game and he sends me an updated version in less than an hour.”

Introducing The Apex (Starbound)
“For millenia the Apex were close to human in appearance until breakthrough research into accelerated evolution lead to the creation of the “Vestigi-Evo Process”. The VEP allowed the Apex to trade physical devolution for intellectual evolution.”

State Of The Game (ScrumbleShip Blog)
“In the past year ScrumbleShip has gone from a barely functional tech demo to something much more. We’ve begun to simulate personal interaction in space with handheld lasers, suits, suit oxygen, suit energy, reaction mass and health. We’ve improved the visual look of the game by adding hundreds of blocks, adding animations, creating a lighting system, adding a HUD, and increasing the render distance by a factor of ten…”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Home Grown

Today’s Indie Links talk about the indie fund, violence in video games, and what goes into making a co-op puzzle game.

Basketbelle Review (TruePCGaming)
“Half game, half art piece.  More art piece than game, really.  Basketbelle is probably not the kind of thing that die-hard gamers will want to play. Those who are interested in a sweet tale of brotherly love, however, would do well to throw a few dollars at Michael Molinari because this is an experience worth having.”

War On Geometry: Super Hexagon Coming To PC (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
“With his new iOS game, Super Hexagon, I’ve just realised that Terry “VVVVVV” Cavanagh has a plan, and it’s to achieve immortality through drinking the tears of broken souls, bent over electronic torture devices screaming his name in fear and fury. I hate him. I hate him. I hate him. Super Hexagon will be coming out on PC. You will hate him too. Hate. There’s a trailer after the jump. Hate.”

The Lawless Online – Funding Campaign For A FREE Multiplayer Role-Playing Strategy Game (I-Luv-Games)
“With all of the funding campaigns going on these days for indie games, and video games in general, it’s hard to know where to start looking or which games to start funding…  You probably want to support a game that you’d like to see finished with the kind of spit and polish that attracts gamers based on how much fun they could actually be.  When it comes to this type of campaign, with proper funding and public support, these games can become a reality. The Lawless Online is one such game that deserves some attention. ”

Dust: An Elysian Tail For XBLA – An Indie Game Review (Indie Game Reviewer)
“Dust. Not to be confused with From Dust or Dust 512, but Dust: An Elysian Tale, an indie ‘Metroidvania’ action platformer from the work of one man – Dean Dodrill, a pro cel animator who worked on the game for almost as long as Phil Fish did onFez (four years in this case), minus all the press hullabaloo and troll-baiting Fish endured (though DAET did win the Dream.Build.Play competition in 2009). That is, if you don’t also count the voice actors and Northern Ireland based music team,HyperDuck Soundworks, who are also quite ingrained in the indie gaming scene these days (A.R.E.S: Extinction Agenda, Mama & Son: Clean House and many others).”

Wooden Sen’SeY Review (Epic Brew)
“Upperbyte’s Wooden Sen’SeY is set to launch tomorrow. I got my hands on a preview copy of Wooden Sen’SeY and spent some time playing through the game. For this review, I played through five of the nine levels.”

On Ultraviolence In Games And The Lessons Of Porn (What Games Are)
“The gaming sphere (myself included) debated about whether E3 had gone too far and had the ultraviolent kinds of game on show were representative of games any more. Many a journalist reflected on their personal feelings of depression in the wake of the show, thinking that for all the high talk games had not really moved on. All fair points, but studios go to the extreme like that for a reason.”

Indie-Ana Co-Op and the Dev Stories – You Have to Learn to Work Together (Co-Optimus)
“Puzzles aren’t cooperative. That’s what I was told. You don’t see teams of people solving Rubik’s cubes, and you don’t see a cooperative mode in Braid (this was also before Portal 2). Cooperation was for killing terrorists, aliens, and zombies. Solving a complex puzzle is a solitary thing which requires concentration. Cooperation would just be annoying, adding a hindrance. I was also told puzzle games don’t need stories. I decided mine was going to have both, because it’s my damn game, and that’s pretty much the beauty of being an indie dev.”

Extra Credits Indie Fund Thoughts (Extra Credits)
“This has been weighing on me for some time, I’ve wanted to update you guys more frequently about the indie fund; I just have been barely staying on the bull that is my life.  Between EC, teaching, my business, trying to get out to every conference I can in order to talk about education and trying to get out to every college that wants me I’ve just been wearing a little thin, but here it goes.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Purple Run

In today’s Developer Links: high dynamic range lighting, Sony’s approach to working with indie developers, and yet more developers’ takes on the Steam Greenlight fee.

‘Evolving Every Day’ – Sony’s Approach To Working With Indies (Gamasutra)
“Sony has earned a reputation for funding daring indie games — especially lately. Dyad and Papo & Yo, in particular, have picked up plaudits in recent weeks. Of course, this is not an accident, says Sony’s Adam Boyes.”

Good Morning Gato # 97 – Oppa Gato Style (Ska Studios)
“We went to PAX! Gato sends her regrets that she was not able to attend as she was tied up all weekend in an international business meeting. Be extra sure to click all the clickables in this week’s Good Morning Gato. You wouldn’t want to miss a single brilliant gem.”

$100 (Thinking In Rectangles)
“So yeah, there’s a big debate this week about greenlight’s $100 fee. I thought I’d come on here and type up my fully formed opinion, because I continue to put my foot in it on twitter. I think others are saying far wiser and more interesting things on the subject, but I want to put my own opinion up, then shut up..”

The Video Game Kickstarter Report – Week of September 9 (Zeboyd Games)
“The biggest new video game kickstarter in the past few days is for a Homestuck Adventure Game. It’s at $853k ($700k goal) with 26 days left which already places it as one of the top 10 highest grossing video game kickstarters. To be honest, I’ve never heard of Homestuck before now but apparently it’s a rather popular webcomic with a weird sense of humor.”

Musing On Iterative Creative Perfection (Cliffski.com)
“The film ‘wanted‘ was on TV here again recently. I’ve seen it maybe 4 times now, and although it has lots of men shooting guns, for once it’s a film like that I really like, mostly because the actual gun bits are irrelevant. It’s a film about breaking out of a rut, in a job/relationship/life you hate, and becoming someone important and doing something you believe in. No wonder I love it.”

Friday Flashback #30: The Return From The PAX (Broken Rules)
“We’re back home! After a few tumultuous days in Seattle, indulging the crazy event called PAX Prime 2012, we’ve finally returned home to use the knowledge we’ve gathered for good. But before we let you know about this week’s achievements, we’d like to present you some of the feedback we’ve received.”

Flow – A Coroutine Kernel for .Net (AltDevBlogADay)
“This post will present a small library called Flow that abuses .Net’s IEnumerable functionality, providing a Kernel for cooperative multitasking based on the concept of coroutines.”

Tech Feature: HDR Lighting (In The Games Of Madness)
“Hello my name is Peter and I’m the new graphics and engine programmer. New is not really the correct word since I have been working at Frictional for a year now. During this time I have updated the engine and added a lot of new graphic features. This will be the first of my blog posts descripting the changes that have been made.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Open Wide

Where can you see SimCity mixed with steampunk, rabbits with revenge quests, match games with endless runners?  In indie games, of course, like those discussed in today’s Indie Links.

Clockwork Empires: A Preview Of Gaslamp Games’ Lovecraft-Laden Steampunk City-Builder (PC Gamer)
“Take SimCity and stuff it with steampunk. Take Dwarf Fortress and make it modern. Take Anno and dump H.P. Lovecraft into its oceans. Consider yourself mildly acquainted with Clockwork Empires, the next project of Gaslamp Games. The indies behind of Dungeons of Dredmor are creating a 3D, sandboxy city-builder teeming with 19th century imperialism. It’ll be populated by street urchins, aristocrats, volcanoes, sea serpents, war zeppelins, mad scientists, and at least one foodstuff that doubles as a building material. It’ll be irreverent, and PC-exclusive. It’ll have multiplayer. It’ll be moddable. Most of all, I think it has a chance to set a new standard for player-driven story generation in the genre.”

How A Bedroom Developer’s ‘Ugly Little Game’ Became An App Store Hit (Wired.co.uk)
“Dungeon-based puzzle app 10000000 (said “ten million”) is an unlikely autobiographical game. So unlikely, in fact, the developer doesn’t even realise how autobiographical it is.”

Mark of the Ninja: The Kotaku Review (Kotaku)
“So before starting Mark of the Ninja up, I assumed my brash nature would be at odds with what the 2D game required of me. I was right—at first. The game starts with the assumption that you are already a smooth killing machine, and the pith lies in the tension between a player’s clumsiness and the eventual embodiment of the refined ninja. The ultimate revelation comes in the transformation, in the metaphorical gain of the black belt. The game teaches you to feel at home in the shadows, to become quick on your feet, to bear the mark of the ninja proudly, with honor. And honor is one of the most important things in the game, but more on that in a second.”

Interview With ‘Dusty Revenge’ Developers, PD Design Studio (Epic Brew)
“‘Hey, thanks for having us. PD Design Studio started out 6 years ago doing various jobs, web, print, video, anything we can lay our hands on. But our very first project was actually a Flash game project. Over the years we started to focus on Flash educational-games. We must have done more than 20 of those. We found it thoroughly enjoyable to work on games but working on client-based games means we’ll never get to fulfill our inner fantasies. The studio actually has done a couple of game prototypes, but we left it at that. We had this game idea of a 2D platformer with supporting character mechanics. After talking through between ourselves, we thought let’s just do it.’”

Super Hexagon: The Joys Of Waiting (Hookshot, Inc.)
“Long story short, Super Hexagon, a game I knew about for ages, but which took its own sweet time to appear on iTunes – and then got yanked away again and is now finally back. I’m not going to tell you about it, because it’s well worth 69p, and if you’re an Androider, here’s Hexagon on Flash.”

The Killing Floor Of PAX: Welcome To Eighteen-Player Johann Sebastian Joust, Complete With Traitors (The Penny Arcade Report)
“Johann Sebastian Joust, played at the higher levels, can turn everyone into a dancer. Every man who picks up a Move controller and understands the mechanic of appropriate speed, while trying to knock out his opponents, begins to move with more grace. Every woman who learns to evade while keeping the door open for attacks becomes a ballerina. The game is not available for sale to the public, but creator Douglas Wilson is hoping to change at some point in the near future. “I really need to release this,” he told me while packing up the controllers and laptops at the end of the night. You’ll hear no argument from anyone who has been lucky enough to play the game.”

A Streamlined Experience: Dungeon Dashers (TruePCGaming)
“Andrew Sum, developer of the online multiplayer dungeon crawler, Dungeon Dashers, spoke to TPG about all things PC gaming.  You will read how Dungeon Dashers was created, his early failures and achievements, thoughts about DRM, piracy and more.”

Thirty Flights Of Loving Isn’t A Game, It’s A Manifesto (Scripted Sequence)
“Well, obviously it is a game, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Brendon Chung’sThirty Flights of Loving, for those who don’t know, is a ten minute long, Quake 2-powered, short story. It’s about a heist gone wrong. That’s probably all you need to know.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Birds’-Eye View

Microtransaction monetization, vector fields, and different ways to create loops in a programming language might not be some of the first things that come to mind concerning indie games, but they are topics that indie developers might have to deal with—and today’s Developer Links have got you covered.  (Rest assured there are articles about less esoteric matters, too.)

Steam Greenlight: Developers Speak Out (Gamasutra)
“Steam Greenlight launched last week to a huge influx of entries. If you follow many indie developers on Twitter, you will have no doubt seen your fair share of both love and hate for the initiative. Crowds of developers happy to get their game closer to being on the system were buffeted by tides of frustration at Greenlight’s shortcomings. Now that things have started to settle down, Gamasutra looked to grasp the general feeling among developers: is Greenlight good news for the indie scene? Will it actually help consumers show Valve which games they want on Steam, or is it yet another database to throw your game into and then never see any real good come out of it?”

What Topiary Should I Put On Top Of The New Courtyard Map? (SpyParty)
“The true purpose of this post is to test the new CAPTCHA system I installed, after getting sick of reCAPTCHA letting in 40 spam comments a day.¹ So, if you’ve never commented on the blog before, please chime in below so I can test that it works.  If you have commented before, then you shouldn’t notice anything different and shouldn’t see the CAPTCHA.  Edit: it looks like the new CAPTCHA works fine, thanks everybody!  The ostensible purpose of this post is to brainstorm what topiary shape should go on top of the center pillar in the new experimental Courtyard map, pictured here:”

C/C++ Low Level Curriculum Part 9: Loops (AltDevBlogADay)
“This post covers the 3 built-in looping control structures while, do-while, and for as well as the manual if-goto loop (old school!); as usual, we look in some detail at the assembly generated by the compiler looks like. Did I forget about the new range-based-for loop that was added in the C++11 standard? Nope. If you have access to a C++11 compliant compiler you’re more than welcome to look at that yourself – think of it as homework…”

Next Generation Monetization: Supremacy Goods (Gamasutra)
“Is your microtransaction-based game set up for failure or success? Consultant and writer Ramin Shokrizade discusses a new class of goods that is likely to damage the health of your user base — and in this article, posits rules for goods as well as taking a hard look at how some games function.”

The One Hundred Dollar Question (Jonas Kyratzes)
“It all began when Valve announced that Greenlight, the vote-based submission system for Steam, would now come with a $100 price tag for developers. The money wouldn’t go to Valve, but to a popular (with gamers) charity called Child’s Play; the point of the fee was not to enrich Valve, but to stop all the bogus and unprofessional submissions that were flooding the system. A few developers said ‘$100 is a lot for some people.’ Then all hell broke lose, and my understanding of the indie scene was permanently altered.”

The Art of Journey Available For Preorder (thatgamecompany)
“Good news, everyone! The Art of Journey is finally up for pre-order at Bluecanvas!  The first 750 orders get copies that are signed by both Jenova Chen and Matt Nava!  Signed copies are still available, but they’ll likely run out quickly.”

A Data-Oriented, Data-Driven System For Vector Fields – Part 1 (Bitsquid)
“A vector field is a function that assigns a vector value to each point in 3D space. Vector fields can be used to represent things like wind (the vector field specifies the wind velocity at each point in space), water, magnetism, etc. To me, wind is the most interesting use case. I want a system that can be used for physics (trees, tumble weed, paper cups), particles (leaves, sparks, smoke) and graphics (grass). I also want the system to be capable of handling both global effects (wind blowing through the entire level) and local effects (explosions, air vents, landing helicopters, rising hot air from fires, etc). But I don’t want to limit the system to only handling wind. I imagine that once the system is in place, it could be put to other interesting uses as well.”

Super Hexagon Launch Week Roundup (distractionware: devblog)
“So, er, wow. So much has happened that I don’t really know where to start, but here goes. Super Hexagon has been an absolutely huge success – both critically and commercially.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Cloth Cover