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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Sunset

Today’s Indie Links include articles on EVO 2012 and indies ushering in a new era of survival horror games.

Dyad: The Kotaku Review (Kotaku)
“To say that Shawn McGrath’s Dyad is intense is an understatement. The game may technically count as a mind-altering drug, and believe me, that’s a good thing. In my video review, I break down not only the experience of playing Dyad but also where it’s roots lay and why it goes above and beyond them.”

Super T.I.M.E. Force, SpyParty, Aztez, Super Comboman Dev Talk at EVO 2012 (IndieGames)
“At EVO 2012, four indie developers of the inaugural Indie Showcase walk their audience through their games and field questions on breaking into the industry and creating their titles. Justin Woodward of Interabang Entertainment shows off sticker-collecting beat ‘em up Super Comboman. Ben Ruiz of Team Colorblind walks players through the brawler half of Aztez (there’s also a strategy component). Finally, Nathan Vella of CAPY shows off Super T.I.M.E. Force, the XBLA exclusive run-and-gun platformer: think Contra or Gunstar Heroes combined with Braid.”

Hotline Miami: Me Vs. Level 4 (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
“Level 4 is not the hardest level of Dennaton’s neon-hued orgy of sado-masochistic violence, and RPS’ official Best In Show at Rezzed, Hotline Miami. Oh, not by a long shot. It’s just the one that, once I finally beat it, made me feel like a god. I had a plan. I made that plan work. Every single action I took, every single movement I made, was with surgical precision. A dozen men died, and their little dog too. I never knew their names. I never cared to know their names. I didn’t even know why they had to die. I just knew they had to die.”

Driving Discussion: Mario von Rickenbach on Krautscape (IndieGames)
“Michael Burgdorfer and Straight, No Chaser and IGF finalist Mirage developer Mario von Rickenbach are working on their first racing game with gorgeous landscapes that allow for flying or driving to get to a goal, somewhere in space, as quickly as possible. While the leader in a multiplayer race creates the path with the direction he or she veers, others can create shortcuts often by flying to take the lead.”

Crajsh (PixelProspector)
“Crajsh is a fast paced multiplayer snake game for up to 4 players on 1 PC. It is a tribute to the DOS game Crash and was created by the developer of Wormhol.”

Endless Forms Most Beautiful (TIGSource)
“Endless Forms Most Beautiful is a Locomalito remake of a fairly recent (February 2012) ZX Spectrum game by David Hughes. Spanning 15 levels, the goal of the game is to collect all the imps on each level while avoiding various monsters. Moving around takes a bit of getting used to as it defies convention – you can travel up and down on teleport pads but only if you’re standing on top of a pad. Also, by leaving the screen you’ll end up either on the row above (if you went left) or the row below (if you went right).”

A New Age Of Survival Horror Games, Thanks To Indie Developers (Gamasutra)
“Horror in video games is constantly evolving. Where we may have once associated increasingly action-based franchises like Resident Evil as being the pinnacle of what horror games can offer, the dish of the day is now fear and tension: the idea that something may be lurking just around the corner that you cannot easily fend off.”

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

Developer Links include articles about music, procedural content, and, of course, the Ouya, because everyone’s still talking about that.

Procedural Content Generation: Thinking With Modules (Gamasutra)
“Manually creating gaming worlds takes time, and storing it all takes massive gobs of space. Since the days of Starflight and Elite, developers have worked towards getting computers to the point where they can be boundlessly creative… In this article, we’ll talk about PCG’s history, problems, solutions, and methods we’ve discovered while using it in our 2009 title, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity(Aaaaa! for short) and our upcoming 1… 2… 3… KICK IT! – Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby (akaUgly Baby).”

Mr Roboto (Hello Games)
“Joe Danger The Movie takes place on the set of the greatest action film ever made. This is one of the bad-guys, we call him ‘Mr Roboto’. He’s from the distant, shiny future and has been sent back to destroy the planet! I like to think he’s still a nice guy though. He can fire slime from his arms. So he’s been sent back in time to coat everything in green goop.”

Music (Vlambeer)
“Ever since we started out, we’ve tried to work with cool musicians for our games. We’ve had the luck to have worked or jammed with amazing talents like Eirik ‘Phlogiston’Suhrke, Jukio ‘KOZILEK‘ Kallio, Adam ‘Doseone‘ Drucker, Brother Android and Alex Mauer. We think that the music in our games is a big deal -imagine any of our games without their music and audio!- and based on what we’ve gathered in our mailboxes,Twitter and Facebook, you think so too. So for all you people that love the music in our games, here’s a long, long blog-post about music with some announcements hidden in there, too.”

Screenshot Saturday (Catapult for Hire)
“The game was recently shown at Rezzed and though I recieved a lot of great feedback, some of it reinforced why I needed to reinvigorate the beginning. I’m very happy with the new direction the game is taking and I can’t wait to start playtesting. All of these screenshots are from the new opening.”

Colorblind Mode Support (Cliffski.com)
“I’m working on adding this as an option for Gratuitous Tank Battles.  If you are red-green colorblind can you let me know if this looks better?”

Lostcast Episode 20: Ouya or Ooh, No? (Lost Decade Games)
“Lostcast is our podcast about HTML5 games. In episode 20, we discuss the much buzzed-about OUYA, Onslaught! Arena on Brass Monkey, and the launch of our new game Lunch Bug.”

Splice Screenshot Challenge (Cipher Prime)
“The point of this challenge is to be creative with the game mechanics. We want to see what interesting imagery people can come up with given the structures available in Splice. We’ll be selecting up to 7 screenshots to be featured as downloadable desktop backgrounds. Entries should be taken at the highest resolution available and in full-screen mode .”

Celestial Apotheosis – Uni Edition (hannardynamite)
“For my Gameplay and Game Design module in university, I “borrowed” Celestial Apotheosis from myself. This turned out to be a great decision as I received a fantasticmark of 92%. With this grade, and the various other successes I’ve had from using this game concept, I finally have the confidence to start/continue working on this game properly. I’d lost confidence, and interest really, in this for a number of various. But getting a glimpse of how good this concept is (good to one studio, and my uni, anyway!) has started to spur me into getting this game out there.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Go Fish

Aside from the usual links to articles about various games, today’s Indie Links also include indie developers’ take on the Ouya console.

Influential Indies On The Brouhaha Around Ouya (Joystiq)
“[W]e want to know what prominent and plucky indie developers actually think the Ouya can do for the industry. So we asked a few, includingMinecraft‘s Markus Persson, The Binding of Isaac‘s Edmund McMillen, Retro City Rampage‘s Brian Provinciano and five other indie starlings. Their thoughts are collected below in the order each developer responded to the email thread, because that seems more fair than arranging them by “best hair” or something.”

The Bunny Homicides: Hands On With Overgrowth (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
“I was going to say Overgrowth is ‘early in development’, as it’s still in early alpha and doesn’t have anything approaching levels or objectives. But it’s been in development since at least 2008. To temper that lengthy development cycle, Wolfire have been releasing weekly alphas to pre-orderers. The version I’ve been playing is ‘a185‘, which shows you just how committed they are to this process. It’s still early in terms of the progress, though. They’ve focussed on how you do things over what you do, ensuring the player feels like a skilled, kung-fu bunny. There are a few test levels that I augmented with a community launcher that adds fan-made maps to the game’s menu. Soon, I had a lot of content: not particularly polished or game-selling, but enough to get a feel for what’s there.”

Hyperspace Invaders I (PixelProspect0r)
“Hyperspace Invaders I is a frantic vertical shooter with abstract graphics and minimal controls. Move left and right, blast away hordes of enemies, collect their souls and dodge thousands of bullets (your hitbox is the blue dot in the middle of your ship and thus pretty small)”

Indie Games Festival Comes To Boston (Develop)
“A new event celebrating indie games is scheduled to take place in Boston on the 22nd of September, and the organisers have announced that submissions are open for the debut games showcase.”

Deconstructing The Dyad Design With Creator Shawn McGrath (Joystiq)
“Shawn McGrath, creator of PSN-exclusive tunnel shooter Dyad, exits his workplace – a house in the north side of Toronto – and lights up a cigarette. The rental home is lined with out-of-control weeds McGrath steps over to lean against his car, which sports novelty license plates with a leet variation of the word ‘hacker.’”

Letters From A New York Indie #2: Chaos From Order (Hookshot Inc.)
“Last time I wrote about why I like short games. I’m also fascinated by simple games. Part my attraction to small games is their relationship to minimalism — that magical thing that happens when a tiny set of simple rules creates something complex and beautiful. But my interest in minimalism doesn’t always pull me in the direction you might assume. I’m fascinated by games that apply their minimalist components to create something that feels like the antithesis of minimalism. I like games that create chaos.”

Dyad Is An Overwhelming Audiovisual Thrill Ride (Ars Technica)
“I’ve never taken hallucinogenic drugs. I’ve always kind of wanted to experience the type of transcendent, out-of-body experience I’ve heard other people describe when on them, but I’ve always been a little too concerned with the potential long-term effects on my brain chemistry. But now I’ve playedDyad, so I’m no longer so concerned about what I’m missing out on.”

Wot I Think: Rune Masters (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
“Here’s what I find interesting about an average puzzle-game/RPG: I spent all morning playing one. An awful lot of games pass over my screen of a week, and many don’t really grab my attention. I’m really not sure that CodeDaedmons‘ Rune Masters should have, but I can’t deny that I played it from 9am to 12am without stopping. And in the end, it proves itself a very useful measure of what this peculiar sub-genre can get so right and so wrong.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Kill The Wabbit

In today’s Developer Links: Audio design, finding programmers, and how to talk to the press.

Eight Things All Indie Developers Should Do When They Talk To The Press (Hookshot Inc.)
“A question I’m asked a lot at games conferences and other events is, how do I get my game covered by the press? A mistake far too many young developers make is to spend a year beavering away on an astonishing iOS title, only to finish it and then think, ‘um, what now?’ Discovery is THE major challenge of the digital distribution era and it shouldn’t be taken lightly. Quality doesn’t just magically rise to the surface, and Apple can only recommend so many titles. As a studio, you must plan for this.”

Creating Audio That Matters (Gamasutra)
“‘Immersion’ has become cliché. It’s often just another buzzword when talking about how great a game is, but it’s all too infrequent that those discussing games will actually break down the finer details of what that immersion entails. Like all pieces of the puzzle that is game design, audio must work in concert with graphics and game mechanics to help immerse the player into gameplay experiences of all shapes and sizes through its ability to convey vast amounts of the detail to the player, often without their knowing.”

Developers Can “Get Into A Lot Of Trouble” Worrying About What The Audience Things, Says Gilbert (VG:24/7)
“Speaking with The Gameological Society, Gilbert said ‘anybody creating anything,’ should have no responsibility when it comes to managing audience expectations. ‘You have to do what you want to do, and you have to do what you think is the right thing to do and what you think is the best thing to do,’ he said. ‘People who like what you do and are fans of your work are just going to like what you do as long as you do something true to yourself.’”

Pursuing Excellence (AltDevBlogADay)
“If a game can be objectively bad, can a game also be objectively excellent? Are there no concrete goals and standards we can make for ourselves in pursuit of excellence – or do we really just throw our hands up in the air and say ‘Just do your best and love what you do!’ and then hope other people enjoy what we make?”

Indie Tools: Petit Computer (IndieGames)
“Petit Computer won’t be something for the professional or the experienced developer, but it will be an easy-to-use and apparently cheap way to develop simple games for the Nintendo DSi and 3DS and, thus, have some excellent and most creative hobbyist times. Besides, the only thing that will make you a better game designer is to actually design more games on all sorts of platforms.”

Splice Featured In The Pax 10 (Cipher Prime)
“Splice made the PAX 10 selection! Turns out we’ll be at PAX Prime this year after all! This is a huge accomplishment for us, and we couldn’t be happier and more grateful for the opportunity to stand alongside some of the great indie developers of today. If you’re going to be at PAX Prime, be sure to come by and visit us at our booth. We’ll be giving away tons of swag! Plus, you’ll have a chance to play our games and talk with the developers.”

Programmer Moneyball (AltDevBlogADay)
“What’s the secret to hiring great programmers? Do you have to have a Google-style cafeteria, or Microsoft-style interviews, or Scrum or Agile? All of those things help, but keep in mind that it’s also possible to find great talent the major companies let slip through their fingers.”

Cook, Serve, Delicious!: Everything You Need To Know (Vertigo Gaming)
“Cook, Serve, Delicious is the next big game from the creators of the Oil Blue, which was part of the Christmas Indie Royale bundle and featured in the “250 Indie Games You Must Play” book by Mike Rose.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Jumping At Shadows

Today’s Developer Links have a lot of character… or a lot about characters: how players express themselves through characters, what makes characters (or character races) good or evil, replaying a character’s actions, and more.

Ouya, Steam Greenlight, And The Future (Radiangames)
“I decided early on that I’d back the project (only the second Kickstarter I’ve backed), but there’s varying amounts of skepticism surrounding it in the games industry.  Penny Arcade Report is the latest to jump on the “too good to be true” bandwagon.  But if you’re going to be skeptical of the device for a reason, be skeptical of their ability to deliver what they promised.  DO NOT be skeptical of there being good games and software on there.”

Games Are Art: An Elephant In The Room (AltDevBlogADay)
“The equivalent of games and music isn’t cinema, it’s theater. Actors play/interpret plays in theater, like musicians play music, and players play games. And then I realized, people seem to be getting something terribly wrong. They seem to think that the default thing to do with music is to listen to it, and that the default thing to do with games is to play them.”

The Good, The Evil And Those That Don’t Care (Purple Orange Games)
“I’ve been thinking about a race being Good, Neutral or Evil and what would this imply to them. Here’s a some quick rules I though would add the right flavor to the game, these rules would be optional.”

On Player Characters And Self Expression (Gamasutra)
“There is no such thing as a player character” is the kind of tagline that gets me into trouble in some places. So is ‘the emotional connection between player and character that many game makers believe exists in fact does not.’ Both contain a powerful subtext, questioning everything from a player’s sense of identity to the validity of their experiences. Read the wrong way, they can seem to say that all the emotion you feel in playing games is made up.”

Unity, Replayed (AltDevBlogADay)
“Replaying actions in a game is a surprisingly common feature. There are match replays of course, but recorded actions are also used in cutscenes, ‘ghost’ players in racing games, and a variety of puzzles, like those for Clank in Ratchet & Clank:A Crack in Time. Many engines support at least a limited ability to record action in-game, as opposed to recording a movie, the demo command in Source for example. Unity, however, does not.”

Building A Titan In Drunken Robot Pornography (Dejobaan Games)
“A 16x speed video of us building a Titan for DRP. This is a pretty simple one, but it shows off the Titan Builder tool that we also want players to be able to use in the full game.”

Antifascista And Drowning (Auntie Pixelante)
“i heard about antifascista (link to play online) through my friend porpentine, an editor for freeindiegames. i think she’s correct in saying that this game really wanted to be hypertext of the kind that twine enables – there were a few instances where i got hung up on guessing the next thing to type, where all the choices in the game are fairly straightforward. it’s that kind of text game. nevertheless, as an american queer bobbing around the poverty line, the message of this game resonated with me. it reminded me where my hope comes from.”

A Super Hexagon Approaches (Distractionware: Devlog)
“Check out what I got working!”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: In The Crosshairs

Today’s Developer Tools include some tips for working with sound and 3D on iOS apps.  For those not planning on developing for iOS, though, don’t worry; there are plenty of other articles to pique your interest.

Call For Industry Speakers To Address AltDev Student Summit (AltDevBlogADay)
“The AltDev Student Summit will be held November 10th and 11th, with the aim of bringing industry veterans together to explain to students the reality of life making games. Individually, many of us already do outreach to local education programs to provide these kinds of insights, so the Student Summit aims to centralise this effort by providing an online forum for this engagement – industry experts gain a much broader reach for their presentations, whilst students benefit from the experience of a much wider pool of potential speakers. As for all AltDev events, the intent is to hold the entire event online and record the sessions and share them with the community afterwards to further enhance the reach of the speakers.”

Cook, Serve, Delicious Update #10: Maintenance! (Vertigo Gaming)
“There’s more to running a great restaurant than producing amazing food. You’ll need to get down and dirty to make sure your kitchen is in tip-top shape… and, in some cases, bring a criminal to justice.”

App Switching And Graceful Music Handling In iOS (Hemisphere Games)
“We post few dev/technical pieces on our blog (I’d love to do more), but we ran into an issue recently that seems to plague many iOS apps on the store: Music not always playing on app resume. It’s not catastrophic when it happens – and can often be fixed by hitting the home button and trying again – but it is annoying.”

“Bringing New Life To Classic RPG Mechanics” At Pax Prime 2012 (ZeBoyd Games)
“Five Indie RPG studios team up for a panel to talk about what’s new in the world of Indie RPG’s! Panelists include ZeBoyd Games (Cthulhu Saves the World), Spiderweb Software (Avadon: The Black Fortress), Carpe Fulgur (Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale), Gaslamp Games (Dungeons of Dredmor) and Level Up Labs (Defender’s Quest: Valley of the Forgotten). Each team brings their own unique twist to a different classic ruleset. As well as taking questions from the audience, the panel will cover these specific topics: Battle Systems Stats and customization Characters, story-telling and world-building Removing tedium Improving pacing Offering meaningful choices Writing for immersion and believability So come, take a seat in the tavern, quaff a blue potion, and join us for this rousing panel discussion!”

Friday Flashback #25: Of Alps And Men (Broken Rules)
“We love the sun (quite frankly, why shouldn’t we?) but our office has become quite the heating oven, so we decided to look for alternative workspaces that are a bit cooler and allow us to concentrate on our work. Half of the team used the opportunity to house-sit in the alps, while the remaining half decided to pack their bags and venture to the Arkadenhof at the University of Vienna, where it’s a lot cooler than at the office.”

Leaky Abstractions (AltDevBlogADay)
“In a world of frameworks, simple to use engines and added layers of abstraction we are in danger of leaky abstraction, both in design and programming. While the concept is familiar to me a friend introduced me to the phrase at the pub recently as well as directing me to this brilliant article by Joel Spolsky. I wanted to publicise and explore this in the context of gaming using a graphics programming and motion design problem.”

Getting Stage3D To Work On IPhone, With AIR 3.2 And Flashdevelop (distractionware: devlog)
“Anyway, getting Stage3D to work on an iPhone took a LOT of messing around, more than these sorta things usually take, and I had a lot of trouble finding recent information online on how to do it – so, I’m going to be a good interneter, and write a short tutorial, for future googlers who might have to go through this horrible process. Here goes:”

Indie Tools: AMOS For Windows (IndieGames)
“AMOS, the Amiga-only successor to the venerable STOS, was one of the few easy to use tools available to Amiga users that allowed for the creation and distribution of proper games. AMOS was essentially a BASIC-like programming language accompanied by certain handy utilities that allowed you to create the graphics, sounds and core of almost any game you could think of. Provided it wasn’t over-ambitious and didn’t push the Amiga too hard, that is.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Cleaning Up

What is the current Indie Scene?  What is the current Indie Reality?  Heady questions, perhaps, but questions addressed in today’s Developer Links.

On Success, Failure, and ‘The Scene’ (Rami Ismail)
“A while ago, in an interview I argued that ‘indie games’ as a scene might be heading towards a bit of a ‘personality crisis’. On one hand, we have the increasingly polished and qualitative titles like Fez, Super Meat Boy, Braid and the upcoming Spelunky. These are all games that have had a production cycle of at least two years and required relatively monstrous amounts of resources. The result is a beautiful, finely tuned game.”

‘Sword & Sworcery’ Composer Jim Guthrie: “If You Can Think It, You Can Make It Work In A Game” (The Verge)
“When we met up with Jim last month at Verge headquarters, he was in town supporting filmmakers James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot during their premiere of Indie Game: The Movie, the game dev docu-drama for which he had provided the soundtrack. He had also just announced that he’s working with artist Craig Adams, aka Superbrothers, to make special levels for Queasy Games’ upcoming musical platformer, Sound Shapes. To top it off, last week saw the release of The Scythian Steppes, a companion album to Sworcery‘s Japanese localization featuring remixes from video game music luminaries like Michiru Yamane (Castlevania) and Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill). We chatted about his new game composer lifestyle, a mutual love of vinyl records, and of course, Space Babies.”

The Indie Reality In 2012 And Beyond, According To Arkedo (Gamasutra)
“In this interview, the studio’s co-founder Camille Guermonprez discusses his take on the industry as he embarks on the formation of his own indie publisher Nice Guys. While he’s working with Sega for the release of Hell Yeah!, he hopes to build “the publisher that we’ve been looking for for 10 years and didn’t find” in Paris. In addition to the industry talk, he outlines his thoughts on the advantages of being indie in a ‘sea of brown’, why he thinks this year’s E3 was ‘a little bit out of focus with reality’, and how he feels that game development has to be a dictatorship and not a democracy.”

Friday Flashback #24: Storytelling And Open Houses (Broken Rules)
“Our main focus the last two weeks was to make sure that the tutorial level is in a 90% finished state, that all the connectors are in place, that everything works as supposed to and that the storytelling elements that we had in mind are also in place and working.”

Cook, Serve, Delicious Update #9: Iron Cook Returns (Vertigo Gaming)
“Work is progressing great on CSD! I’m finalizing the foods, adding sound effects, and getting prepped for the open beta that I hope to kick off in the middle of July. Till then, here’s some more food reveals, and I’ll be back next week with a deluge of screenshots!”

Calories (Auntie Pixelante)
“in the wake of tentacle bento‘s cancelled kickstarter, people have been asking me whether games dealing with rape exist that don’t contribute to our culture’s silence around and permissive attitude toward rape – or whether such games even CAN exist. usually i point them to gr.”

Ugly Baby: June Gestation (Dejobaan Games)
“Our June, 2012 has focused on creating “patterns” — scripts that compose simple geometric solids in a scene that you can fly through. In particular, “foreground” patterns are all the pieces you’re trying to avoid smacking into when playing the game. Combine enough individual pieces (such as these arcs), and you get a tunnel:”

The Less The Code, The Better (AltDevBlogADay)
“From time to time, I mulled over how one can incentivize a short code or a refactoring that makes overall code shorter & simpler. A need for such incentives stems from the fact that a shorter code (providing identical features, of course) often requires both deeper consideration, unremitting diligence and courage and usually takes more time to accomplish.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: What’s Cooking?

In the games explored in today’s Indie Links, you can explore a house, navigate environments created by music, or just have lots of sex if that’s what you’re into. Hey, we won’t judge you.

Mercenary Kings (PixelProspector)
“Mercenary Kings is the upcoming platform shooter by the creators of Wizorb that shares similarities with the Metal Slug series.”

The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Beatbuddy (Joystiq)
“Beatbuddy is an action-adventure that takes you into the world of a song. You take control of our main character Beatbuddy and navigate him through levels where everything you see, the enemies and challenges you encounter, are synched to the music and rhythm of the individual tracks that make up a particular song, which you can manipulate and basically re-mix through your interactions.”

VVVVVV’s Cavanagh On His Quest To Become Activision (Also: Super Hexagon) (Hookshot Inc.)
“Super Hexagon is very close to completion now – I sent the beta out to some friends for feedback a few weeks ago, and right now I’m working through that, and trying to polish some of the game’s rough edges. Once that’s done, I’m going to start thinking about how to release it, hopefully very soon.”

The “British STALKER” Continues to Look Fabulous in Tweed (Kotaku)
“In case you’re just joining us, Sir, You Are Being Hunted is an upcoming indie game that promises to be ‘a procedurally-generated first-person, open world game, with some sneaking, some shooting, some tweedpunk adversaries, and plenty of fleeing in terror.’”

NSFW Free Indie Games Spotlight: Polymorphous Perversity (Calunio) (IndieGames)
“Calunio’s turn-based sex-RPG Polymorphous Perversity is finally available, for those who want a quest to explore unknown lands, meet strange people, and sample slices of sexuality.”

Spelunky Review: Obtainer Of Rare Antiquities, Giver Of Aneurysms (Joystiq)
“Spelunky, an Xbox Live Arcade revamp of a free PC indie game, straddles the line between insurmountable addiction and a precise extractor of self-hatred. Like other rare indie gems, such as Metanet’s N series, Spelunky is equal parts diabolical and ingenious.”

What Uplink Really Made Me Think Of (Book of Justice)
“A key element once you get past the early stages of Uplink is deleting logs – you bounce your connection from place to place before connecting to a target system, and a passive trace can follow this breadcrumb trail. What it means is you have this moment of tremendous excitement during a hack, where you’re playing chicken with the clock, before the disconnect and an immediate urge to delete the trail back.”

Ain’t No Mystery: Fullbright Talks Gone Home (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
“Gone Home is to be the first game from The Fullbright Company, a new indie studio whose formerly mainstream members were previously the prime creators of the excellent BioShock 2 add-on Minerva’s Den, as well as working on assorted other 2K projects. I had a chat with Mr Fullbright himself, Steve Gaynor, about their highly intriguing but equally mysterious non-combat first-person game. Why ditch the guns? Why leave cushty industry jobs to do this? How abstract will it be? How much can the physics be abused? I also made some sweeping generalisations about Columbo.“

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Move Out!

Want to release a game on the Android?  Promote your games with a podcast?  Or just get more tips on how to be a game developer?  Know the design secrets of your favorite childhood RPG? For any of these topics, today’s Developer Links have you covered.

Promoting Your Indie Game Company With A Podcast (AltDevBlogADay)
“A few months before jumping fulltime into our independent game startup, my co-founder and I started a podcast. We did this largely because of the advice from other successful independent game companies like Wolfire Games, who employ guerilla marketing techniques with remarkable results. It also sounded like a fun excuse to talk shop!”

Chrono Trigger‘s Design Secrets (Gamasutra)
“But the goal of marrying linear narrative to dynamic gameplay is not out of reach for developers that don’t have the resources to create such complex systems. No game shows this better than the classic RPG Chrono Trigger. Crafted by Square’s “Dream Team” of RPG developers, Chrono Triggerbalances developer control with player freedom using carefully-designed mechanics and a modular approach to narrative.”

The Mindkill – Making The Music For Receiver (Wolfire Blog)
“Recently I had the opportunity to work with Wolfire again, this time for the7dfps challenge to create a full first person shooter game in a week:Receiver. Working on the music for the game allowed me to try some things in video game music that I haven’t had much opportunity to try. One of the elements I really enjoyed was working with David to create the dynamic music of the game. It was the first time we really had the opportunity to allow the music to help you understand what was coming, and what you were up against.”

PlayStation Network Indie Devs Divided on Software Pricing (IndieGames)
“PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 3 indie developers are divided when it comes to pricing strategies for their games that use cross-save or cross-play features. IndieGames speaks with one team who decided on giving access to Vita and PS3 versions for one price and two others who are undecided. The developers discuss whether a lack of precedence mixed with seemingly non-conducive, third-party publisher pricing strategies may be to blame.”

Photon Mapping Part 2 (AltDevBlogADay)
“Continue with previous post, this post will describe how light map is calculated from the photon map. My light map stores incoming radiance of indirect lighting on a surface which are projected into Spherical Harmonics(SH) basis. 4 SH coefficients is used  for each color channels. So 3 textures are used for RGB channels (total 12 coefficients).”

Fragments Of My Imagination (Radiangames)
“There are different kinds of content fragmentation.  For listening to music, I use iTunes, Pandora, and Spotify depending on my mood, though there are many more ways to find and listen to music.  For TV shows, there’s cable TV, Netflix (DVD and streaming), Hulu, Crackle, Amazon, Google TV, iTunes, and tons of channel-specific streaming services, though I only use a couple of those myself.  For the people who create normal media (music, video, and books), getting your content on these various services is pretty much a legal issue, not a technical one.  If you look closer as a consumer though, you’ll notice a pattern of Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all providing streaming/renting/buy to own services for music and videos (and books).  We’ll come back to that.”

5 Ways To Be A Successful Indie Developer (Gamasutra)
“For now, however, Boyd is all too eager to share with Gamasutra what he believes to be the key pillars to his studio’s quick march success streak. Zeboyd’s big plans for indie scene domination followed five key points, which he shares with us now.”

Amazon Appstore Postmortem: A Guide to Android Developers (GamesIndustry International)
“Getting noticed is a constant struggle when you’re a mobile game developer. You can bet there’s an audience for your game — but how can you reach them?  One possibility for Android developers is to distribute games on the Amazon Appstore.  I’ve shipped two Android games so far, FRG and ErnCon, both of which are distributed on Google Play and Amazon Appstore. I wanted to share my experience getting a game ready for Amazon Appstore distribution focusing on the advantages and challenges encountered along the way.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Trigger Happy