Kickstarter is certainly turning into the place for older games to make a comeback to the modern world. So far we have seen the return of Shadowrun, Carmageddon, X-Com and now The Great Giana Sisters are making their way back into the hands of gamers. The team behind the sisters is the German developer Black Forest Games who hope to ship in October if they can reach their backing goal of $150,000.  As an added bit of incentive to convince backers to put forward a little love for the old title, a free demo of the game will be released on their Kickstarter page on Friday, August 24th, showing off two of the title’s playable levels. I’m going to stop talking now and just let you take a look at the absolutely gorgeous game this is looking to be in their Kickstarter video.

As you can see, The Great Giana Sisters is already a stunningly beautiful game. Both of the dream worlds have their own unique charm to them that promises a visually pleasing experience. The platforming looks solid, with Black Forest taking advantage of the transforming sisters’ abilities to make some interesting challenges for players to overcome. The dual soundtracks is also a nice twist to make the dream and nightmare worlds feel different from each other, the fact that Chris Hülsbeck and the metal band Machinae Supremacy are the ones doing the music only sweetens the deal.

At this point in time Black Forest Games has over 2,665 fans backing the project, leaving the total amount at $73,271 as I write this. You can get a full copy of the game for only $10 if it is completed within the next two weeks of its backer period. To get another look at The Great Giana Sisters in action, Black Forest Games has provided a video showing off one of their first levels of the game in its entirety.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – ‘The Great Giana Sisters’ Are Back In Action

There have been lots of articles in previous Developer Links about how to design games, but in today’s installment a developer discusses why.  Also covered are Steam, the Humble Bundle, and the middleware tech that goes into a game.

Good Morning Gato # 93 – Summer Chores (Ska Studios)
“It’s not quite Friday anymore, but it is still technically the weekend for Ska Studios and that means it’s time for getting chores done such as mowing the lawn and pondering over the last week.”

A Simpler Design For Asynchronous APIs (AltDevBlogADay)
“Accessing Internet services, e.g. to fetch a web page or to store data on a leaderboard, requires an asynchronous API. You send a request and then, at some later point, you receive a reply. Asynchronous APIs are trickier to design than synchronous ones. You can’t simply return the result of the operation, since it isn’t ready yet. Instead you have to wait until it is done and then send it to the caller through some other channel. This often results in designs that are needlessly complicated and cumbersome to work with.”

Steam Is Cool (The Witness)
“Last night I put together a test build of The Witness for Steam. I’d been wanting to do this for a while, but the game’s ability to run in full-release mode had been broken for a while. From day to day, we run the game with unpackaged data files, because we change them a lot. For a release you generally want to pack them together.”

Spirits Goes Multiplatform In New Humble Bundle (Spaces of Play)
“Today Spirits goes truly multiplatform and comes to Windows, Mac, Linux and Android as part of the Humble Bundle for Android 3, alongside with indie classics Fieldrunners, Bit.trip Beat, Uplink and SpaceChem. The game has been faithfully ported to PC and Linux with the help of Tim Ambrogi of Final Form Games, developer of neo-classical top-down shooter Jamestown.”

Tech Behind Octodad: Dadliest Catch (Octodad blog)
“A common question we get from people when we talk to them about Octodad is, “What tech are you using to make the game?”.  Our goal from the start has been to make the game for as many platforms as we can, so we’ve currently chosen an array of technologies that would let us accomplish this.  As a reminder, our key platforms we are developing for are Windows/Mac/Linux.  However, we’d love to make versions for iOS and Android as well.”

Auditorium + MusicRx (Cipher Prime Studios)
“Through MusicRx, the Children’s Cancer Association is helping to promote a bit of hope, happiness, and comfort to children fighting cancer. The program is aimed at providing kids with a therapeutic means of escape while allowing them to express themselves through music. MyMusicRx is a place for kids to explore and listen to music, play music-based games, learn about musical artists and sports stars, and connect with others.”

Big Robot’s Tom Betts Releases Procedural Generation Experiment “In Ruins” (Big Robot)
“Our lead programmer Tom Betts has been developing procedural generation techniques for our games for quite some time now, and they’ll see their most sophisticated debut in Sir, You Are Being Hunted. But they are also a major part of his PhD research, and one of the experiments that makes up that research is called In Ruins. It’s a game which you can download for Mac and PC below.”

Why We Design Games & Playing With LUFTRAUSERS (Vlambeer)
“Making games is hard work. Work isn’t supposed to be fun. As a matter of fact, it’s called work because it’s not fun. That’s why you get paid to do it. The pay allows you to buy fun later, to make up for the time spent not having fun. One of the reasons we get paid so little at Vlambeer (other than having little money) is that our work has rare moments of pure, crystalline fun.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Multiplatform

Coincidentally, today’s Indie Links include a number of games about squares: a roguelike with the map on a parchment-like square grid, a puzzler involving pushing things around square grids, another puzzler that involves lining up squares and rectangles.  But don’t worry; we’re not all squares here.  You can also read about the Indie Megabooth, Xbox Live, and more.  (Note, however, that the ”MEGA” letters in the Indie Megabooth logo are also pretty close to squares.  Huh.  Never mind.)

Everything You Knew About Playing Tetris Won’t Help With This Clever New Puzzle Game (Kotaku)
“Slydris operates on the same falling-block template pioneered by Tetris and, yeah, you’re still aligning the tumbling shapes into horizontal lines to clear space on a vertical playfield. But Slydris finds unique ways to differentiate itself from other efforts to recapture the glory of Alexey Pajitnov’s all-time classic game.”

Video: Creating The Audio For Bastion (IndieGames.com)
“If there’s one thing the industry will remember about Supergiant Games’ Bastion, chances are it’ll be its audio. The game’s rich, ethereal score and iconic narration gave the game a very unique tone, and went a long way toward establishing its striking aesthetic. And at the 2012 Game Developer Conference, Bastion‘s audio and music designer, Darren Korb, discussed the ins and outs of how he made the game’s sound stand out from the pack.”

Brief Impressions: English Country Tune (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
“At RPS, we’re hardy men. Jim can often be seen carrying a shed on his shoulders, packed with all his tools. Alec and Adam run a side business as fix-it gentlemen for logging machines, while Nathan is officially San Francisco’s Sturdiest Man. And I once fixed a tap. But English Country Tune is too much for us. (Well, for me and Jim, as we’re the ones who tried it.) A really beautiful puzzle game that Quinns once sent a biscuit. But by golly it’s hard.”

Mercury (Beta 1.1) (TIGSource)
“Described as an “experimental, winner-generated arcade roguelike”, Mercury is a simple dungeon crawl that allows the two top-scoring players at the end of each 4-day cycle to permanently add something new to it. Released as beta last month, the game began with only one monster, item, and class, but has since been expanded by the leading players in its community. There’s also a Chaos Mode, which allows anyone to add new entities to the game at any time (this is an easy way to see how the creation system works).”

Indie Megabooth Makes A Triumphant Return To PAX Prime (Joystiq)
“The Indie Megabooth proved to be a success at PAX East and is returning, bigger and better, to PAX Prime 2012, running August 31 – September 2. The PAX Prime Indie Megabooth will feature 29 independent studios and more than 30 games, each one shrouded in mystery and intrigue for now.”

Unepic (PixelProspector)
“Unepic is an action adventure platformer with RPG elements that draws inspiration from the Castlevania series.”

Kickstarter Katchup – 4th August 2012 (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
“There’s an absolutely enormous winners’ list this week, which is always a pleasure to see. Unless they turn out to be international money laundering thieves who release mediocre games at best. Then it will be a bit of a shame. So at what will you throw your money?”

How To Fix Xbox Live Arcade (Hookshot Inc.)
“Microsoft’s most recent dashboard update (a bi-annual-ish freshening of the Xbox 360’s menu screen that rearranges its form and tweaks its function) has been widely-criticized. Its haphazard arrangement bespeaks Microsoft’s muddled vision for their console’s twilight months – ballooning the size of advertisements, emphasizing the system’s media hub capacity by putting movies, TV and apps front and centre and, largely, ghettoizing the ‘game’ aspects of the system.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Indie Links Round-Up: Just Around The Corner

Just look at that screenshot above. Click it, so you can see it in full. Now, putting aside for a moment the fact that it looks more like a menacing dragon than a goblin, let it act as a reminder of just how astonishingly pretty Frozenbyte’s fairytale puzzle-platformer Trine 2 was, and still is. Let’s also remember that Trine 2 was one of the best indie releases in recent memory, offering a meaty, clever adventure under all those stunning graphics. Good, now we can be fittingly excited that it’s getting bigger – coming this Autumn is the official expansion, Goblin Menace. Here’s the also-lovely-looking trailer:

A new story arc, six new levels set across some very fresh-looking environments, and new abilities for all three of the playable characters. Interestingly, the new powers can also be used in the original campaign, which should add a little more replay value to the old content as well. Sounds like a fairly hefty bunch of new content. There’s no specific release date or price tag set on this one yet, but Frozenbyte have announced that the game will be re-launching under the banner of ‘Trine 2: Directors Cut‘ when Goblin Menace arrives.

You can find the official (and rather spartan) press-release here. Included with it is a large gallery of similarly beautiful screenshots – worth a look, I reckon.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Trine 2 Expands This Autumn With ‘Goblin Menace’

Wadjet Eye Games have really been cementing their place as the second coming of Lucasarts these past few years. They’ve put out a steady stream of well-written, thoughtful and interestingly themed point-and-click adventures, and now they’re ready to tease their next project – Primordia. Here’s the brooding, atmospheric first trailer:

A dark, apocalyptic cyberpunk aesthetic here, and a story revolving around a machine-city falling into corruption and disrepair in the absence of human control. All of this, and it’s narrated by Logan Cunningham, the inimitable voice of Rucks from Bastion. The art (while slightly low-res, admittedly) looks fantastic, and reminds me a lot of Beneath a Steel Sky. This is on the grungy, worn-down end of the cyberpunk scale for sure.

No specific release date on this one yet, but Wadjet Eye are aiming for the fourth quarter of this year. We’ll be covering news on this one as it unfolds, but you can follow the development of the game and read up some more on the official site here.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Cast Your Ocular Receptors Over This ‘Primordia’ Teaser Trailer

For a while there, it was looking seriously bleak for Shadowrun Online. Perhaps it’s because there was already an official singleplayer Shadowrun game licensed and in development? Either way, not too many people seemed willing to bite, and the game was short of its funding goal by a full quarter with just one day left to go. It seemed unlikely that they’d raise 25% of the target money in 3% of time. Statistically, it seemed likely that the game would go unfunded. And then they pulled out all the stops.

At the time of writing, there’s an hour or two left to put your money down for early Beta access to the game, and they’ve cleared their $500,000 target and sailed past it to the tune of $25,000. The ambitious multiplatform (Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android & even Ouya) turn-based tactical fantasy/cyberpunk MMO is good to go. Despite their difficulty finding funding, the game actually looks remarkably solid already, with a fair amount of gameplay footage being available for viewing on the Kickstarter page.

Can the market bear two related, but fundamentally different Shadowrun games? Well, it could back in the 90s – Shadowrun titles rolled out on both SNES and Megadrive/Genesis consoles, and despite both being great games, they were wildly different. So, I reckon there’s room for two sets of cyber-decking ne’erdowells on the post-cyberpocalyptic streets of Seattle. Congratulations to Cliffhanger Studios (what a name choice, eh?) on funding their game – here’s hoping that development goes smoothly from here on in.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – ‘Shadowrun Online’ Kickstarter Clears Its Goal With Just Hours To Spare

Gravity – the Gay Force – it brings us all together, and stops us from floating off into space. It causes the tides and we’d have 100% less falling-related injuries and casualties if we were to abolish it. Force: Leashed by Kepuli Games isn’t about eliminating gravity, but you do get to control it, albeit in limited form.

Working a bit like Cipher Prime’s Auditorium, but first-person and 3D, and grungy and industrial instead of abstract and musical. Your goal in Force: Leashed is to guide streams of particles from their emitters to a target. To do this, you place floating ‘attractor’ crystals with their own gravitational power, and use them to bend the path of the particle stream to a target goal. Enough successive hits on the target, and your path opens to the next areas, where you do it again with a little more complexity.

Of course, it’s never that simple. The attractors you place (a very limited number of them) are colour-coded, and certain walls will change the colour of the particle stream when bounced off, so you might need one red attractor to bend the stream into a blue wall, then use your remaining blue attractors to bend it the rest of the way to the exit.

This gets more complex the further you play, with ‘wind’ in effect in some areas, blowing certain colours in a certain direction, or emitters that spit out alternating blue & red particles, requiring some more creative attractor placement. While each level does expand a little on a single concept, each new stage usually introduces some fresh element to the gameplay. It shouldn’t take a huge amount of time to conquer the 11 levels (each of which has multiple stages), but there’s some brainteasers in there.

Of course, being developed so quickly, there’s unrefined elements here. There’s some misaligned textures here and there, and the actual movement physics of the particle stream is a little unpredictable. The attractors feel like they might exert a little too much force in too small a radius, often requiring you to slingshot the particles to their target, rather than just precisely bending their course. Still, it’s all very consistent, even if not the most intuitive.

Force: Leashed was originally an entry into the 7 Day FPS development contest, although there’s really not much in the way of shooting going on here. It was later re-entered into the Assembly 2012 game-dev competition and came away with the silver medal. While I think there could have been more done with the aesthetic (it’s all rather Half-Life 1, although it runs on an updated Quake 1 engine), this is a really nice piece of work and worth your time if you’re looking for something brain-teasing to play.

This isn’t the longest or most polished game, but it’s an impressive show of what can be done in a short time these days.  The release of this also reminds me that Assembly 2012 has come, been and done this year. While the results pages haven’t yet rolled out on Demoscene hub Pouet.net, the contest results themselves are in. Force: Leashed is good stuff for sure – we’ll be taking a look at Lavalanche, the #1 prize winner soon.

Force: Leashed is freeware and available to download from the official site now for Windows, Mac & Linux PCs.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Freeware Game Pick – ‘Force: Leashed’

Syrenaica, a small chilean indie game developer, has launched a Kickstarter campaign for their puzzle/defense game Evilot. The game is about a Evil Lord named Count Dolfus who has decided to retire, but the wealth he has amassed to help him retire has gotten him some unwanted attention. Heroes and adventurers alike have begun trying to invade the Evil Lord’s castle and steal the amassed coinage. Fortunately, the Evil Lord has some means for protecting himself.

Count Dolfus can use any number of 15 playable units and 5 summons to help aid him in his castle defense. The game offers a few slight deviations in an attempt to go beyond simple tower defense mechanics by adding in puzzle elements, one of which is a grid based level-up system for units. Three level 1 units in a column will make 1 level 2 unit, 3 level 2 units in a column will make 1 level 3 unit, and so on. The mechanic creates a need for the player to decide whether they want a wall of defense or one strong unit standing in the enemies way.

Acquiring units is similarly interesting. The bigger the combo, the more units the player is able to place. The goal of this was to eliminate the need to collect resources or pay for a unit.

Finally, Evilot includes an original soundtrack made up of 11 songs which are specifically composed for the game. Two of the tracks are available to listen to on the Kickstarter page. The tracks help complement the games length, which spans 50 levels across 5 territories. Evilot promises to be over 8 hours in length; a solid play time for a tower defense game.

The game is currently $3,778 short of its $10,000 goal. Funding launched August 8th and will end on September 7th. Evilot is a Mac, Linux, PC, Android, iOS, and, most interestingly, Ouya game. You can view its Kickstarter page here.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – ‘Evilot’ A Puzzle/Defense Game on Kickstarter

Senscape has been kind enough to provide us all with a brief and entirely interactive glimpse into the world of Asylum, the first and – by that logic – freakiest game to be created using their homegrown Dagon engine.

It’s a point-and-click adventure, set within the hallways of the mysterious Hanwell Mental Institute – the developer’s official stance is to keep quiet about specific plot details. All we can assume so far is that the protagonist has been tasked with an investigation into the recently closed asylum, to uncover ongoings that are no doubt nefarious in nature. It’s a classic setup and, were there not to be some manner of supernatural development down the line, I would be entirely stunned.

I’ve taken my first trip through it, fifteen minutes from beginning to end, and I’m suitably impressed by the atmosphere they’ve created with the engine. It’s Lovecraftian through and through. The player character coughs through the dust within the abandoned rooms. He offers notes and descriptions in a manner that seems entirely well-placed considering his surroundings. There’s fear in his voice, a hint of madness and a foreboding sense of determination to continue with his task. And then there are the inmates, banging and wailing.

If you want to have a go for yourself, head over here to download. The teaser is currently available for PC, Mac and Ubuntu. And if you want to find out more about Asylum, check out the main site, here.

It’s important to note that Senscape have not released this as a demo per se, as the content has been created separately from the main game, but it offers an indication of what we might expect. The full release is expected to be with us next year.

[With thanks to Richard Cobbett for bringing this news to my attention]

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Senscape Release ‘Asylum’ Interactive Teaser

The Negative Possibilities of a Windows 8 Gaming Regime

The recent announcement of an integrated Windows Store within Microsoft’s upcoming operating system could deal a massive blow to the indie gaming community if major game publisher/developer, Valve, is right about their assumptions. By creating a Windows Store (similar, but supposedly more aggressive than Mac’s App Store), Microsoft will be limiting the power of online distribution services such as Steam and Origin immensely, and Steam has already announced that it will be distributing general software in the future as an attempt to keep its foothold. Microsoft representatives have refused to comment either way on how encompassing the Windows Store will be, but if Valve is right, what will this mean for independent game developers?

 Microsoft Takes Higher Cuts, Allows Less Diversification

While reported numbers from indie developers say that Apple takes around 30% of every sale, and that Steam takes around 30-35% of every sale, Microsoft tops most distributors by taking around 35-40% of every sale. With the Windows Store taking the stage, other distributors will also find themselves quickly losing a large amount of their sales. If there is only one major company distributing games, then the diversification of developers will drop drastically. Based upon Microsoft’s current distribution numbers, they will not be able to handle more than 14% of the current independent gaming marketplace. This gap will leave a large number of developers without the type of distribution needed for them to make a living.

On the other hand, the Microsoft Store will provide a singular benefit to indie developers by almost guaranteeing a substantially larger amount of sales (when compared to current independent sales), if a developer happens to be lucky enough to make the cut.

 Microsoft Is Posed To Change Indie Gaming

While Microsoft has yet to take a firm stance on the extent of their Windows Store, their upcoming release of Windows 8 could radically change the face of independent gaming on the PC.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – The Negative Possibilities of a Windows 8 Gaming Regime