Roguelikes are becoming quite the hot thing to develop at the moment, and why? More than likely because they can offer players a high dose of replayability and they are something that small developers can put can adequately achieve. It’s all about the procedural generation folks. Even more so with the dungeons. Combine both of those things together and that is exactly what The Crystal Catacombs has to offer. Though it’s a lot more than just that too.

Rendered in those familiar, but colorful, big pixels and in a 2D form, The Crystal Catacombs has you taken up the role of treasure hunter Captain Vasil Ravencraft. He encounters the fabled catacombs and it is you who needs to guide him through them, over and over and over again. But you’ll never have the same experience twice, and thus reveals the beauty of the roguelike. The Crystal Catacombs contains seven Crystal Realms to travel through altogether; each unique due to their random concoctions of enemies, traps, hazards, treasures and bosses.

Essential to this type of game are those all-important magical artefacts, which can offer you some extra powers to aid you. The Double Jump Boot, Dragon Armor, Crystal Skull and Grapple Spikes and many more are yet to be found. You won’t just rely on these alone though – choosing your class from the start will affect your playing style and gaining experience points to level up with will cause you to become a force to be reckoned with. Well, maybe not.

Unfortunately, as great as all of this sounds, The Crystal Catacombs is only about 40% complete and you’ll never guess what – the developers are looking for funding on Kickstarter. This is actually the second time the game has been submitted to Kickstarter as last time it failed – sad face. Maybe this time we can make it work though, yes?

The funding is to recruit people to make the game sound, look and play even better. Plus you can secure yourself a copy of the game or help design it, be in it and so on. More information over on the Kickstarter page and the game’s official blog.

Amongst the longest running indie developers still churning out games to this very day (since 1994), Spiderweb Software will be getting the Steam bundle treatment very shortly as it has been registered on the digital distributor.

To be precise, it is the second Avernum trilogy which is included in this newly registered bundle. That includes Avernum IV, V and VI which were originally released in 2005, 2007 and 2009 respectively. These are RPGs that are fairly old school in their nature but a lot of fun because of it. You’ll be trekking over fantasy ground with your party of heroes at a 45 degree angle and entering into turn-based combat to take down your foes.

The second trilogy is currently available from Spiderweb as single purchases at $20 or as a trilogy for $45, so presumably this Avernum Bundle on Steam will be quite a bit less than that for a limited time at launch and will then revert to a higher price after that. The games are listed only as Windows versions in the registry but we presume that they will also be available on Mac.

Avernum: Escape From The Pit was released only weeks ago (our review here) and is the start of an effort to remake the original Avernum trilogy, so hopefully you’ll be able to own all six of the games in modern versions soon. Look out for the Avernum Bundle on Steam shortly, probably in the next few days.

More information on the Avernum series can be found over on the official website.

Ones for vibrant graphics and fairly sound gameplay, Questtracers are working on their latest title known only as Project Scylla, but now you can get a proper look at some WIP gameplay. Straight away you’ll notice the thick bold lines around Project Scylla which give the game a kind of friendly comic book feel, despite the depths of space staring at you in every direction. The jump into a full 3D world for Questtracers has quite clearly been successful, at least on the visual considerations.

Though Questtracers have mostly retained the cartoon vibe as seen in their previous games, Easter Avenger Ex and Kukoo Machines being prime examples, Project Scylla definitely pertains to a more core gaming experience. This is primarily because it’s a shmup based in space and there’s a whole legion of people who dedicate themselves to games of this type.

How does Project Scylla add up though? One particular thing that stands out in this early gameplay is the character communication, as they argue with each other and talk to the player, quite alike Star Fox with less animals and more headgear. The rest of the gameplay, as in the shooting part, seems pretty simple and not all that challenging but the game looks worth playing for its presentation and delivery in general.

If the backlog of games from Questtracers is anything to go by, then Project Scylla will be a free game and we already know it will be playable in a browser. So considering the quality of it, this should be a pretty impressive free browser game to play through.

More information on Project Scylla can be found on the developer’s official website.

What if LSD: Dream Emulator was made nowadays? Well, there’s no need to imagine it because that’s what surreal exploration game, TRIP, basically is.

Unfortunately we didn’t hear about TRIP prior to this date, because if we had we could have funded it and got ourselves into the playable alpha. Nothing we can do about it now though. What we can do, on the other hand, is to tell you about it and stare at its imagery, dribbling a little bit.

Pitched an art game and even cited to be a remake of LSD: Dream Emulator with a slight twist, TRIP is headed for PC and Mac. The troubling thing is that it was originally said to be ready for purchase in late April…maybe not then. The game is presumably finished though, or so we surmise by going through the jumbled development blog, but a release seems to be hanging around if imminent.

Enough of these boring words though! More screenshots are demanded:

More information on TRIP can be found on the game’s official website.

Thanks Gather Your Party!

Proving that being late to the party doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy yourself, Quick Fingers made Obsolescence in just 24 hours, though you wouldn’t be able to tell otherwise. Keeping with the theme of LD23, Obsolescence pits the human race at the very terminus of our existence and, as if a parasite, we have eaten up the resources of all the big planets and all that is left are dwarf planets, with minimal resources and space to spread our wide girth. The idea of the game, then, is to survive for as long as possible.

You’ll start Obsolescence off on a small planet and taught to rotate it with the mouse. In this game, your concern is not managing the planet – your thoughts are at all times with finding the next planet for which to send the termite-like humans to chew up next. As decades fly by every second, skyscrapers and homes are erected upon the planet and you’ll see the resources bar slowly deteriorate.

The gameplay itself actually revolves (literally) around paying attention to the radial dial around the planet and launching probes off into space missions. Once a few seconds have passed, decades or centuries in game time, the probe will return with feedback of its journey. What you don’t want is for it to bring back no results, which can happen. The least you can hope for are readings of photosynthesis which indicate a planet and the feedback will tell you how many degrees away this is from your last launch point – you’ll have to guess whether to rotate left or right. With a guesstimate or with pure luck your probe will come within the vicinity of a nearby planet and it will tell you how many nearby planets there are and how the resources are on said planet. You’ll be given the option to colonize that one and then the cycle carries of, or to stay on the current one and hopefully find a more resource rich planet. The more planets you colonize the tougher things go on, but the gameplay never changes, just the countdown becomes more pressured.

This is a game with a pretty bleak outset and the game’s presentation adequately matches that. I absolutely love the sounds in Obsolescence, merely because sci-fi whirrs and beeps are fun to hear. But it’s more than that too – a gentle piano and ambiance really creates a tone to match the game’s outset and gameplay. Everything is a bit of a panic for you, but inevitably this is the damnation of the human race, as the game says in its introduction, “These are end times” and that permeates through the game.

Initially, I thought that Obsolescence could have done with something to vary up the gameplay as things progress. Perhaps some very light research elements, such as spending resources to make another probe or research a probe that travels quicker, or tells exact locations of nearby planets when it issues feedback. I then came to the decision that to do this, the game would have had to be made a little slower in order to give the player time to do such things. This would mar the experience, adding more to it or slowing it down, simply because the game captures desperation and hopelessness in its simplicity – a race against death.

Obsolescence isn’t the greatest thing ever made, but it captures the atmosphere it sets out to very well and supplies that feeling in its gameplay too. Considering this is a 24 hour effort, it’s pretty remarkable, though I still think something could be added to it to make progression feel more worthwhile over than a highscore. Then again, as things progress, you feel more hopeless as the human race dwindles and begin to lose hope as they swallow planets before you can find another suitor for them to move on to. Perhaps it’s fine as it is after all.

You can rate Obsolescence over on the Ludum Dare page, where you can also download it. You may prefer to play in your browser though, in which case, head over to Kongregate.

As a kid I had a fairly solid idea of what I *thought* multiplayer video games would be like in the future. They would be all about cooperation on a grand scale – players working in harmony with one another as cogs in some grandiose social machine. Like a tank crew, each player would do their part to ensure the continued effectiveness of their team as a whole, with the most efficient team being declared the winner at the match’s end. Yes, that’s right; I thought multiplayer games were going to turn into Commie simulators.

You may have noticed that, with a few notable exceptions, things kinda went in the opposite direction to my Soviet fantasies. Games became far more about personal glory rather than teamwork, with only high tier players even acknowledging the existence of their allies. But that’s what gave me an instant affinity towards Ludosoft’s AirBuccaneers HD, a game where I can finally live out my dreams of coordination and unity. Also, it’s about combat blimps, which is totally badass.

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As expected for a title that’s in a early alpha state, the thing’s pretty clunky right now. Controls are slightly awkward, certain mechanics don’t function quite right and the graphics are rather underwhelming. But even in this relatively early build, one thing above all else is abundantly clear: this game is so damn fun*!

*Provided there’s enough players around.

The basic idea is that each team serves as crew aboard a small armada of cannon equipped blimps, which are all styled as pirate ships and viking longboats. While one player acts as the ship’s helmsman, the rest of the deckhands run around taking care of other vital tasks such as loading different kinds of ammo, spotting enemy vessels, laying air mines, lighting fuses, aiming said cannons or even boarding nearby ships for a bit of hand-to-hand combat.

These tasks aren’t quite as straightforward as they may sound at first, though. For one thing, the cannons have no cross hair or other such aiming aid, so firing on enemy ships requires you to be constantly accounting for each ship’s speed, height and trajectory in order for your shots to hit anything meaningful. Yes, sometimes it can become a tad frustrating when you miss your mark ten times in a row. But this trial and error approach also creates a rising sense of tension that slowly builds up every time your aim inches ever closer to that optimum firing angle, a sensation that’s only heightened when you realise your counterpart on the opposing ship isn’t too far off the mark either.

And that moment when you manage land the killing blow before he does? Man, it’s honestly one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve ever had in a multiplayer game. The glory ain’t just reserved for the gun crew, though. As the captain, correctly outmaneuvering a rival skipper while giving your gunnery boys a clean shot is just as good as landing the blows yourself. And so too is plunging head first into the melee a part of a boarding party or any number of other tasks that further the war effort in your team’s favor. When everyone plays their part, everyone reaps the reward…….. comrade.

/> While the visuals still have a long way to go on a technical level, that doesn’t stop the large scale multi-ship battles looking absolutely glorious! Just think of it: a half-dozen or so ships sailing through the clouds, each filled with soldier dudes working feverishly towards a single goal while cannonballs and rockets fly across the battlefield like a medieval fireworks display. All this, interrupted only by the occasional roaring battle cry as one of the vessels descends to the earth in a gigantic fireball alongside the bodies of her vanquished crew. It’s a sight like no other, one that I reckon could make AirBuccaneers HD a must-play multiplayer experience once it goes gold.

The only thing that’s really capping its potential right now is the player count. Even more so than most multiplayer shooters, AirBuccaneers HD requires a relatively decent number of players on each side for it to really come into its own. From my experience with it so far, I’d say that number’s around 8 or so players on each team. That might not sound huge, but being a relatively low-profile alpha game, it’s rare to see more than a handful of players online at once outside of the occasionally prearranged showdowns with the developers. You can play with fewer players if you really want, but I’ve found that those games tend end up as zero sum slogs that’re no fun for either team regardless of who “wins”.

I assume there might be some AI bots or something in the full version, which would go a long way to mitigate this issue if they’re smart enough to put up a decent fight. Regardless, in its currently unfinished state, AirBuccaneers HD is already an absolute blast to play, and manages to provide a special kind of gratification you just don’t get very often in video games. Shooter fans with a heavy cooperative bent better keep a close eye on this one and make sure to give it a whirl when it finally hits. Hell, play it right now while it’s still free! The more scallywags, the merrier!

You can currently join in on the AirBuccaneers HD Open Alpha over on the official site. Alternatively, you can pick up the original Unreal Tournament 2004 mod here.

This panel was packed full of great information for indies and we got a lot of great information about Kickstarter game projects. The panel started with Awkward Hug talking about their successful campaign.  They wanted to great an augmented reality game about sock puppets and sought out $7500.

Awkward Hug researched the KS blog and realized that most successful KS campaigns ask for less than $5,000.  They found that 75% of their contributions came from within their circle (fans, family, friends, facebook, twitter, existing player base, etc.) so they encouraged their backers to evangelize and market their project.  Video is crucial for your project and should be less than 5 minutes but cut to the point since most people only watch the first 20 seconds.

Cindy from Kickstarter then took over and shared some excellent information about games on Kickstarter.  First off the games category is broken down into Video Games (51%), Board/Card (31%) and General (17%). On Kickstarter, the average success rate of projects is around 45%. Video Game Projects on Kisckstarter only have a success rate of around 25%! Pledges from within the Kickstarter site come mostly from the category discovery page or search; the homepage is the 5th referrer. The highest external referrers are BoardgameGeeks.com, followed by Facebook and then Twitter.

So what does the average game project look like on Kickstarter? Cindy revealed that most game projects ask for $5400. If they’re successful, they typically bring in $11,200 with an average of 136 backers who each contribute around $42. She closed by touching on the sweet spot for games saying that everyone should really try to push contributors to the $25 donation point and offer really great rewards there. It’s also good to offer your game or something significant at the $10 price point as well.

While you’re here and we’re talking crowdsourcing, don’t forget about 8-Bit Funding which IGM is now behind – there’s no region lock, you can give people rewards and you get the support and advice that we can give you as a bonus!