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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s been a while since I last talked about ZED Absolution (ZED). It turns out the guys over at Zombie Killers have been working tirelessly on ZED and there has been some big developments.

ZED is a top down gauntlet shooter that takes inspiration from such classics as Smash TV and Robotron 2048, updating this model and bringing it to us in an all new fast paced HD and 3D format, that’s right ZED will support the Oculus Rift.

It seems ZED is getting close to the beta stage, but before the game can reach its completion Zombie Killer will be looking for some additional funding to move ZED over the line. They hope to obtain a little extra funding through the games pre-orders that offer four different packages to suit your every need and range from $15 to $45. Alongside the game you can also buy a rather nice ZED poster to put up and show your support in the real world.

In addition to the pre-orders Zombie Killers are looking to start-up a Kickstarter campaign in the hopes of raising the required capital to finish the game, and maybe implement some of the teams more ambitious ideas. Like any Kickstarter expect to see some rather great physical rewards from soundtracks to models so stay tuned for the launch.

If you would like to find out more about ZED be sure to head over to the all new ZED homepage for additional information about the game. ZED is also looking for additional up-votes on Steam’s Greenlight service, so if you would like to see ZED on Steam be sure to up-vote.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – ‘ZED Absolution’ Gears Up For Fund Raising And Beta

Discord Games is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter for Chasm, a 2D action-RPG featuring procedurally generated Metroid-like dungeons and stylish pixel art. A demo is available for Windows/Mac/Linux on the Kickstarter campaign page, and Discord Games plans to release the game in early 2014, if the campaign is successful. Chasm is inspired by the 2D platformers of the past, and will utilize gamepad support to compliment the game’s retro art-style.

“…this game can not be made without your support,” Discord Games says on the campaign page. ” We’ve been waiting forever for a game like this, but game publishers today just aren’t interested in projects like this one. With your support, we will be able to finish the game ourselves and give you a truly amazing experience.”

After all the recent publicity Richard Hofmeier has been getting for his retail simulator Cart Life I thought it was only appropriate to give it a go myself. Cart Life is a very interesting RPG in which you play as a budding retail entrepreneur looking to start-up in numerous places across the states.

Each character has an object along with some positive and negative traits to make them feel a little bit more realistic and three-dimensional. Overall the story is very interesting and develops in a paced manner that slowly reveals more characteristics about your chosen character.

Not only is the gameplay rather great but so is the graphics style and music creating a very well made game that is just great on every level. Although billed as a retail simulator it does not feel a lot of the time that the retail side is the important part, with the character development making this game so much more.

Average play time – Over an hour

Cart Life is a very interesting game with a lot going for it, it has some rather interesting and in some cases odd minigames which do add to the game overall. Cart Life is largely fun if not frustrating from time to time but if you are a fan of RPG like games or if you are just looking for something a little different be sure to check this one out.

Cart Life can be downloaded from Richard Hofmeier’s official site for free although you can support him with the paid version also.

If you are a developer with A fun indie game that can be played over a coffee break, we want to hear from you! Private message us on twitter @IndieGameMag or shoot us an email at editors@indiegamemag.com with the subject “Indie Intermission” and you could be our indie intermission pick of the day!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today’s Developer Links peek into the development of a puzzle game, an RPG, a party game, and… whatever you fancy calling SpyParty’s genre.

Practice Made Perfect: Super Hexagon (Mode 7)
“Super Hexagon is a brilliant game which is predicated on the relationship between persistence and mastery.  It also might just be a maze having a grand mal seizure.”

One Bug’s Story, Or, Assume It’s A Bug! (SpyParty Blog)
“This is the story of a bug in SpyParty.  This story has a happy ending, because the SpyParty beta testers are amazing, and they are constantly helping find bugs, of course, but they are also constantly helping me reproduce bugs, and narrow down the potential causes of bugs, and triage them, and are generally providing me with incredible support so I can make the game better.”

Driftmoon From A New Angle (Instant Kingdom)
“We’ve just released Driftmoon beta version 0.996! This is the first version featuring our new, tilted viewing angle that we mentioned earlier. It’s available right here. If you haven’t had a chance to try Driftmoon yet, or have patiently been waiting for us to add the angled camera feature, then now is the best time to start playing! And before you ask, yes, the full adventure is all there now, from start to finish.”

Ouya Game Jam Postmortem: Pig Eat Ball (Mommy’s Best Devlog)
“To help invigorate game development for the new console, a game jam was held for the  Android-based ‘Ouya‘ console. It was a bit of an unusual game jam in that it had no specific theme and had some troubles early on (there was a false start and the rules changed a bit along the way). Buuuut once it got going, it turned out pretty fun. And the event, hosted by KillScreen and named the ‘CREATE’ jam ended up being very successful with over 160 games made!”

Super Hexagon Now Available For Blackberry 10 (distractionware: devlog)
“Surprise! Super Hexagon is now available for the new Blackberry 10! This wasn’t originally something I had lined up – the opportunity to do it just sorta came along.”

Twine Bundle, February (Auntie Pixelante)
“here are some twine games i have enjoyed in the past while.”

Mew-Genics Teaser Week 16, The Ballad Of D. Claude! (Team Meat Blog)
“One of my personal faves on the soundtrack, The Ballad Of D. Claude, sheds light on the life of an alley cat from Boone County. The full track is available on Bandcamp free to check out (with lyrics!) and can be purchased for anything you’d like to pay ”

Vexing Puzzle Design (AltDevBlogADay)
“I enjoy a good puzzle.  At my core, I look for patterns in pretty much everything around me and I think we all do to some extent.  Looking for order in chaos is just something that we all do from the time we’re toddlers.  That’s when toddlers aren’t creating chaos, as I’m sure other new parents can attest to.  It’s no surprise that puzzle games are among the most popular games available for mobile devices.  A good puzzle game will keep us captivated for as long as we find it challenging.  I thought I’d take a moment and share my design process as a new game designer working on the puzzle mode for our imminent title, Vex Blocks.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: When Pigs Fly

Earlier today, Steam released a list of ten games which have passed through the gauntlet of approval that is Steam Greenlight. Some of the games listed, were not surprising. Anodyne, for example, just finished a large Pirate Bay promotion campaign that undoubtedly boosted popular opinion of the title. You may remember we featured Distance in an IGM Greenlight feature awhile back. We knew once people knew of Distance, they would have to get their hands on it.

I was surprised to see Receiver on the list, considering the game has been out since late last Summer, and I had not heard of any updates from Wolfire Games since Receiver’s game-jam conception and launch.

The full list of Greenlit games are as follows; we will be examining each of these games closer, in the coming weeks.

Anodyne – Sean Hogan and Jonathan Kittaka
Distance – Refract Studios
Evoland – Shiro Games
Huntsman: The Orphanage – Shadowshifters
Kingdom Rush – Ironhide Game Studio
Legends of Dawn – Dreamatrix Game Studios
Organ Trail: Director’s Cut – The Men Who Wear Many Hats
Receiver – Wolfire Games
Surgeon Simulator 2013 – Bossa Studios
War Thunder – Gaijin Entertainment

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – ‘Anodyne’, ‘Surgeon Simulator’, ‘Organ Trail’, And Others Selected For New Greenlight Batch

UnReal World is a roguelike RPG in which you take the role of an adventurer during the late Iron Age in a randomly generated world inspired by ancient Finland. In a world rich with northern folklore, the player becomes a member of one of nine different cultures and creates their own story of discovery and survival.

UnReal World by Enormous Elk was originally released in 1992, but the team behind it still saw tremendous potential with the system already in place. The game was completely re-written in 1994 as UnReal World version 2.00b. Since then, the game has been continually receiving updates for the last 19 years.

This month, February of 2013, UnReal World will be switching from its current model of pricing to a donation based one. In the past they have given the option to purchase just the current version or buy a subscription to all of the versions. Instead, all of the versions will be free and fans will be able to support the developers with donations.

The new update will also be adding features such as a completely new item selection dialog which will allow the selecting multiple items, item filtering and listing of  non-player items in groups. Commands for filling containers, eating, drinking and other tasks are more smoothly integrated and hunger is being implemented into the animals so that they react out of their own need for survival.

Based on the way so many indies gain their community through their game’s beta phase, it would make sense for us to see more games adopt UnReal World‘s model of constantly receiving updates as long as developers are able to support themselves with it. You can purchase a copy now or keep up with the updates on UnReal World‘s official website.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – ‘UnReal World’ RPG Is Going Free-To-Play Later This Month

Today’s Developer Links are going places, with games going to diverse devices, cats going to the races, and what you can expect if you go to Japan.

Netrunner and Vulnerability (Natural Selection 2)
“Netrunner was a collectable card game released in 1996. While not a major success, it gained a strong cult following. Luckily, the game was re-released in 2012 as Android: Netrunner. The game features bluffing, deduction, unique character identities with special powers, 2 player asymmetric play, deck building, a cyberpunk theme (before it was cool…), and a variety of other game mechanics.”

On Episodic RPGs (Zeboyd Games)
“I can see two main approaches working for an episodic RPG. The first is to have each episode be a direct continuation of the previous episode…”

Rocket Report #1 (Rocket Bear Games Blog)
“Welcome to the first Rrrrocket Report!  I’ve decided to make weekly blog posts about Infested Planet and what I’ve been up to.”

Octodad In The News (1/11/13) (Octodad Blog)
“Sometimes Octodad is in the news, and sometimes people say some nice things about it. Dadliest Catch for instance has been getting a solid amount of attention in people’s “Most Anticipated Games of 2013″ lists. In case you don’t follow us on twitter or like us on facebook we figured it might be good to consolidate all these links to one place of maximum linkage.”

The Video Game Kickstarter Report – Week of January 11 (Zeboyd Games)
“Really quite weak. Only thing of note I noticed was the GameStick – a new console similar to the Ouya in that it lets you play Android games on your TV with a traditional video game controller… When you see stuff like GameStick and Ouya raising hundreds of thousands or even million dollars, it’s easy to think that they’ll be big success but for perspective, many people think the Vita is bombing and Sony has sold well over a million Vitas worldwide. If it’s hard to get serious developers to take the Vita seriously, it’s going to be even harder to get them to want to develop for systems like the Ouya that probably will never even reach a million systems sold.”

A Game Developer’s Take on Japan: The Myths and the Reality (Kotaku)
“One well-received and much commented-on blog post I wrote many years ago covered the “stages of living in Japan”. These are the 5 stages I have witnessed, again and again, in myself and in others, and though your mileage may of course vary, they seem pretty spot on. I daresay they could be applied to living in any country.”

Mew-Genics Teaser Week 12 (Team Meat Blog)
“Is your cat in shape? has he taken his pills? has he had a good nights sleep? does he have ADD? what about a few extra legs? Either way i think you should try your luck in the sewers and join Franks Cat Races, you could find your fortune there! or maybe a few magical poopies!”

Games Everywhere: The Game Industry’s Challenge For 2013 (Gamasutra)
“At CES 2013 last week, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang succinctly laid out the challenge facing the games industry at large in his opening remarks at the Nvidia press conference on Sunday evening: ‘It isn’t possible for you to enjoy the same video game on any device.’ Where the iPod, the Kindle, and the cloud have enabled consumers to consume music, books, and movies whenever and however they pleased, Huang said the challenge for the consumer tech companies is to invent the technology to make this happen with video games.”

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Dev Links: Big Daddy

We often joke that Zynga-style social games involve clicking virtual cows and spamming friends’ Facebook walls. A new Facebook game, Tip The Cows, uses just these elements as a prototype for a future transmedia game experience.

In CowClicker, Ian Bogost’s Facebook game hilariously satirizing Facebook games, players are asked to click a virtual cow, earn clicks by clicking, or paying premium currency, and then invite their friends to do the same. Players can also share their progress on their Facebook walls, or see their friends’ progress that way. The joke’s on Zynga-style Facebook games, where the vast majority of interactions are not what most of us would consider gameplay. But it’s playable, too, so it causes players to think about player motivations in click-wait-click social games, as they click the cows. (CowClicker has recently taken Farmville satire to a new level, and you now click the empty space where your cow used to be.)

Tip The Cows is less a satire than a proof-of-concept, but it distills the social side of Facebook sharing and leaderboard competition to its most basic elements. The game is part of a capstone creative project by students studying Animation Graphic Game Programming at New Hampshire Technical Institute.  Kyle Lambert is the main developer in Flash and Facebook, and Dan Chamberlain is the project backend and server programmer.

Gameplay involves earning points by clicking the cows that appear on your virtual field. Players can then share their scores on their Facebook wall. The game takes a maximum of thirty seconds, but can be played indefinitely, without waiting or paying in.Find and click the golden cow, and you can send special wall spam, er, a special Tip The Cows message to the students’ advisor, Greg Walek, a professor of game animation and design at NHTI.

Disclosure: Greg is my friend from college and while I’m quite interested in his social game experiment, I would also enjoy watching his Facebook wall blow up with game spam. Yeah, yeah, working prototype for a larger experience, blah, blah, student creativity, yeah, the real highlight of this game is spamming my friends.

The developers say that Tip The Cows is an early proof-of-concept in what will become a larger transmedia game experience, creating games based around the idea that “what you do in one game should and will affect another. For example, we are planning to have items only in one game, but usable in another level. “ Walek says.

I hope these Golden Cows I keep tipping onto Greg’s wall will come in handy later on.