Today is a rather different gaming experience to what I generally do here, but that said it is still a great game and gives the player a fantastic and rather unique experience. This Is How Bees Work may not be biologically accurate in its portrayal of bees, it does however create a rather great gaming experience that you are not going to want to miss.

This Is How Bees Work has been created by Super Flat Games and is much more of an interactive experience then an actual game. You play the role of a cloud in a empty and barren landscape, it is your job to water the fertile ground to sprout new flowers for the bees to pollinate.

As you create more and more flowers the bees in return allow more flora to develop and slowly you begin to create your very own Garden Of Eden. This Is How Bees Work has been lovingly created using a vibrant and highly vivid colour scheme that really makes for fantastic visual that go hand in hand with the lovingly created pixel art style chosen.

You can really just get lost in this game and while away time just admiring your creation as you create. Its a rather simple idea and one I have not quite seen executed in this particular way before, but it is rather Zen.

Average play time – 5 minutes

Somedays you just need to break away from the monotony of life and become absorbed into something altogether more vibrant and engaging. This Is How Bees Work is a fantastic way to escape from the dull winter world and be transported into something altogether wonderful.

This Is How Bees Work can be downloaded from the TIGForums, and be sure to check out Super Flat Games official website for other interesting and inspiring games.

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even the most humble of dabbling fighting game players has heard of Evo, the worlds largest fighting game tournament, and sponsored by countless corporate entities. Many bad dudes enter, a scant few bad dudes leave with fabulous cash prizes and immense bragging rights. There’s a new aspect to it this year, though – a range of indie games (some fighting, some less so, as listed in this Shoryuken forum thread) are going to be showcased at the event. I’m already jealous of those who get to play them, as it’s a rather exciting bunch of competitive and arcadey concepts.

Continuing its long tour of places where I can’t play it yet, Messhof’s Nidhogg makes another appearance. By all accounts, it’s a very finely tuned piece of low-fi arcade swordfighting, with the battle swashbuckling it’s way across several arenas, and culminating in the victor being devoured by a giant flying worm-monster. As you do. This’ll be it’s toughest workout yet – fighting game fans are a notoriously critical lot, and if there’s even the slightest hint of lag to the controls or imbalance to the gameplay, they’ll tear it apart.

For laughs, they’re also going to be letting people play Divekick, a brutal parody of fighting games in general. There is diving, and kicking and even dive-kicking! It’s thrilling stuff, worthy of the most challenging of all challenges at the tournament of tourneys. Either this’ll help players decompress after losing to a continually dive-kicking opponent in the main tourneys, or it’ll send them into full PTSD shock. Either way, somebody wins!

Capy’s time-looping Contra-esque Super Time Force will also be playable. Not exactly competitive, but it looks like a ridiculous amount of fun. The gimmick being that each time you die, you go back in time and play alongside your previous life. If you manage to save yourself from whatever killed you last time, your now-rescued self becomes a checkpoint, allowing you to push further in. Simple and low-fi, but a great idea.

Aztez is also going to be on show. An interestingly minimalist-looking open-plan brawler/fighting game with a cool Mesoamerican theme and a cool tri-color (black, white & red) palette. The developer – as heard in the slightly profane gameplay video below – seems quite enthusiastic about testing the game to death and picking apart his own mistakes, so it might well be a good fit for the toughened Evo crowds. Perhaps this outing could be considered extreme playtesting?

The deliciously retro Barabariball will be there, too. Looking like a bizarre lovechild of Super Smash Bros, Volleyball and something from the Atari 2600, it really does look like a fun competitive party game, and there’s something strangely charming about the mix of modern ‘casual’ brawler mechanics and super-retro aesthetics. Can’t wait to try a more public build of the game.

A bit more of a solo brawler, Super Comboman looks like it has some talented artists behind it, if nothing else. It’ll be nice to hear how the game is shaping up – the last time we saw anything really concrete of it was the gameplay trailer below, which was released over a year ago now. Everything could have changed since then, or nothing. Either way, punching stuff + collapsing physics-driven worlds is a winning combination in my book, so it has my interest if nothing else.

And lastly, the everpresent SpyParty – a game always lurking in the shadows of indie news lately. It’s definitely a competitive game, but not as we know it. One player controls an almost Sims-esque character, tasked with infiltrating a party for the rich and famous and completing various objectives. The other player controls a sniper, watching in through the window for the slightest hint as to who is the spy. It’s a game of psychology and learning, as one player is trying to act as much like an NPC as possible, and the other one is searching for human-like actions that don’t match the AI code. For a game set in a single room, there’s a lot of potential depth here.

It’s a strange lineup, but I’m already incredibly jealous of those folks travelling to Vegas to take part in the festivities. The tournament of tournaments and the indie showcase will be happening from July 6th to July 8th, and only the strong will survive.

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   ‘Megabyte Punch’ Has A Playable Demo Worth Fighting For

The developers of Satazius, Astro Port, have released their top-down tank shmup Super Tank Warfare: ADVENTIA to Japanese players; for everyone else there’s the demo and it’s definitely worth playing!

We’re not sure of the exact details of the storyline for Super Tank Warfare, but it’s set just shortly after World War II when a secret military base is set-up and develops devastating technology in a ploy to take over the world – that kind of thing. You’ll be playing as a squadron of chirpy ladies who are clearly out to stop them. There are five of them altogether and each of them correspond to a different gun for your tank, you can select up to three. There’s some great variation between each of the guns too, from the standard one-shot to a spread shot and even huge balls of electric which can be used while you hide behind cover.

Super Tank Warfare is of course an arcade game through and through so the levels are fairly short but they make up with that with huge explosions to complement the meaty shooting. The tank isn’t the most maneuverable of vehicles of course, so anticipating the enemies fire is quite essential. Most of them don’t fire that often but the bigger ones will take quite the pounding in order to distract you while the smaller ones attempt a flanking maneuver. Later into the demo you’ll also have mines to dodge and turrets to deal with, or even turn against your opponents.

Then of course you have your big boss tanks to deal with. There’s only two of them in the demo and both are pretty easy to take down as their attacks are very easy to dodge. Still very fun though. After each level you can use the experience gained to upgrade each of your guns, movement speed and armor. Your health will also be replenished a little, which does mean that you won’t start off every level with full health.

Download the demo for Super Tank Warfare yourself, we highly recommend it – just click on this link and it’s all yours.

You can find out more information about Super Tank Warfare: ADVENTIA over on the game’s official website.

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   Shovel, Where?: ‘Miner Warfare’ Gets PC Release On Pay-What-You-Like Basis

“We believe that developers should have the freedom to price their games how they like” is how the prose begins over on the Because We May website. This is an effort started by Ron Carmel as a means to celebrate the digital stores that grant indie developers the freedom to set their own prices; primarily the App Store, Google Play and Steam but IndieCity, Indievania and Desura are certainly stores that fit the criteria.

Celebration takes the form of encouraging indie game developers to discount their games on the site during the last week of May, and it seems to have proven very popular with about 180 developers signing up to endorse the site’s message (that of freedom of pricing on those stores). The discounts rolled out today with, we imagine, many eager wallets springing open and gobbling up the many quality indie games available at such low prices.

Take a look at that image above just one more time. Do you see it? Sos Sosowski’s Super Office Stress is set at $99.99. Hardly the low price discount that every other developer has sided with for their game in accordance with the encouragement by Carmel and the other organizers. So what’s going on here?

A few developers have taken a different approach to being able to set their prices as they see fit, and as we’ve heard previously it’s one that disagrees with the “race to the bottom” that discounts, bundles and sales arguably encourage.

Earlier today Michael Brough (aka smestorp) wrote up a blog post about indie game pricing in reaction to the Because We May discounts. He recounts that upon first hearing about the organized sale that he thought it irrelevant to himself, saying that he had never had a problem with being able to set his prices as he sees fit and therefore it coming across as a weird thing to celebrate.

“But thinking about it some more, maybe I am indirectly affected”, Michael writes. “I’m affected by expectations of what the costs of games should be, for what a game of a particular cost should look like. I’m not entirely free to set prices how I like, if I need anyone to buy them.”

Michael’s most prominent point is that most indie games are attractive to only a small audience so they aren’t likely to sell in big numbers. Therefore you are going to want to put a high enough price on them if you wish to cover your costs without losing too many sales. He argues that he has to set the price higher per unit than another developer who is pushing many thousands of sales.

“So while I kind of get the point of this sale, I feel like it’s going about things backwards. Dropping prices – well hey, they might be too low already, the thing to celebrate is being able to set them higher. Get out of this race to the bottom.”

Michael has adopted what we’re calling an ‘anti-sale mentality’ by selling Vertex Dispenser at $15.01, “antidiscounted” from $9.99, and Glitch Tank and Zaga-33 have both been priced to $6.99, anti-discounted from $1.99 and $0.99 respectively.

This is what Sos Sosowski has partaken in by setting Super Office Stress at $99.99; as a means to fight against this “race to the bottom” that has been ongoing due to the abundance of bundles and sales that offer indie games at very low prices. The result of this could be that players learn to wait for these regular sales in order to spend their money on indie games, therefore devaluing them and often being called out for being priced too high in places, when in fact they may not be.

We spoke to Sos to find out his reasoning behind putting the price of his game up so high in the Because We May discounts:

“Actually I wanted to set the price this high just for a day for some time. Then I heard about Because We May and thought it was great and wanted to join in! Then I realised I am unable to discount [Super Office Stress] since the price is determined by dice roll anyway, so I thought it was a good opportunity to pull this off. I think that since we celebrate being able to set the price whatever we want, why not put it this high?!”

“I think it proves a valid point. It seems a bit ironic that indie developers, who are probably kind of poor already, celebrate setting the prices even lower and I hope to display that you can actually do what you want and you will never know how it goes unless you try!”

“Thus I think that anti-discounts nail the point of Because We May and provide a fair balance.”

Someone else who has read the post by Michael Brough is Jon Brodsky, who has developed his own games as a solo developer but currently works at Lucky Frame, producing catchy iOS titles. He has set-up of more an experiment with the pricing during these discounts – selling his solo title, Wiresq at the anti-discounted price of $6.99 on the App Store and has revealed his reasoning for doing so:

“With digital goods, the relationship between the price and the production cost is really hard to determine. Wiresq has been out for over a year, and while I think it is an interesting product, it is extremely niche”, he told us.

“I also have the historical perspective to see that I earned well below minimum wage for the time that I worked on it, discounting any intangible gains I made. [Lucky Frame] is participating in the Because We May sale as well, with Pugs Luv Beats, so it will be interesting to see if discounting makes us more money than raising the price.”

Jon’s two price point experiment reflects, at least in part, the efforts of Sophie Houlden’s “pay-when-you-want” sale, which Michael brought up in his seminal blog post. The point being made here by these developers is that the discounts encouraged by the Because We May sales are slightly hypocritical, and that seems to be a valid point.

This could, for some, feed directly into this “race to the bottom” which sees players being taught to buy indie games only when they are on sale or as part of a bundle, which might have the effect of devaluing them too. This causes a problem when indie game developers need to set their prices slightly higher to cover their costs, but players perceive normal pricing as too steep and would prefer to skip the purchase and hope to see the game in a sale at some point.

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Dutch indie developers are amongst some of the exciting out there and Indievelopment 2012 has invited some of the very best to conduct talks on May 16th in Utrecht, Netherlands. How they have managed to grab such a good roster of studios together we don’t know (we suspect offerings of drinks), but it’s definitely not an event to miss if you are able to attend.

The day will kick off with Ronimo Games giving a talk, they of course being the developers behind the recently released Awesomenauts. Then Tale of Tales and Game Oven Studios will take to the stage, The Graveyard and Fingle being their most famous games respectively. Of course, Tale of Tales are Belgian – getting there before we’re called out on that.

After lunch, Goosegogs (German) and Stolen Couch Games will deliver talks about their experiences in game development with their releases Goosegogs and Kids vs. Goblins respectively.

The big talk to finish off the day comes from the marvellous Vlambeer of Super Crate Box fame. Coincidentally, we attended a talk given by Vlambeer not so long ago which you can read a summation of here.

A very good lineup if we do say so ourselves. The day-long event will take place in ‘t Zand Maarssen and a ticket can be bought for €7,50 through this payment form.

More information on Indievelopment 2012 can be found over on the official website.

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Look, we’re not trying to insinuate anything about your working conditions, nor are we inclined to advocate brutal physical assault, but have you ever felt, for just a second at least, that you’re verging ever closer to inciting an office-based rampage? Haven’t you been just the slightest bit tempted to respond to your line manager’s request to print off an extra hundred quarterly reports by jamming the photocopier into his rectal canal and and stapling a pack of post-it notes to his urinary tract?

Official disclaimer: We certainly haven’t. That would be illegal. And blood stains take ages to wash out your jacket.

Super Office Stress, a third-person action roguelike produced by Sos Sosowski for the recent Indie Buskers 48 hour game jam and aims to scratch that masochistic itch by allowing players to unleash gut-busting hell in a multi-story office environment. We’re being quite literal here – as you make your way up this roguelike’s many levels, you’ll be ripping colleagues to shreds in order to reach a goal within the allotted time limit.

Sos has been working on the game after the Buskers event and now has it ready in a state at which he is happy to let people purchase once again. Super Office Stress will be released today in its updated state and to accompany it is a brand new trailer from which you can soak up the quirky madness.