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After 7 years of development, Ville and Anne Mönkkönen have released Driftmoon, an adventure/role-playing game set in a charming and colorful fantasy world. The game comes with development tools that you can use to create and share mods. Also, a large demo is available to try out and includes the full editor.
You might remember Ville as the creator of the survival game Notrium from 2003.
Jelly no Puzzle is the latest difficult puzzle game from Qrostar. It shares some similarities with his earlier Hanano Puzzle but has enough changes in the gameplay to make it a new challenge. Mainly, the jelly blocks push each other instead of being switchable.
Qrostar is still making tweaks to the game before finalizing it, but I found the current version very playable. The latest improvement-in-progress should help to compensate for colorblindness through adjustments made to the color values. So, if you have something to report or a comment to share with him, you can head over to his diary to post it. That’s also were you can find a link to download alternate versions of levels 38, 39 and 40 that were replaced during development.
The cult classic survival roguelike UnReal World is now donationware as of version 3.16. Creator Sami Maaranen cites faster releases as the reason for the switch, saying “massive AI, end-game and graphics improvements are underway and I’d like to keep releasing new versions whenever substantial new features are up and running”. People who already own a full license to the game are still entitled to free updates should it ever revert back to a paid scheme (a possibility that Maaranen acknowledges).
Although it’s a lesser-known roguelike, UnReal World has garnered a cult following for its complex combat and survival systems, as well as its unique portrayal of Finnish history and mythology. Unlike many dungeon crawlers, UW is extremely open-ended, allowing the player to play a number of non-combat roles such as hunter, hermit, fisherman, or trader. More often than not, the elements are your worst enemy, and understanding how to survive in an Iron Age Finnish wilderness is one of the game’s major challenges.
This is the first official trailer for The Witness, a first-person puzzle game by Jonathan Blow and his new team. It was shown today at a Sony press event where they unveiled the PS4, the only console that the game will launch on. The other two launch platforms for The Witness are PC and iOS.
The Longest Journey creator Ragnar Tørnquist is kickstarting Dreamfall Chapters, the third game in the popular adventure series and the conclusion to the story of Zoë Castillo. Six years after the release of Dreamfall, Tørnquist is bringing back that game’s core team to develop this third chapter independently through his new studio, Red Thread Games. The Kickstarter has already reached its goal of $ 850,000, but fans may want to earn the project’s rewards or support its stretch goals.
Since hitting its $ 900,000 stretch goal, Dreamfall Chapters will be released on Mac and Linux, as well as PC. The currently-slated release date is in November, 2014.
It’s maybe easiest to compare Antichamber to Portal, but it actually reminds me more of The Manhole, an old children’s adventure title where a boat ride down a river might take you into the teacup of a character you were chatting with earlier. Like that game, Antichamber is constantly subverting your expectations about what is possible, especially with regards to physical space, and gives you a relatively large amount of freedom to explore its interconnected world. However, whereas The Manhole was goalless and sometimes completely random, Antichamber has a logic behind it – a method to its madness – that makes it such an interesting puzzler (and a technical marvel, as well).
There’s no story to speak of in the game and barely even any text. Instead, proverbs are found on posters as you play, encouraging outside and inside-the-box thinking in life and acting as simple metaphors for the game’s puzzles. Antichamber is almost self-referential in this sense, since, according to its press page, the development got it start 7 years ago through “a series of naive programming mistakes” made by its creator, Alexander Bruce. And just as Bruce must have undoubtedly felt surprised, frustrated, and ultimately elated during his development of the game, so should fans of puzzle games that end up playing this terrific title.
Skulls of the Shogun was released today on XBLA and Windows 8/Surface/Phone. Inspired by fast-paced tactics titles like Advance Wars and Fire Emblem, Skulls promises relatively deep and engaging decision-making based around a simple ruleset and a limited number of units (7 total, including the singular General unit). To promote the quick pacing of a match, the game eschews grid-based, menu-based movement – instead, players move their units within a circle that represents the maximum distance they can travel each turn.
On top of a “15-hour” singleplayer campaign and hotseat local multiplayer, Skulls of the Shogun also offers an online multiplayer mode can be played between platforms.
Robit Studios and Chucklefish are collaborating on Treasure Adventure World: a commercial, HD remake of Treasure Adventure Game (a wonderful, freeware Metroidvania from 2011). Their press release shares some of the main changes to expect from the new version:
New engine – smoother gameplay, HD widescreen mode
High-res, hand-drawn art – Christine Crossley is the sole artist bringing the pixelated world of TAG into the beautiful world of HD
New music and sound by Robert Ellis
More treasures and collectibles, remixed puzzles and new equipment
Improvements to enemy AI, more intense boss fights.
Enhanced story – more tightly focused story, intriguing cutscenes, charming NPCs and new multiple endings
There is also some additional info in the Indie Statik post on TAW. Also, those curious about experiencing the game’s earlier incarnations can download Karma as an exclusive bonus from the GOG.com release of TAG.
There’s no need to beat a dead horse but it should be mentioned – yeah, Diablo 3 was a pretty disappointing experience for me, too. It happens. However, just as the third Godfather movie didn’t mean the end of good gangster flicks, neither does the third Diablo game mean the end of good point-and-click action RPGs.
Path of Exile is one of the newer entries to the genre, and the one I’m most excited about. Unlike Torchlight, the theme and graphics are dark, gritty, and almost oppressive. And unlike Grim Dawn, PoE will be available to play later today, as an open beta. Unlike all the other Diablolikes, the game will always be free-to-play, with cosmetic microtransactions being the only source of the developer’s income from it.
One of the biggest problems with Diablo 3 were its lackluster items, which arguably moved the game’s most exciting moments from the dungeon floor to the in-game auction houses. In Path of Exile, however, items are everything – almost literally. Not only can weapons and armor be socketed with active skill gems, but potions and even playable dungeons can be dropped as loot and then enchanted or traded (PoE has no gold and uses on a bartering system instead).
A vast amount of customization seems possible with PoE’s itemization, as well as a
passive skill tree that looks more like a forest. The six starting classes will place you on one end of the tree, but after leveling up enough it’s possible to wind your way over to the opposite side. Certain passive skills, called “Keystone passives” will drastically change the way your character plays.
On top of that, the developers are promising a fun PVP system with leagues and ladders that will last anywhere from one hour to months on end. Could you really ask for anything more of this type of game? Well, an offline mode might be nice, especially on launch day… but if you were willing to put up with “always online” to play Diablo 3, than PoE certainly seems worth it. At the very least, the price is (better than) right!
Links: NeoGaf thread
The Main Competition finalists for the 2013 Independent Games Festival were announced earlier this month and the Student Competition winners were just announced today. New to the Main Competition this year is an Excellence in Narrative Award to honor “innovation, quality, and impressiveness of storytelling in a game, including, but not limited to, scenario, plot construction, story, dialogue, and other major factors”.
The award show will take place at GDC on March 27th, at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. In the meantime, TIGForums members are discussing the results in this thread.
The lists of nominees and Student winners are reprinted below:
Excellence In Visual Art
Incredipede (Northway Games and Thomas Shahan)
Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer)
Guacamelee! (Drinkbox Studios)
Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime (Asteroid Base)
Year Walk (Simogo)
Excellence In Narrative
Thirty Flights of Loving (Blendo Games)
Cart Life (Richard Hofmeier)
Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer)
Dys4ia (Auntie Pixelante)
Gone Home (The Fullbright Company)
Technical Excellence
StarForge (CodeHatch)
Perspective (DigiPen Widdershins)
Little Inferno (Tomorrow Corporation)
Intrusion 2 (Aleksey Abramenko)
LiquidSketch (Tobias Neukom)
Excellence In Design
Samurai Gunn (Beau Blyth)
FTL: Faster Than Light (Subset Games)
Starseed Pilgrim (Droqen & Ryan Roth)
Super Hexagon (Terry Cavanagh)
Super Space ______ (David Scamehorn & Alexander Baard/DigiPen)
Excellence In Audio
Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer)
Bad Hotel (Lucky Frame)
140 (Jeppe Carlsen)
Hotline Miami (Dennaton Games)
Pixeljunk 4AM (Q-Games)
Nuovo Award
[Designed 'to honor abstract... and unconventional game development'.]
Cart Life (Richard Hofmeier)
Spaceteam (Henry Smith)
Dys4ia (Auntie Pixelante)
Bientot l’ete (Tale of Tales)
7 Grand Steps (Mousechief)
MirrorMoon (SantaRagione + BloodyMonkey)
VESPER.5 (Michael Brough)
Little Inferno (Tomorrow Corporation)
Seumas McNally Grand Prize
Hotline Miami (Dennaton Games)
FTL: Faster Than Light (Subset Games)
Cart Life (Richard Hofmeier)
Little Inferno (Tomorrow Corporation)
Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer)
Student Winners
ATUM (NHTV IGAD)
Back to Bed (Danish Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment)
Blackwell’s Asylum (Danish Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment)
Farsh (NHTV IGAD)
Knights of Pen & Paper (Instituto de Ensino Superior de Brasilia & Universidade de Brasilia)
the mindfulxp volume (Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center)
Pulse (Vancouver Film School)
Zineth (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)