Category Archives: Indie Games

Plague Inc: Evolved, Eradicate Humanity!

Posted on by thre3zekiel

PIE_Logo

 

So I wiped out 99% of humanity today and still fucking lost!  Plague Inc: Evolved is a game for the strategic mastermind in all of us.  Take control of an infectious disease, evolve and kill everyone ever known by everyone you’ve ever known.

This title starts out simple enough, but gives you an idea of the scope you are dealing with in order to get there.  Initially you can only control a bacteria, but later organisms include prions, viruses, nano-viruses parasites fungi and some things I have never fucking heard of.  You then name your virus.  In prior Plague Inc titles (previously known as Pandemic) I always named my disease something insidious sounding like Writhing Death or The Manacles.  I lost every time.  So one day I made a disease named Booty Shoe out of denominational ennui.  Booty shoe eradicated the world population.  So this one got to be Nut Slipper.  I started Nut Slipper out in Indonesia, and altogether solid start location for any disease.  It has ports for oceanic export, planes for aerial export and it’s a warm, moist climate, which puts it two evolutions away from stepping out into the greater world.  Plague Inc seems to have 3 phases of play.  It’s not actually a part of the game, but the way the flow of the game seems to develop.  I call these phases initial spawn, transmission and eradication.  In initial spawn, you get DNA points for evolution from a few gameplay milestones in the beginning.  This is where your disease starts in its natal region and starts to breed.  When you spread out little by little to people in your starting country, Indonesia in this case, you’ll see little red and orange bubbles appear.  Pop these for the DNA points to evolve your disease.

Exponential infection rates and the game gets excited over a few thousand? Psh.

Thousands of nuts are apparently warm and cozy. Why is this bad?

In Plague Inc, you don’t order your little bacteria where you want them.  Consider the game a simulation of the spread of a potential disease.  Your disease will spread on its own in an organic fashion across the various methods.  You control the disease by mutating it, granting it new characteristics along the way.  These characteristics fall into three categories: transmission, abilities and symptoms.  Transmission is how the disease is carried from one host to another.  These can be things like livestock, insects, air, water etc.  Being in Indonesia, I evolved air and water right away.  Now, the game also made it so that transmission via water would be hard off the bat for my disease.  Something about sanitizing boats.  But evolving that water transmission negated the effect.  Nothing would stop Nut Slipper from sailing the seven seas!  This brings us to where you are spreading to every country in the transmission phase.  You get DNA points for spreading to new countries and infecting large portions of the population.  People don’t need to know you are around yet, but you get the DNA points for infections.

Now one of the things that you get concerned about really fast is how well your disease spreads to other countries.  Does it like the climate?  How rapidly does it spread? Do they use class 3 or 4 antibiotics?  All legitimate concerns.  It used to be that getting your disease into Madagascar was a sure-fire win, but now fully infecting Greenland, Canada and other cold-climate countries is the true challenge.  Your disease will spread the slowest in these locations and if you get lethal too soon, you’ll kill the hosts before they can spread it to other people.  That is a no-go.

Only fifty-one percent of the world population is dead!? Time to step up my game.

Only fifty-one percent of the world population is dead!? Time to step up my game.

Once you have enough people eating, drinking and breathing in your disease it’s time to start the extinction of humanity!  This is my favorite part because once people start dying the music, which has sinister techno-ambiance, goes from ominous to downright fucking creepy.  It starts off with the EKG heart monitor noises woven into it just below audibility and the moves on to include some kind of sirens.  I think they might be the noise that ambulances make in countries not mine.  Ours are pretty obnoxious.  Either way, it moves on to people hacking and coughing and children singing ring around the rosey.  Awesome, ambient and creepy as fuck.

Now the extinction of humanity won’t be reached by making your disease resistant and transmissible alone, and this is where it gets tough.  In the eradication phase you get DNA points for wiping out populations and destabilizing governments.  Symptoms are the method for reaching these goals.  If you take symptoms too early in the transmission phase, your disease will be detected and cured fairly rapidly.  Take symptoms too late and you will not have enough points to develop the truly lethal symptoms.  Occasionally you will spawn random symptoms, but the game can be paused in order to devolve those and earn some DNA points.  With your bacteria, you want to aim for 70% – 79% of global infection to start taking symptoms, and when you take them take them fucking hard.  When I pump up the symptoms I will take them 3 – 4 at a time and let them go.  People start dropping dead faster than the game even knows how to react, and by the time the first death hits the news, hundreds of thousands are lying in their living rooms clinging fecklessly to their last breaths.  Even with Nut Slipper taking the world by storm, I was still greeted with this fucking screen at the end.

ninety-nine point nine percent of the world is dead and it is not considered a goddamn victory

ninety-nine point nine percent of the world is dead and it is not considered a goddamn victory

I am only partially joking about that, too.  I wiped out 99.9% of humanity and it was still not considered a fucking victory!  To give you an idea, the people who survived lived in Greenland, Canada, Italy and Sweden.  Everyone else in the entire fucking world was dead.  My problem was that I took symptoms around 65% world infection and killed all my hosts too fast.  I have no fucking clue how Italy, of all goddamn places, fucking survived, either.  I guess they didn’t go to the Olympics in London that year…   Granted none of them survived unscathed, but they survived.  One of the more fun features of this game is how you can make spectacular effects occur, like projectile vomiting, by combining various symptoms.  Projectile vomiting occurs when you have coughing and vomiting at the same time.  Once you have started to wipe out the population of planet Earth, people will start to do research in an attempt to survive.  This is signified by a blue plane that flies around.  You can slow them down by clicking little blue bubbles, too, but the best part is when you stop research by killing everyone in a country.  Then the country just goes dark as everyone slowly collapses.  This game is a tough one, but rewarding for the strategic enthusiast.  It can be gotten for 14.99$ on Steam and.. wait this is early access?  Well for an early access game, this one sure is well done.  Worth the money, in my honest opinion.  It also feels like one of those games that some people think might save the world by thinking about how to solve realistic problems, except in this one you are the problem.

Of all the things this game does right, there is one thing that still haunts my dreams.  The children.  When you start to go nuclear, as stated, you hear a group of grade-school children singing Ring around the Rosey.  I swear to fucking god this is the creepiest thing I have ever fucking heard in ever.  It is like the children of the corn, or some shit.  The music is fucking awesome, mind you.  That just enhances how creepy the children are.  They are like the fucking harbingers of the goddamn apocalypse!  I will be waking up in a cold sweat singing ring around the rosey tonight, I just know it.

 

Estudio Antropo, True Next-Gen Gaming

Posted on by thre3zekiel

estudio-antropo-logo

 

Remember is Shadowrun how your characters had 2 different versions of the matrix to deal with?  Yea, sure, one was the Virtual Reality (VR) realm where hackers reign as gods, clad in icons to resemble all the deities of old as their meat body lays somewhere on a bed or floor neglected by the free-roaming mind.  The other was called Augmented Reality (AR) and it is where you find the visual interfaces that allowed you to see what specials and sales stores have going that day by looking at the logo through the right pair of glasses.  Nintendo was the first to really take advantage of this when they came out with the 3DS and its aptly named VR cards, which revealed a variety of simple, fun AR games that had my wife and I battling over who was the better virtual fisherman.  These cards were cards you lay on a table and then look at with your 3DS in AR mode.  Characters would then pop out of the cards or games would form out of the table.  It was fucking awesome.  Then there was this company that fucking decided to make a pair of computerized glasses, which hold the potential to plaster gaming all over the world.  There is another company, however, whose scope is more ambitious than just playing with cards and more exciting than karate chopping at the air or shouting virtual “clay pigeons” to pieces with your fucking thu’um.

Estudio Antropo said “That’s fucking neat and all guys, but what about the goddamn devices the entire society has already invested in?”  Not a direct quote, but one I like to imagine coming out of someone’s mouth.  These guys have developed a game for the boARd format, a Kurzor S.R.O. concept, that allows you to use your mobile devices to play board games.  Now, the trailers for this only show people with their iPads all spooled up and ready to go, but, the game is also scheduled to release with an Android element, as well.  I don’t see it being long before Andriod and iOS players can huddle around the same boARd to play a rousing game of Monopoly, or something.  Estudio Antropo currently have a kickstarter campaign up that ends August 1st.  If anything in this article excites you nearly as much as it fucking excites me, go there and throw some money in!

cartoneros-logo-01-long

 

Check my cardboard swagger.

Check that cardboard swagger

First among the titles that will pioneer the fourth fucking dimension is Cartoneros.  This title is one that has a kind of general appeal that plays out really cool.  Not to mention, even those hippies with their goddamn iPads will love the concept.  Cartoneros takes place in a world where people throw away vast amounts of fucking cardboard.  EVERYTHING is cardboard, including your characters.  Your characters then go out on their mission to clean up the world! Aw, yay!  That is so special!  Yippee! Love is magical!  They then proceed to battle over resources like the humans that undoubtedly spawned them and battle to the death over cardboard.  So yes, good intentions do pave the road to good gameplay.

In this tactical strategy, you control a small team of Cartoneros, these little guys that collect the cardboard detritus of the world.  Each of your cartoneros has strength and weaknesses, too, so it is not all cut and dry combat.  In your mad dash for sustaining cardboard, you will battle with other players.  Now, this carboard you collect isn’t really something you’ll use in-game to pump your cartoneros up, but between plays is when it comes in handy.  As you await your next round of play against your mortal foes (apparently your mom and little sister) you use the cardboard to beef up your cartoneros.  You will even be able to shape the gaming environment by building maps, characters, weapons, monsters and robots!  Its developers liken it to a combination of DoTA and XCOM.  Granted, if you spend your cardboard too frivolously, you will not have enough resources to maintain a competitive  team.  This honestly looks like it could turn into a fucking sport.

Adorable cardboard characters butchering each other with their cardboard shotguns. Isn't that nice!

Adorable cardboard characters butchering each other with their cardboard shotguns. Isn’t that nice!

Each game of Cartoneros will include 1 – 8 players, and the game style will change depending on the teams.  If everyone is on the same team, the game is more like an RPG with players working together to fight monsters and get cardboard.  If you split the players apart, it becomes a DoTA, XCOM fusion-style tactical strategy game.  Monsters in this game fall in three categories.  Little ones that flee, big ones that attack your characters and huge ones that make you crap your cardboard trousers.  Each monster will have special abilities that can be obtained by killing the monsters and eating its heart like a ancient n0rse warrior.  I might have made up that last part about eating its heart, but you really can get the powers of your foes for a limited period by destroying them.  Apparently there are some really neat features to the game structure, as well, allowing you to create your own game.  Maps can be created by arranging terrain on the board, missions can be created by designating objectives and stories created by linking maps.  The game is going to be tough, too; if you lose characters weapons, tools etc. in-game they are gone forever.  You’ll have to be careful how you spend your cardboard between games, but careful planning will pay off big-time in the long run.  You can read about Cartoneros in greater detail on its Kickstarter page.

espio_logo

Does cartoneros sound too much like something that the family will enjoy and won’t be badass enough for your group of awesome buddies that only opt for the finest and most edgy of tabletop games?  The guys backing cartoneros are also developing Espionag3: Berlin Files.  If cartoneros’ strategic gameplay and winsome visuals don’t excite you, the dark world of spies and intrigue laid out in Espionag3: Berlin Files should.

It’s another strategic game where you control a network of spies and battle against your friends.  Berlin files looks really fun and with pitched gun battles and tailing missions, this game looks awesome.  I don’t fucking care what language the goddamn screenshots are in!  The players take up the role of secret government agents in Berlin, who have discovered that the mafia has moved in and are expanding rapidly.  It is up to players to utilize their stealthy spy tactics to overcome and eliminate their mafia enemies.  This gaming format has a lot of possibilities, from the simple and fun ideas to adult level games providing intrigue and excitement.  I could see a game like this taking place in 1930’s New York with players controlling a mafia family and vying for control of the illegal liquor trade.  Want a historical piece?  What if someone developed a game where half the players are the French Resistance fighters and the others are Nazis, and the players duke it out for control of Paris?  See, only limited by your imagination.

On any city street in Berlin...

On any city street in Berlin…

So why does this concept excite me and why should it excite you too?  Do you like tabletop games?  Anyone who has ever played Shadowrun, Dungeons and Dragons or Warhammer and any other such related games should be able to see the potential this poses for awesomeness.  This format could easily be built upon by major developers to create a DnD game that works with ipads, android phones etc. so that you can sit down with your gaming crew and play some serious tabletop games.  You could have endless customization options for your Warhammer armies, all explained at your fingertips by the software of the game.  Terrain customization for Warhammer, DnD and Shadowrun games would be that much more detailed and the worlds you play in would, literally, just be a game screen away.  You would be able to almost touch them.  Super-nerdy niche games not your style?  This format could be used to give standard boardgames the modern update off of console systems they so desperately crave.  Instead of buying the whole box and all the pieces getting scattered by a rampaging dog, you could just play care-free on a paper-board!  Granted, the animals might poke holes in the paper boARd, but it saves you a hell of a lot more time searching for tiny houses.  Those fuckers are a bitch to step on at night, too.  So support Cartoneros on kickstarter up through August 1st!  It could really be the update of next-gen gaming that would really make people feel like they are living in the future!

 

Double-Up Discussion: Color Stairs, Fluff Eaters

Posted on by thre3zekiel

colorstairs

 

The first game of today’s double article is Color Stairs!  An interesting concept for iOS systems, you can get this game for free on your iphone or ipad.  It can be found on the iTunes store at this location.  A fairly simple concept, this is a game easier explained than played.  You control a little square and you have to get it as far along the treacherous rainbow-colored terrain as possible.  You will fall in the spaces between one set of platforms and the next, though, so the game makes it easy to keep track of progress.

You’ll pick this up and underestimate it from the start.  Smooth jazz jams on as you tap the screen to move your square.  To start, you’ll tap to drop the square.  I had numerous pit-drops off the bat as the platforms are scrolling while the square is in the same spot on the screen.  Eventually, though, the law of averages has to fucking even out and you’ll get it on a platform.  When it does, tap the screen and don’t stop.  When you see a gap, swipe upward real quick and you’ll jump that shit.  It is a little jarring to get used to, and prolonged gameplay may result in motion-sickness, but once you get a good rol, you want to stay on that shit.  My best play got me to 143 points.  How do you gain points?  They accrued every time you tap the fucking screen.  Sound simple?  You fell into the same goddamn trap I did!  Try it.  Just try it.  It is fun, frustrating and, honestly, satisfying.  But you do not feel bad putting it down: everything required of a good app game and good puzzlers alike.  Do I need another screenshot?  No, the above logo pretty much says it all.

flufflogo

Fluff Eaters is not out yet.  This half of today’s double-up is a preview as of the typing of this article, but it will be released on the 14th!  Check it out on its website!  This game honestly has all the makings of the next big app game that young girls and middle-aged men will latch onto.  A cute main character, lovably devious foes that are charming in their own way and a simple base concept.

Basically, you are playing jacks.  You know, the game played arbitrarily on every sidewalk by young girls in the mid-nineteen fifties.  You bounce a ball and pick up as many jacks as you can.  In this, though, you bounce a cat.  Bouncy the Cat, as a matterafact.  Now these little fuckers, called Fluffs, waited while Bouncy got out of bed and fucked up his personal lounge spot!  This is some unprecedented douchebaggery on their part, so Bouncy needs to get his revenge.  Each level you are tasked with bouncing Bouncy and tapping goals.  Tapping fluffs gets you through the level, but each level there are these little fish crackers to collect.  Getting the crackers gets you more points and killing fluffs gets you through the level with less points.  The goal is to tap all the objectives and then move on.  A simple concept that gets more and more difficult.

... but you end up on whacky levels wondering what you are even supposed to do after enough time.

… but you end up on crazy complex levels wondering what you are even supposed to do after enough time.

I am not going to lie.  For all this game’s adorable trappings, cute sound effects and silliness, it is a pain in the ass to complete.  I found myself on a level where the platforms are angled and you have to catch Bouncy after he gets the crackers but before he hits the WALL OF GODDAMN SPIKES!  This cat would hate me for real, and not just because I am a dog person.  I dropped his ass on more than a few spike traps and into pits, launched him off screen, missed the catching tap and let him double-bounce: you name it, I fucked it up.  And this game gets challenging.  I give serious accommodations to anyone that can get through more than a few acts in this game. Aside from being challenging, it has really good visuals, fun scenery and lovable characters, even if they do seem like a euphemism for cat dander and hairballs.  If you are a fan of fun, cute and humorous app games, this is a title to pick up, and for the asking price of 0.99$ it is a relative steal.

The Parsnip Theory, Lunchroom Throwdown

Posted on by thre3zekiel

parsnip

 

If every highschool kid in the world could design video games, The Parsnip Theory would probably be the first game they make.  Though it has a few rough edges, its design and gameplay are certainly an experience worth a play, especially with friends.  It is a shareware game available at itch.io. One thing to keep in mind is that this game is in its alpha stages.  It is listed on itch so that people can test it, play it and enjoy it for what it is so far.

Turn-based strategy has many forms, some good, some bad.  Many involve alternate play-areas that allow you to play with armies as pieces on a Risk board, while still others give you a base to return to and beef up your troops.  Parsnip Theory is a simple game with one face: lunchroom mayhem.  Every time you play, you join a team of kids, who all look the same, and you start launching tomatoes at the other teams.  Controls in this title take a minute of fiddling to really figure them out properly, but they are intuitive and allow you to consider your moves like a chess player before you fully commit to them.  Each of your teammates starts a round with 7 moves.  Throwing a tomato costs 2 moves, each space costs 1 move to traverse and crouching is 1 move as well.  This means that, without moving, you can get 3 shots off per round.  If you have to move more than 1 space in a turn, you could end up losing 1 or 2 of those shots, so timing is a big part of this game.

My first couple runs of Parsnip Theory ended with my team as nothing more than gooey smears on the tile.  I would just charge out there, tomatoes blazing, and hope for the best.  Have you ever played XCOM?  Yea, you run out there guns blazing and your people will end up in the hot place really fast.  Parsnip Theory is no different.  Although the graphical style makes it tough to tell, there are tables in this lunchroom.  I would expect tables to stand out a little more, but these ones sort of look like drainage grates laid throughout the room that, for some odd reason, you are fully incapable of walking over.  These grates, however, are actually tables.  If you have your team members crouch behind them, you can use them as cover.

Move behind cover, Aaron! You're under fire!

Move behind cover, Aaron! You’re under fire!

Now, above you see my characters crouched behind a wall, waiting for that little blue guy to come out behind his wall.  What I didn’t realize was that he could see the guy up top, and  splattered him accordingly.  We still mourn the loss of Aaron.  But moving with cover is a good way to operate in this game.  If you can set up your team to ambush a foe coming around a corner, he might get one shot off at one of you, and the next turn he’ll get three more, but that’s it.  He won’t be able to get off enough shots to take down any of you, and you’ll have him splattered in barely more than one turn.  The hellish onslaught of tomatoes takes down 10 hp per hit, so you’ll likely take him out and have plenty of moves left that second turn.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you are in highschool with a bunch of fucking baseball stars.  These kids will lob a barrage of perfectly-aimed tomatoes at you from the other side of the lunchroom like a howitzer loaded with tomatoes.  The AI seems to favor taking advantage of long-shots at weakened enemies because you likely won’t see it coming.  The AI of this game, really, is way better at this than it has a right to be.  As I said, several times I played through and took out one or two enemies, and got smeared.  The AI wasn’t all focused on me, either.  The other teams were going back and forth at each other like nobody’s business.  They just managed to mop the floor with me every time.

Graphics in this game are acceptable, except for a few little issues here and there.  Sure the table don’t look like tables, but I rather enjoyed the look of my little team mates.  Sure, hair color and clothing is all the same, but after playing a few times, skin-colors are randomly assigned.  Also, your people all lack arms and legs, so their hands and feet hover in space where the ends of their extremities should be, Rayman-style.  The difficulty in this game was a little rough, but you learn the best way to battle your foes after a while, and it’s not too tough to adjust.  There are a few things that this game could benefit from: variety of attacks, the potential for someone to miss, some stronger graphical definition, but for a piece of shareware, this game is enjoyable.  I would advise playing it with some friends to get the most out of its gameplay.  The AI players are just a bunch of dicks.

Another feature of this game that my brother will discuss at greater length is the level editor.  Should you get tired of the single level of play in the game, you can always go and make more of them.  A level editor is always a good idea, and in a game like this grants players the ability to make it their own way.  You hate the lunchroom?  Fine, have a fucking food-fight in the art department, you damn lunatic.

We stand victorious over the blood.. err.. tomato-spattered lunchroom.

We stand victorious over the blood.. err.. tomato-spattered lunchroom.

Of everything I about this game, there is one thing that I HAVE to mention.  I do not under any circumstances recommend this to anyone with photosensitive seizures: you might not make it past the title screen.  The background is this warping, color-changing spaghetti (or something) that looks like one of the lunch aides slipped fucking LSD into the juice boxes.  In their psychedelic-induced frenzy these kids have taken to defending themselves against the phantasms of their own imagination the only way they can deign: by lashing out with salvos of edibles projectiles.  This is my story, and I am sticking to it, since the game itself doesn’t really have one yet.

 

Third World Future, Be a Hero

Posted on by thre3zekiel

TWF-logo

 

How many times have you seen someone you know spend hours, cumulatively speaking, playing one of those irritating in-app purchase games?  My wife plays a few of them and I always find new charges I wasn’t expecting.  It drives me up a wall that these purchases are so small and easy to make because you just make them on an impulse.  These games truly are the kings of capitalism in the game world.  But what if that kind of energy could be harnessed and channeled into something better, something worth getting behind.  What if you could use one of those games to help children in Africa get food, clothing, shelter and maybe even a uniform so they can get to school?  If this indiegogo campaign is successful, you can do just that, all while spending your time playing games.

Third world future has an ambitious goal: to make the first game that directly benefits charity organizations.  Just as other game designers are trying to use games as a tool to educate children, TWF’s dream is to use gaming to help people in third world countries.  Do you like Clash of Clans?  How about Farmville? Third World Future will feature a number of elements similar to these games whereby you manage your own African village.  This strategy game will leave players with the ability to make In-App purchases.  60% of the proceeds from their game will be contributed randomly to charitable organizations.  This is just casual gaming, too.  There is a speech on TED Talks where Jane McGonigal talks about how we can use games and encourage gamers to solve real-world problems.  That video brought a few tears to my eyes.  I feel like this is a chance to accomplish the next step for gaming.

Their method for deciding who to fund comes from the people that provided the money in the first place: the players.  Every quarter for 2 weeks, a vote will open up to the game’s discussion board.  Every quarter five non-profit organizations will be selected from the region receiving the benefit.  Players can then choose which of the five organizations they want the funds to go to.  Whichever of the benefits wins will receive the lion’s share of the funding and in-game advertisement with the rest of them receiving smaller amounts and some in-game advertisement.  So, if you have a few extra bucks in your pocket that you can throw at a good cause, visit the Indie Go Go campaign site for Third World Future as soon as it launches on July 14th and give what you can.  Every little bit helps, dammit, 1$ in America  and we’re trying to save the fucking world!

twf_concept

Please note that I will be updating this article and reposting it as more information becomes available.

Among the Sleep, Crawling in the Dark

Posted on by thre3zekiel

AtSlogo

 

My wife calls this the “freaky baby game” and not because of the baby.  Everything about this game is unnerving and it all adds up to an enjoyable experience in fear-inducing games.  My wife hates it when I play this in the dark cause she keeps having to run in and check that my screams are caused by the game and not something terrible… like a stubbed toe.  Those are horrifying.

If you come into this game off the adrenaline high that profoundly horrifying games like Amnesia produce, you will not be enthused.  I have to admit, I couldn’t play Amnesia.  It was that fucking freaky for me.  I quit playing only about an hour into the game, and I hadn’t encountered any enemies yet.  Among the Sleep was a much more accessible game for those who don’t want to pour hours into complex puzzles, creeping through terrifying dark castles and losing your mind.  Horror-lite, is the best term for this game, and I found it rather enjoyable.

Among the first elements of the game that you notice is the fact that you are a goddamn 2-year-old.  Your mom has you in a high chair, she’s feeding you cake, you play with a ball and you have as much control of yourself as a drunk muppet.  Not to disparage the game, it controls beautifully.  Toddlers on the other hand are called toddlers because they don’t have the basics of biomechanical locomotion down, yet.  Look down at your body, and you notice a tiny, onesie-clad body that takes haphazard steps.  Environmental manipulation is difficult at times, too.  You are a baby, after all.  Your tiny little hands grasp uncertainly at objects.  It is almost adorable.  Except for the fact that you are scared out of your shit trying to rationalize the world around you.  In the very beginning of the game your crib gets thrown across the room, spilling you onto the floor.  You spend some time crawling around, which lets you hide from foes and get into tight places, but you can stand up on your little baby-legs.  When you do, you move slowly, but you can run briefly before stumbling over into the crawling position.  Frequently, the game makes use of this by making you want to run so badly, but you can’t, you know, being a fucking baby and all.  Not exactly a Kenyan track star.  Also, you can hear the tiny little baby breaths and your character hides in the dark, sucking in air like a noisy little vacuum.  Another feature that highlights the fact that you are a baby is the esc screen.  Hit escape and you bring up your tiny baby hands to cover your face.

Remain still and the teddy bear will go away.

Remain still and the teddy bear will go away.

Early on you realize there is trouble in paradise, and being sensitive to everything around you, it shows.  Babies don’t know much, so they have to experience the world around them in terms of emotions.  Thus, when something scary happens, your screen gets dark and twitchy, like it’s being chewed on by a langolier.  This occurs early on when mommy answers the door.  You hear a male voice and then mommy starts yelling.  That’s when the screen gets all ugly, but mommy soon comes back and it’s all ok again.  She brings a present to you, which you get at later no thanks to your mother, and inside it is the scariest toy ever.  Your travelling companion is a terrifying possessed teddy bear.  At one point he plays with your train set and hides your elephant from you.  But I know the fucking truth!  That little bastard is possessed by a dark entity bent on turning you into a ruthless serial killer!  Either way, teddy is apparently your only weapon.  When you get scared, you have to hug him and he glows in the dark, like a carebear stare that is less powerful and gives your position away to enemies.

<THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD!>  Since this game only came out a few months ago, I have to do this.

While playing this game, you notice some really interesting tidbits.  There truly is something sinister lying just beneath the surface, and it isn’t just the spooky ambient soundtrack.  Anyone who watches Grimm knows that what people thought were stories are often used to represent something more sinister.  Although it might not be the fact that werewolves exist, fairytales like Grimm’s fairytales were actually mechanisms used to rise children in a time where they could have been ripped apart by wolves just outside of town.  No one would have noticed for a good few hours either.  So rather than saying “don’t go into the woods or you’ll get ripped apart by wild animals” they would probably say “don’t go in the woods or you’ll be eaten by a witch!”  This is much easy to offer to children than, you know, sheer abject terror.  This game uses the same vehicle to convey and otherwise occluded backstory.  Some guy brings a wrapped package to the door on your birthday and gets into a fight with mommy?  Yea, that was dad.  I guess they were having some kind of issues, so daddy doesn’t live at home anymore.  Later you go through this level with paintings on the walls, one of which features a woman and a well.  As you approach it changes from the woman coming out of the swamp toward the well, her standing at the well and then her drinking deeply from the well with water running down her dress.

Toward the end of the game, you see mommy drinking from bottles (which litter the floor in another level) and she turns into a monster.  This made my jaw drop.  So apparently mommy is also an alcoholic and having some serious issues.  Considering your character stumbles out of a closet at the end of the game, I have to assume this means that the whole game is basically the result of child neglect by a irresponsible bitch that wants to keep the child away from a potentially loving father.  This is a little on the rough side, since a lot of single mothers work hard to ensure that their children get the best they can provide.  But no one is perfect, and some people outright deserve to be dropped off a cliff.

O, shit, mommy is drinking from the jack daniels well again!

O, shit, mommy is drinking from the jack daniels well again!

This game takes a real big adult issue and shrinks it down to a baby size.  It is really deeply affecting, especially since at the end, your mother is the one who rips the arm off your teddy bear, and you character still starts rubbing her head as she sits crying on the kitchen floor.  I cried a little, since this one hits a bit too close to home, having had a number of friends growing up who experienced something like this.  All told, this game is a true horror story that focuses more on the story elements and leaves those “terror from the darkest wilds” elements to more drawn out titles.  After all, how much can you really tell about the story of a baby?

Among the Sleep is a great title, but the thing that really got my gaul up about this title is the number of startle scares it gets out of you.  I mean you creep around a corner, BAM! chair flies at you.  Turn around and something behind you is moving by itself, or something flies out of a random hatch you didn’t know about.  STOP FUCKING DOING THAT!  Man, you’re gonna scare the shit right out of me!   I guess that is their fucking plan, though.  Bastards.

Viscera Clean-Up, Engagingly OCD

Posted on by thre3zekiel

vcdlogo

 

So this is what it’s come down to.  Viscera Clean-Up detail is a glorified janitor simulator in early access, but don’t close the screen yet.  You’re not exactly wiping some kid’s puke up off a tile floor or mopping up piss.  You are the guy that cleans up after the events of other video games and tragic events, but this seems to be made by a people who are disenfranchised with the world in general and are used to monotonous, soul-crush jobs.  Like the British.

Ultimately, this game is just like building a puzzle.  You are given a big mess to organize, and piece by piece you work the mess down to an easily manageable pile and then finish up.  Now, starting this game is a bit of a chore.  You begin and blood and guts litter the floor, are painted on the walls and the entire scene is a very “modern art in rouge.”  You have several very fucking important machines that help you get your job done.  First, there is the Slosh-o-Matic, dispenser of buckets full of water.  Then there is the furnace, it is the disposal method of choice for viscera both human and alien.  Then there is the What-a-Load container machine, which disposes containers marked with the “biological hazard” symbol.  And finally, the vending machine, which provides access to all manner of useful objects.

This game provides the all-too-realistic experience of being a janitor fitted with the cheapest mechanism for cleaning available in futuristic times.  By all accounts, you should have access to a fucking auto-cleaning zapper mechanism!  But the most high-tech device you have is the Muck-Guyver, which provides a radar “ping” that beeps faster and in a higher pitch the closer you are to a “mess.”  Way too many times have I finished cleaning up a section of a room littered with the remains of a scientist, used the Muck-Guyver and the region still came up hot.  I look on the ceiling and curse the gods, realizing that the some of a victim didn’t fucking reach the floor.  At which point you have to stack a bunch of boxes, or whatever environmental detritus you have available, and scrub the goddamned ceiling!

Your main “weapon” is a mop, so the Slosh-o-Matic isn’t just a funny little feature.  It is your main support element.  And don’t even think for five fucking seconds that this shit is all user-fucking-friendly!  Every time you hit the dispense button, there is a shot you will get a bloody body part instead of a bucket of clean.  This means it will drop out and splatter fresh blood all over the ground and the machine.  I like to imagine that this is because the machine is really a teleporter, and a careless technician just lost an arm or something.  A slosh-o-matic is necessary, though, as your mop gets dirty through usage.  You can only mop a heavily-soiled section of the floor for five mouse-clicks before you start just spreading the muck around, so you have to get a fresh mop bucket and rinse the mop.  One dunk only, though!  Your mop buckets will get soiled, too!  Dunk your mop in that and you will just be smearing a fine paste over surfaces leaving a trail like a snail on its period.  And watch your goddamned step!  Knock over a bucket containing ANY level of grime, and you will have just poured out a mess all over the floor again.  Prepare for agony.  My wife came in worried about me only to find I knocked over another fucking mop bucket!

vcdspill

Dirty mop? Spilled bucket? This might end with suicide.

 

If your buckets get dirty, too, how the fuck are you supposed to clean for a protracted period of time?  In this space-age setting your company has resorted to the most sensible and fiscally responsible means of disposing of things: setting them on fire.  Apparently the Joker was right, everything does burn!  Even steel buckets full of fucking water!  Now, this is a little silly, but once you have mopped up enough blood and such to get to the bullet cartridges and organs lying in the open, how can you get them to the furnace reliably?  Why, you simply put someone’s assorted remains into a yellow bio-hazard bin and burn them, of course!  Bins are pretty sizable, too, and seating most of two people comfortably.  But be fucking mindful of your goddamned surroundings!  Have a bloody stub sticking out of the bin?  You will smear blood on anything it might touch.  Considering the fact that doors in this don’t open wide, you will end up scrubbing walls and doors a lot, too.  And don’t be that manly man that has to cram eight people, a thousand bullet cartridges, five soiled knives and a take-out box into one fucking disposal bin.  That shit will cost you!  Things inside the bin will get heavy for you and you will drop that shit.  Even if the bin isn’t that fucking full and you are hitting shift to go slowly!  Run with organs and you might as well paint everything red.

One thing that this game encapsulates entirely too fucking well is frustratingly tedious tasks.  So you have disposal bins, eh?  Here is a floor littered with a bazillion mother-fucking bullet cartridges.  Pick them up one at a time.  Scientists in this ripped apart by a blood-thirty alien?  Intestines will be scattered around like someone spilled oodles of noodles and you have to pick it up one greasy meat-tube at a time.  Then there are the distances they go to make this a challenge.  Aside from organs pouring out of the bin or bucket dispensers, should you step in a pool of blood, you will track blood everywhere across mom’s new carpet.  There is nothing more frustrating than realizing you just tracked somone’s DNA across your freshly-mopped floors.  And then there is the detail!  Yea, sure, anybody can scrub a few tiles and punch out, but if you just run through and opt-out of spot-checking your work with the Muck-Guyver, you’ll miss something.  One element I discovered was that sometimes blood will run into the fucking grout in the tiles!  And you’ll have to scrub that separately from the rest of the pool!  I am just grateful they don’t force you to go in there with a brush and scrub it out by hand.  Holy fuck!

At the top of the bin, Chad was really getting a-head!

Spacious enough to fit the extremities of several researchers comfortably!

Cleaning up the organs or dead researchers is only the fun part of the job, though.  You’ll find yourself cleaning up crumpled papers, soda cans and other office debris.  There are also other menial tasks to achieve, such as refilling wall-mounted medkits.  I mean, what research facility is complete without the easily-accessible medkit designed for dressing alien claw-wounds?  To this end, the vending machine is a must.  Of course, not all facilities are outfitted in anticipation of epic fight-scenes.  Some places are just dimly-lit and have naturally dingy textures.  In such situations, the vending machine will provide lanterns!  Of course, knock these fuckers over too many times and they explode leaving scorch marks all over the floor.  Vending machines will also offer any number of useless shit, such as pizza slicers and “wet floor” signs.  Granted, I think you get docked points if you don’t put down the signs, so yea.

This game isn’t without its flaws.  Sometimes you’ll have an arm that will get jostled so bad in a disposal bin that it clips through the bin, painting anything it touches.  The bins are the source of a number of issues, as over-stocking the bins causes things to jump around in there like a bunch of nitrogen atoms under pressure.  I also found these strange “phantom pegs” that appear on the electrical cords for your appliances.  At first you might not see them, but if you splatter blood on them, they show up, sometimes only partially.

I guess this is more respectful than just dumping it all in the garbage somewhere.

I guess this is more respectful than just dumping it all in the garbage somewhere.

Aside from being the type of game a serial killer would jack off to, the most irritating thing about it is.. uh.. well I’ll tell you after I spend another 3 hours scrubbing out the toilets and transferring the wasted toilet paper left on the floor to a disposal bin.  Yea, it really is that much fun.  What kind of psychopath has fun in this, do you ask?  Anyone who gets satisfaction out of gradually turning a hopeless situation into an operational facility ready for the next batch of squishy and ethically-irresponsible researchers.

Skara, Shiney Pre-Alpha Preview

Posted on by thre3zekiel

skara

 

Skara: The Blade Remains is a game given the go ahead by the community on Steam Greenlight.  One of many worthy candidates for support, Skara attmepts to step in where many mainstream companies leave off.  Arena deathmatch games typically come with guns and grenades, but this title threatens to drop you into an ancient desert or a volcanic nightmare and wishes you well against the hordes of your foes.  The game looks great and the developer’s site gives a lot more regarding the story and world.

Among alpha-previews that I have played, this title has to be the most difficult to discuss in my fashion.  Primarily, I would ask readers to keep in mind that this game is not even up for sale yet.  It is not even close to finished.  The developers are working hard daily to ensure this game gets to a complete phase as soon as possible.  Having recently played the pre-alpha build, I am certainly excited, but not overly impressed.  If this game were to pre-release today, I would laugh loudly and call shenanigans.  But it is not, so I look forward to the game that the developers are working on, as detailed on their Greenlight page.

First, let me generally name some of the areas that the developers have to improve.  In a game with sword fighting gameplay, you want the character to attack well.  A third-person perspective is granted to the player, and this gives you a much better perception of the presence of your character than other games of a similar genre with their first-person views.  Now, being in pre-alpha, Skara’s animations are a little slow right now and this definitely comes out in the gameplay, making it difficult to maneuver, but it was funny as hell to watch my character swinging a longsword like it was made of white-dwarf matter.  I had to actually start my attacks at a distance in order to “spool up” the animation like it was some kind of minigun with one fucking shot.  Another problem with the animations is the ragdoll effect, but in this it should be called the invertebrate effect.  Upon death all the bones in a corpse seem to magically disappear.  Instant man-jelly style.   Now, one thing that I did notice about the animations while playing was fatalities.  Let’s fucking face it, a game like this is boring without a little extra in the awesome category.  I was able to perform two fatalities that really got me amped up.  I favored the civilized look of the Durno fighters.  They just felt better than the insane, cultist look of the Kharn savages.  I was able to get a few guys to a state of “finish him” dazed-ness.  Once there I ran one guy through and flipped him over my shoulder.  The second one I put a guy on his knees like a priest at a pulpit then proceeded to hack wildly at his muscular neck.  I imagine the head will fly off at the end once the game releases, but the chopping action just finishes the animation with the victim sliding to the ground.

Just wait right there, Shraka! I gonna keel you!

I’m not waiting here all night, Shraka.  Just get the attack over with already!

 

Arena fighters always need someoneto duke it out or there is nothing to play.  This game currently features the Durno (above left) and the Kharn (above right).  Looking at the models and textures for the races I can see why there are only two at the moment.  And why they turn into man-jelly on death.  The models and textures are detailed as fuck.  Light reflects from their clothes and skin differently and their armor and weapons gleam. It is really exciting to see.

Another element that is important to arena fighters like this is easy navigation, especially as far as the menus are concerned.  There shouldn’t be a learning curve for the usage of the basic elements of a game.  When there is a menu to interact with, Skara makes sure it is easy to use.  The only two menus I saw, however, were the escape menu and the match menu.  When loading the level right now, there is nothing.  The screen is just a dead view on the map your anticipated match will be held. Once the game starts, though you have access to the match menu. The match menu is what displays when you hit the tab button in-game.  This is pretty simple and shows you how many kills you (in a deathmatch) or your team (in team deathmatch) have scored.  The scoring system is the Kills – Deaths equation, which I can get behind.  I played enough Unreal Tournament and grew accustomed to the simple systems of games past.

STBR

Best not ask the barbarians why they all have the same first name. Might insult their savage and unforgiving culture.

 

Now, everything that is wrong with the game can be attributed to the fact that the game is not ready for release, so it is missing a variety of important features, such as a tutorial area.  Tutorials on the operation of the battle combos would definitely be very helpful.  Looking at the explanation of the combos in the PDF that came with the game is a little on the confusing side.  Not because of the manual, that is simple.  Click this button, or press this series of keys.  Whatever, no sweats, man!  Then you get in-game and the ham-handed speed of the animations makes timing combos impossible for anyone.  Unless you are Miss Cleo or a Jedi..  then you can clairvoyantly intuit precisely when you need to hit the next key.  Otherwise it is a frenzy full of confused manipulation, like watching my childhood dog hump a pillow.

Of all things this game does and does fucking well are the sights.  Now, yes, I am very critical of graphics-heavy games with no other matter, but this is a game that is still in fucking development!  Cut me a goddamn break!  At one point the AI had a freakout session as I swung at it, and I think opted for self-preservation.  Either that or the guy was like, “fuck this!  If I die now, I want it to be a badass fight sequence!”  So he turns and runs up this tower, and I immediately give chase.  Bones of fallen warriors crunching beneath my iron-clad feet, I charge after my foe.  Bloodlust is coursing through my mind and bringing that coppery flavor thick into my mouth.  Each step takes me upward and he intermittently flags in stamina, coming into view only to catch a string wind and charge further.  I arrive at the top, only to lose my bearings.  Around me the winds howl and the glare of orange light as the sun reflects off the clay-shot fields of the moors.  Behind me my ambuscade foe howls and comes a hair’s breadth from burying the sharp end of his axe into my skull.  I dodge narrowly and heft my sword up, bringing my slice through his torso.  Dazed and reeling, the Kharn warrior blinks against the dazzling flash of my steel.  Only a blink passes and he opens his eyes to see the sharp tip of my sword pierce his chest.  Back my sword plunges until the hilt nearly touches his bulging muscles.  Kharnish men are brutal, and the warrior sneers and tries to grab my sword with his last breath, but I ram my shoulder into his sternum and twist my blade, flipping him into the air.  He lands with a sickening crunch on the stone behind me.

This is what is looked like in game, and the graphics supported every second of it.  You see a far-flung waste, venomous water gnawing at its shores and warriors struggling against death borne by other men.  I can only image that this game will get better, especially since it has been successfully Greenlit.  My biggest issue here is that the game isn’t fucking done, yet.  I played an unfinished game and honestly cannot wait until it is done, because a fantasy arena fighter would be so much fun to me.  The graphics and textures are gorgeous and the ambient sound is nice.  Perhaps the grunts and groans of the characters sound like they came out of a can, but the wind tearing at the dirt and slobbering waves on the shore sound magnificent.  Add in the ambient wildlife and you have a very graphically enticing world that utilizes the Unreal engine to stunning effect.  Now let’s get the rest of the game done, guys.  This one is set up to be really good.

Here the Kharnish warriors allow a Durnovan man how to perform the Kharnish Hot Foot ritual, performed with axes and clubs by boys at age 4.

Here the Kharnish warriors allow a Durnovan man how to perform the Kharnish Hot Foot ritual, performed with axes and clubs by boys at age 4.

 

By Your Powers Combined, I am Indie Team Up!

Posted on by thre3zekiel

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Since Captain Planet can’t help us anymore, it is up to us to fend for ourselves in this crazy world.  But none of us have powers as strong as Captain Planet’s, even if Independent Game Developers are capable of some pretty cool things on their own.  Many IndieDevs are solo men or women sitting in their basement coding, more still have a small team of about 6 people.  Some IndieDevs are entire companies, but still the process can be a difficult slog through treacherous terrain.  Indie Team Up is, luckily, one of those awesome things that some GameDevs did has the potential to make life easier for everyone involved.

The idea of the upcoming service is to link IndieDevs together so that we can help each other move the development of games forward.  Another feature of this is artists.  How many times have you been sitting there wishing you had artistic talent outside of coding?  Or needed a composer just to drum up some music?  Perhaps you need a writer to spell check, edit and hone your dialogue?  Indie Team Up will have that, too.  So who are these people with the drive, passion and vision to make this happen?  What is their motivation and what are they going to get out of it?  Just follow the bouncing ball.

Between the two of them, Colleen Delzer and Justin Hammond are the evil geniuses bringing this community to life.  Both are dedicated IndieDevs, and both of them have other things in their lives that require their focus and attention.  During our interview, Colleen had chicken in the oven for her family.  This code-slinging mother of two spends everyday making games with her husband.  Indeed, she is half of Adversary Games, a company Co-Founded with her husband.  Colleen attended the University of Advanced Technology and, only two years into her studies, she was picked up by Realm Interactive.  A year later Realm couldn’t find a pusblisher, so Colleen sought new work outside the industry.  That lasted about 6 years until she was hired at Game Center Group.  There she did game QA, game CS, web coding and design, but her true creative desires drove her to make games.  Listening to the voice in the back of her head, she read some C++ books cover to cover and founded Adversary Games with her husband.  And they manage well enough to make the Indie Team Up a reality.

When I asked Colleen to explain the Indie Team Up to me, she explained, “There are a lot who would love to help out GameDevs but don’t know how to ask, and a lot of GameDevs want help with an idea but don’t know where to turn too.  The role of Indie Team Up is to connect the two!”

In a culture that is so focused on excelling individually, Indie Team Up has a different plan, “Our mission is to help bring the ideas of Independent Developers to fruitation and to cultivate a spirit of collaborative assistance.   And to say, Hey! It’s ok to ask for help!”

And many in the IndieDev community agree.  Indie Team Up is a burgeoning hashtag that is tearing holes in the twitter-verse.  “It only started on the 15th of June, and I really wasn’t thinking it was going to take off like it did!  But we are really trying to help people collaborate to make their projects a reality.”

So where does an idea like this originate?  The ITU team has a good heart and the skills to bring the Game Dev community closer together, but it seems this is a movement born out of frustration. “Several people asked if I could use help with development, which at the time I didn’t.  I felt bad turning people down because it seemed they really wanted to help someone. I thought that Indie Team Up could be a way were they could help someone in need.  An avenue for them, if you will”

ITU is an idea from the heart of its creators, helping them tap into their own creativity and allowing them to give back to the IndieDev community.  “I guess it’s an avenue for me as well.  I really love helping people, just wasn’t sure on how to do it.  So, I guess this is my chance. ^ ^”

If Colleen is the caring mother of the ITU team, Justin is certainly the dedicated father.  With C++ as his first language, possibly prior to English, he is a self-taught programmer and later sought to legitimize his knowledge by attending school.  Though he has yet to finish his degree, his reasons for taking his time are certainly respectable.  Having served 5 years in the Army of the United States of America, Justin spent 2 tours in Iraq.  He is proud of his time in the military, but he’s glad to spend his time with his own family now.  Justin is a husband of 7 years with a 3-year-old daughter.  He devlops games under the moniker Black Module Studios and  has some of his work on Kongrerate as well.  Of course not every project goes as planned and sometimes you just have to roll with the punches.  Justin also helped develop a voxel framework that is featured on the Unity3D asset store for 40$, which started as a game.  Unfortunately he and his team at Black Module had to shelve the idea until they have the resources to complete it.

Justin’s biggest priority as a Co-Founder is the development of the Indie Team Up website and shared his origin story as the ITU Web Developer. “Web development just sort of came naturally, as I love spending time on the internet, and I could program, so I just picked it up.”

And he puts a lot of time into the website, “It’s really only been about a week, so I can’t give an average yet.  Although I’ve spent at least 25 hours this past week on design.”

But hard work is worth it when the product in mind is rewarding and extensive. “At a high level, [the Indie Team Up website] will allow users to showcase themselves and search out other people or teams to join. Teams will also be a large part of the site as teams will be able to search for users with the skills they need to complete their projects.  There is a heavy emphasis on discoverabilty.  The goal is to make it insanely easy to find people with the skills you need, or projects that you want to work on.”

The team has some really interesting plans, too, to integrate with a number of other community-organized projects.  “Something else that we hope for is some integration with game jams.  This was actually a personal idea of mine, as I always have trouble finding people to work with when Ludum Dare comes around.  We still need to organize something with the hosts of different game jam events (Ludum Dare, #1GAM, etc.) but we are very hopeful.  At the very least, we’ll have a section of the site dedicated to short term projects, such as game jams or other events.”

Indie Team Up has a list of problems it aims to solve, and Justin was eager to expound up them. “Because the internet is so large, it can be difficult to find people that 1) have the skills you don’t have, and 2) actually want to be part of what you are doing.  We aim to solve those issues by having a centralized place to find other indie developers.”

Among the goals for the ITU site are integration with its existing extensions, “The site will tightly integrate with the hashtag and facebook page, so that when people post their, it is right on the site. It won’t just be a direct feed though, as we are already having people ‘misuse’ the hashtag.”

I even suggested that there be a showcase where ITU displays some of the projects it helped match-make with the approval of community members.  He laughed and mentioned that he and Colleen already have a plan in the works for just such an idea.  The ITU team has even had its first victories, which Justin shared. “One of the first days after #indieteamup started, we helped an artist find a team and are flying him to PAX.  That was a very happy moment for us, being able to see what we are doing actually help people to achieve their goals.”

The Indie Team Up is a project that has a lot of goals.  My first thought is to worry that the team is reaching a bit, but they have a well-coordinated group of members outside of its founders.  When I spoke with Colleen about the origin story of the ITU itself, she mentioned it felt serendipitous, even fated.  As if the IndieDev community has been looking for something like ITU for a long time.  ” They just stepped up and asked.  Justin was pretty much like ‘hey I plan on making a site!’ As well as the bot guy and the app guy.  For instance, I did want to make a bot so I asked White Llama how to create one. The same day the bot guy 0x0 tweeted to me that he was interested in making one.  I DM’ed White Llama, and I did tweet that there should be a more organized way for #indieteamup users to connect.”

0x0961h confirmed this story from his end in an email correspondence with me. “I was scrolling through my Twitter timeline and saw this new Twitter thing, that Colleen was kickstarting.  I thought that it was actually a very awesome idea for the whole indie community, for people who are desperately looking for a team during jams.  Plus, I always liked One Game A Month’s bot and always wanted to make a Twitter bot myself. So I threw some code into IDE, made it work and contacted Colleen. She approved the bot idea a-a-and here I am.”

As the Bot Developer, 0x0961h has the task of maintaining what currently represents the Indie Team Up initiative on the internet. “I made a web application that once in hour receives tweets with hashtag #indieteamup and pick 10 (or less) tweets to retweet. Simple enough. My current mission is to maintain it and implement new features for it. In one of future updates, for example, bot will start looking for speacial hashtags (e.g. #LFA for “looking for artist” or, maybe, more “Reddit-ized” variant of tags: #AW and #AH for “artist wanted” and “artist for hire” respectively) and give priority to tweets with them, not just every single tweet with #indieteamup hashtag. The goal is to make Twitter bot useful tool for, well, “teaming up” and not “just another useless spam twitter”.  Now it just retweeting tweets with #indieteamup, but after site launch, I think, it’ll have few more functions, like, automatic posting “looking for/for hire” stuff from sites, maybe week highlights. It should become more clear after launch.”

0x0961h is experienced with the frantic days leading up to game jams and the search for individuals useful to a specific project. “All my previous games are jam entries, so they are not so polished, not so long, not so narrative-driven.”

But he is currently in the process of making something new that will follow along the lines of a true game release. “I’m developing a… well, I call it a “Big Project”.   I want to make something, you know, “big”, pretty looking, so I won’t be blushing in shame before and after sending it to Greenlight. No details for now (mostly because I don’t have a single clue where my concepts and ideas will lead me), but I want to make a puzzle. I hope one day I’ll be able to finish it and actually release it. :)”

Despite his modesty, 0x0961h has a number of projects that made it to itch.io and even a prior Greenlight submission for a game on Steam.

Justin was able to further detail the origin story “Colleen was talking to @0x0961h (I believe) on twitter one day, and they wanted a place to find other indie game devs, then Colleen suggested #indieteamup, and @0x0961h set up a retweet bot for it (@indieteamup).  I noticed this conversation and told Colleen I was going to make a site for Indie Team Up as I knew that permanence would be an issue, what with how quick tweets can go by.”

And so Indie Team Up was born.  But where is it going?  What happens when you can’t get to a fucking computer and you have to make immediate contact with everyone involved in your project in the heat of the moment? Well, simmer your skettios, there’s an app for that.  Or, rather, and App Developer for that.  Yep.  Indie Team Up has a mobile division, and they’ve chosen to collaborate with another development team from Pakistan to do it.  After speaking with them on the topic, I am really excited to see the results. “We, BugDev Studios, were looking for an artist to team up with on a few projects, one thing lead to another and we found #indieteamup. I was pleasantly surprised by Colleen’s enthusiasm of the idea and felt that the need was real and when we had a chat we knew we had to make this happen.”

The main man behind BugDev studios, Usman Cheema, was happy to give me a little bit of his background as well. He graduated in 2012 in Computer Science from a Lahore University of Management Sciences. He loves the intricate systems games offer for players to experience, used to play DOTA and AOE 2 alot around my graduation and I think these two games are what got me interested in game design. After being repelled from game design schools by financial limitations, Usman joined a local game development studio named Tintash. He worked there for two years in multiple roles and recently quit to start BugDev Studios full time with a team of like minded individuals. “At BugDev Studios we aim to develop creative, out of the box games, currently focusing on hand held devices as out target platforms. I have worked on Itsy Bitsy City at Tintash and Crazy Hexagon as an independent project with fellow devs (both available on Google Play). I like to read and write about games and psychology and take course on Coursera in my free time.”

As stated, Usman is part of a three man team that is working on the app. ” I am part of a team with two engineers [Aqeel Raza (@AqeelRaza2) and Abdul Aleem Khan (@aleemkhan001) ] who have experience in game dev, web development and app development. We will primarily be handling app development of the project. I will also be pitching in with user experience and feature design of the website.”

Though the app is too early in development to expound upon specific features, BugDev studios was able to provide some information about the app’s functionality. “The concept of the project is help out independent developers working in game devevlopment to find like-minded individuals with specific skills they need. The app will be designed to mirror the website’s capabilities, more or less.  So, the website is something really needed right?  The app is visualized as a mobile version of the platform, making it easier for our users to interact with the platform on the go.”

Indie Team Up is a community of IndieDevs created by IndieDevs.  What are your skills and talents?  What prior work have you done?  Want to break into the gaming industry, and help some independent developers along the way?  Keep and eye on #indieteamup and use the hashtag to connect with other developers.  I would like to nominate this song as their badass theme song because these guys are IndieDev superheros.  Like a bat signal in the night sky, this team of dedicated developers will see it and help provide you with the key ingredients necessary to get your project finished, and well.

All of the quotes included in this article are modestly paraphrased for spelling and accuracy.  This is what the individuals involved said, but it has been arranged so that it all flows together nicely.  What? You thought I got everyone in a room and had an interview?  That shit would take hours!

 

Concursion, Genre-Fusion Salad

Posted on by thre3zekiel

concur

 

I imagine the discussion at Puuba Games when this game was thought up went like this:

“We want to make a game, and have decided it will be a platformer, now Bill…”

Dave jumps in,  “Whoa whoa whoa!  Who decided on that?  I wanted to do a fucking fighter, like double-dragon!”

Bill cuts off Dave “O fuck that! We agreed last week at Chi-Chis that we’d be doing a damn ninja game!  Shinobi redux bitches!”

“And most of us were trashed on tequila and margaritas!  No, last week beforehand we decided on a space shooter!”

Sam cuts in angrily, “What!?  But the indie scene needs my ideas for a non-violent ambient space explorer!”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               – Puuba Games Board Discussion, probably

On the battle raged for 6 days, 7 nights and on the 7th day, everyone said fuck it! and they each started their own games.  Little did they know, this was Dave’s plan all along.  He wanted everyone to do what they were good at in order to make this game.  You’re a devious mother-fucker Dave.  Devious.

Concursion literally takes 6 different games, disembowels them like digital legionnaires and squeezes them into a bizarre game smoothie.  Don’t believe me?  They brag about it on their fucking site.  Now, the game starts off as a platformer with the usual platformer issues.  Dark Lord Bignbad has captured the princess… Honey Drop.. Honey Bum..(?).. the princess yet again, but this time he shatters some crystals, rending the world and various others.  Your character just shows up at the castle, presumably because he’s a horny (-ed) viking, and sees that she isn’t there.  You then chase after the princess’s hand maiden, who it seems was included as a bad-ass lady character because in a kingdom with no other visible rulers, theirs is still a princess.  At least I don’t think there are other rulers, but if there is a king and queen, it was real shitty of them not to show up at the scene of their own daughter’s kidnapping.  Anyways.  Puuba Games essentially does with Concursion what Irrational attempted with Bioshock Infinite, but does it better and to greater efficacy.  Sure, it is not as sparkly as Bioshock was, but I never once said, “God this game looks great, but where is the game material that I was expecting to enjoy?”  Concursion delivers on all of its promises, whether you like it or not.

In the platformer you play a little red viking that seeks to save the land.  Of course, when your happy ass crosses realms you change into the hero of that realm.  It’s pretty fucking awesome.  So one minute you’re a little red viking and the next you are a ninja, double-jumping and deflecting shurikens.  Cross over into another realm and you man a spacefighter, and another still has you don a jetpack and spacesuit.  Watching the transition is a little bit jarring, but as you play each genre-realm, you become associated with the capabilities of each character.

They have great dumplings in this swirling vortex of universe-rending power.

They have great dumplings in this swirling vortex of universe-rending power.

Transitioning between worlds also grants you certain abilities.  Jump in the platformer, transition into ninja, now you can double-jump that pit in time to survive and go platforming again.  Even the bad guys transition sometimes, but it is really funny to see a dopey dragon-dog transition into a flying hunk of rock and vice-versa.  Those bastards over at Puuba also made mastering these transitions essential to obtaining the key to patching all the holes.  See those little green shards at the top left of my screen there?  Yea, those little fucking things.  At first you are getting them like it’s you’re job, but the difficulty of the game increases steadily, so each level makes it tougher and tougher to get the damn things.  I can already hear the howls of completionist rage.

I am not a platformer pro, either.  I bought Braid, found it insanely too tough and quit playing.  Sure, it’s artistic and mopey and wrist-cuttingly emo, but this is not Braid.  This game is also artistic, in its own way.  In a way that reminds me of Mega Man.  Seriously, this game’s music is the type that I love to hear.  It is full of energy and fun.  I actually alt-tabbed the game so I could listen to the theme music of the Intro level.  Don’t you judge me, play the game and listen for yourself!  Music in this game is also as much a part of the game as the mechanics and the graphics, too.  Each realm has its own version of the same music in each level to which it transitions.  It seems Puuba put some serious ass into this game as the only way I can imagine doing this is to make several versions of the same soundtrack and making the game change the place in the soundtrack upon transitioning.  And in case you are wondering, this takes about a fraction of a second.  It is seamless and really neat.  Even in places as above, where you will transition three times mid-jump, the game alters the music as you pass through those vortices.

The soundtrack here must be titled something like "the finality of laser-induced death"

The soundtrack here must be titled something like “the finality of laser-induced death”

Concursion’s difficulty has a good rising curve, but after a point I got to where I was cursing my ass off.  It really brought me back to my roots on the Super Nintendo with Mario or the Commodore 64, trying to make the Hulk cry for mommy before the dynamite he had strapped to him exploded.  It is the most fun game I have ever sucked at in every possible way.  Real platformers would be facepalming and tearing the controls out of my hands.  But the way this game has you doing things that are hard as hell to awesome and encouraging music is really fun.  I mean, every scenario they put you in, whether you are attacking shuriken-flinging wall-ninjas or dashing for your life from a player-seeking angry spike ball, the music is perfect for the level.  Any of you that have a child inside you not due to a heavy lunch will want to go get this and relive your entire childhood gaming experience in one game.

Some of the levels are done up in vector graphics, some are your pixel-art, if you’re into that.  But all-in-all this game rocks.  There is even a little humor in how the game teaches you how to play.  Like, did you know that ninjas could historically perform a double-jump?  I can just imagine that showing up in one of those highly questionable History Channel shows.  And once you are done running all over the place, the game lets you jump under a discoball for your own personal pelvic-thrust party!

If you would like to buy this game, aptly described on Steam as a difficult indie action platformer with a great soundtrack, it runs 11.99$ on the aforementioned gaming service or 16.98$ for game and music.

nntsss nntsss nntsss

nntsss nntsss nntsss

Absolutely one of the most fun platformers I have ever played, including in comparison to the classic ones.  But the thing that pisses me off about all of this is how hard I suck at platformers!  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love gaming, and I played more Super Mario Brothers than any one person should have as a kid with 4 brothers.  But I was the one that passed the Sega controller during rocket-knight adventures so my brother could teach me how to rocket-jump!  I played the first level after the intro in about 3 minutes and 30 seconds.  When you play that level, you will be astounded by how hard I truly suck.  Please don’t hate, we all have our strong suits and I am not the Jack of Platformers.