The Indie Gala 2
The Indie Gala has returned with their second set of bundles, containing indie games and music albums, with proceeds being split between developers, charity and the Indie Gala itself.
While it is a pay what you want scheme, this time it’s a little different, with three tiers of bundle available depending on how much you pay:
The Carebear Bundle contains Critical Mass by Manic Games Studios, Fortix 2, by Nemesys Games and Bunch of Heroes by NGD Studios along with Casey Lalonde’s Skitter EP, Giraffage’s Comfort, and The Numbers’ Beautiful EP.
The Big Saver Bundle contains all the contents of The Carebear Bundle, two more games: Greed Corp by Vanguard Games and Roboblitz by Naked Sky Entertainment, and music: Casey Lalonde’s Thank You, Robot Science’s Square, and Jack Butler’s Fit the Paradigm.
The Epic Gala Bundle contains all the games and music listed here, but also contains all the contents of the previous Indie Gala bundle: inMomentum by Digital Arrow, hacking sims Hacker Evolution: Duality and Hacker Evolution: Untold, by Exosyphen Studios, puzzler Your Doodles Are Bugged! by Spyn Doctor Games, and Sigma Team‘s Zombie Shooter 1 and Zombie Shooter 2, with Robot Science’s Doodads album too.
Come Home
I just played something beautiful: Come Home, an interactive and rather personal true story by independent developer Quick Fingers.
A beautiful but sad story.. I thought it was very cleverly done and the rain fits how this made me feel.
This was produced in just two weeks, using Unity as well as image stock and music.
IndieCity Global Game Jam 2012 and 100 games!
IndieCity hosted a game jam in Birmingham this weekend, as part of the Global Game Jam. All games created for the jam, and submitted during the weekend will be accepted and published by IndieCity!
The Global Game Jam is the world’s largest game jam event taking place in January each year. Thousands of student, indie and professional game developers get together across hundreds of local jams to share advice and develop games based on a secret theme during the weekend. This year’s attendee figures reached 11228, with 2310 active game projects listed; beating the 2011 record of over 1500 games created.
IndieCity have been steadily growing, and have now reached 100 games, with platform exploration game LaserCat being the 100th game.
Indie Royale – The Serious Sam Lightning Pack
Indie Royale‘s first Lightning Round brings us a bundle of Serious Sam themed indies, containing Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, Serious Sam Double D, Serious Sam: Kamikaze Attack, and Serious Sam: The First & Second Encounter. The bonus game is Serious Sam: The Greek Encounter, a top-down, 8 bit version of the game.
This bundle is on sale for just 100 hours, on the same pay what you want scheme all the previous sales have used.
The Serious Sam Indie Series was commissioned by Devolver Digital with the support of Croteam around the release of Serious Sam 3: BFE. More information on the pack is available here.
The AGS Bake Sale Bundle (Another Indie Bundle)
The AGS Bake Sale Bundle is the latest set of indie games to appear for sale, with all proceeds going to the Child’s Play charity.
There are fourteen games in this bundle, all made in the Adventure Game Studio (AGS) engine, by members of the AGS Community. These games have been created precisely for the purposes of inclusion in the Bake Sale Bundle.
Customers can purchase the bundle for any price they like, though with a minimum of $1.50 to cover the cost of the transaction. The bundle will be available from today, 20th Jan, through till the 29th of February.
Terrorhedron
Terrorhedron is an eight player, 3d co-op tower defense game by indie developers MCRO Games. This tower defense game is rather different from other tower defense as in Terrorhedron, you build and program your own turrets!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7KQ1ee0pB8]
You can building turrets from a set of 3d building blocks, with 4- or 6- facing platforms, then a choice of seven types of turret: laser, EMP, Plastic Pulse, Photon Pulse, Energy Vacuum, Plasma Beam and Finance Generator. You can program each turret to prioritise different enemies; faster moving targets, those closest to the turret or the end of the maze, or the strongest, which gives you a lot of choice in terms of strategy. Target the strongest enemies at the beginning of the maze, leaving the weaker targets to be mopped up by later turrets, or use the EMP to slow them all down and allow more firing time..
The enemies in this game are coloured spheres, with different strengths and speeds. As they take damage they change speed, with the weakest targets turning green and travelling at a set speed, but higher strength balls becoming either faster or slower. You have 100 lives to start with, and although you regenerate a life per round, later on you encounter enemies which are worth a lot more, so your setup of towers has to be able to cope with the changes of speed as well as enemy strength.
Terrorhedron is available via mcro.org, for just $5.
Q.U.B.E. goes live on Steam!
First-person puzzle game Q.U.B.E. (Quick Understanding of Block Extrusion), by Toxic Games, is now live on Steam!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iABxhj0ExA0]
Players begin the game by being dropped into an all-white room, and with little instruction, they must find and use coloured blocks to solve the puzzle and discover the way out of each level. Q.U.B.E. has drawn comparisons with Portal.. but you can see for yourself by trying out the demo.
Toxic Games is a UK-based independent games developer; Q.U.B.E. started out as a part of the developers’ student project in 2009.
Q.U.B.E. is also the first Indie Fund game to be released! Indie Fund is an investment fund backed by a team of successful indie developers, providing the investment new indies need to help cover ongoing costs and get their game finished. Other games being backed are Steph Thirion’s Faraway, Robert Briscoe‘s re-imagination of Dan Pinchbeck‘s Dear Esther, and Pocketwatch Games‘ MONACO.
The Indie Royale – New Year’s Bundle
The Indie Royale New Year’s Bundle has now opened for purchase!
There are four games in the bundle at present: Nuclear Dawn by InterWave Studios, Max & the Magic Marker by Press Play, Fractal by cipherprime, and Indie Royale exclusive Super Crossfire by Radiangames.
As usual, the bundle is pay what you want, above a minimum price. All the games are available on both Windows and Mac, with Steam keys for Nuclear Dawn, Max and the Magic Marker and Fractal, and Desura keys for Max, Fractal and Super Crossfire.
This bundle will be available for only five days.. so go and grab it now, over on www.indieroyale.com!
The Oil Blue
The Oil Blue is an indie action sim by chubigans of Vertigo Games, where you drill for oil and sell it on the world market in order to remain profitable, as well as completing missions for your employer, the United Oil of Oceana Company. I picked this one up in the Indie Royale’s Xmas Bundle, along with a few other games.. they’ve now added greenTech+, an earlier game by Vertigo Games which has you save the world from global warming using a hurricane!
The tutorial shows you how to use your first drilling machines: the Groundwell and the Oil Derrick. Keeping the Groundwell running seemed easy enough.. strike a balance between speed and power consumption, and keep an eye out for flat batteries. The Oil Derrick was a bit more complex..
While the drill is working, you get oil signatures coming up on the right hand side.. these are revealed as either pockets of air or oil. When you see oil, you have to slow the drill down, move it left or right to position it above the oil, pump the oil, then re-start the drill until the next pocket of oil appears. You also need to watch the Pressure and Stress gauges. Pressure can be vented at regular intervals, and increases more quickly while the drill is slowed down, while Stress accumulates through use, until it reaches critical levels, where you have to shut down the machine and go for repairs. Pressure also increases Stress. Not venting pressure leads to the machine breaking down..
Repairing the machines involves mini-games. In the tutorial I saw two types, one to keep a laser within a moving red circle, and another to make a set of four target lights come on simultaneously by turning on different adapters and switching between different levels of lights until you hit the correct combination.
Once in the game itself, “Rotary Misfire” came up as my repair mini-game three times; I managed to complete the puzzle by chance on my first two attempts, but I couldn’t get it the third time. This puzzle requires you to hit the spacebar just before the lights complete a full circle.
I had to actually come back to the tutorial and have this puzzle appear in the set of three to see the instructions.. whether they were obscured by previous messages on the right.. or whether they just don’t appear all the time, I don’t know.
The next two machines, the Pumpjack and Drill Rig, were unlocked as I played, with brief tutorials showing how to use them. The Pumpjack requires less interaction than the Oil Derrick, with plenty of time during setup or calibration, where you can check on the other machines and the market. The Drill Rig follows a path you plot for it onscreen, and will gather oil as it travels over it. To get all the oil from a bubble, the path has to be set to go back and forth over it: two options here, then.. to be efficient with a short path over a bubble to maximise oil collection, but have to watch the machine while it does it, or plot longer paths and be able to flick back over the other machines. As the Drill Rig is a rare machine, it doesn’t appear on every island.
On the islands I played, my set up was a Groundwell, an Oil Derrick and a Pumpjack. I started up all the machines, then parked myself over the Oil Derrick because of the pressure release requirement, as well as needing to catch the oil pockets as they were revealed. This was also the machine I found most likely to blow up, as the pressure led to stress if I wasn’t fast enough in venting it. In fact, I found the Oil Derrick needed so much prodding that I kept missing the Pumpjack’s window of drilling opportunity!
I can see it getting even harder to adequately manage when there are more machines,.. although they level up with use. When a machine levels up, parts are added or replaced, improving performance.. an example being the Groundwell’s additional batteries which allows you to go faster. The improvements are only effective per mission.. you leave the machines behind when you move to the next island.
You do keep your own rank though, which increases as you sell oil and unlocks more machines and different challenges.. You also get some funny titles as you increase too: eg the Rank 40 title: “Useful Bum”! 🙂
The Little Big Bunch
The latest in the line of indie bundles arrived today: the Little Big Bunch, with five indie games on the usual pay what you want scheme, with money being split between developers and Games Aid as you wish.
This one has a minimum price.. something I’m glad of after seeing a guy taunting one of the indie devs on Twitter this afternoon. He was bragging about only having paid 1 cent for the game.. less than a penny.. which would have been bad enough without the taunting!
I already owned one of the games: Mode 7‘s strategy game Frozen Synapse, so this one is going to Tim, and maybe we’ll get to play together at some point 😉
Also in the bundle are two platformers, one with destruction: Explodemon, by Curve Studios, and one with aliens: Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee. Finally there’s New Star Soccer 5, a football career sim, by New Star Games.. which isn’t really my type of game. The one I’m most interested in here is 2d platform shooter Serious Sam Double D, from Mommy’s Best Games, and supported by Croteam through their Serious Sam Indie series.
Serious Sam Double D is via Steam code, while the rest of the games are available via Get Games‘ download system. I have to say I much prefer Steam, knowing that I can download the games as many times as I want, and that updates will be applied as they appear. Get Games’ FAQ says that the number of activations per game vary between publishers.. while I don’t mind if I lose a cheap indie game after a couple of reinstalls, I’d be wary of buying anything I forsee playing over and over again.