Q.U.B.E. recoups Indie Fund investment in four days
Q.U.B.E. is the first project released to be bankrolled by the Indie Fund, an organisation made up of a series of successful indie developers looking to provide hands-off financial support to exciting new game makers. A post on the Indie Fund blog, spotted by Joystiq, says that they have recouped their $90,000 investment after just four days.
“In the short time that it’s been available on Steam, Q.U.B.E. has sold over 12,000 copies,” say the Indie Fund. “Indie Fund recouped its investment in Q.U.B.E., and now we’re looking forward to seeing what the future holds for Toxic Games.”
Red Orchestra 2 mod tools released
The full version of the Red Orchestra 2 SDK has been released for free, giving RO2 owners the opportunity to create maps and game modes for Tripwire’s multiplayer shooter. The developers have released a few limited versions of the SDK, but the full suite of tools is now available.
“Users can now make and publish everything from simple mods and mutators, through custom maps and on to full total conversion mods,” Tripwire say, mentioning that big mods like Rising Storm, In Country Vietnam and Iron Europe are already in development. You can grab the mod tools from the Tools tab of your Steam account.
Tripwire are no strangers to the modding scene. Killing Floor and Red Orchestra started out as mods for Unreal 2004. Hopefully the SDK release can inspire another wave of talented modders.
Free games for the New Year: Yeti
As much a comedy sketch as an adventure game, Yeti casts you as the director of a nature documentary in the Himalayas. You’re in pursuit of the mythical creature itself, a beast of the wilds whose hobbies include brandy and dance music. The game’s humour is grounded in the Yeti’s increasingly improbable cosmopolitan lifestyle, the places he finds himself, and the things the film crew will do to facilitate him.
Free games for the New Year: Deity
Deity places you in the hooves of a purple-horned demon whose realm is invaded by torch-bearing, sword-wielding fantasy types. On the surface, it’s an isometric dungeon-crawler in the vein of Diablo: but there’s no direct combat and no loot to find. Instead, this is a stealth puzzle game – the student developers at Digipen cite Batman: Arkham Asylum as one of their influences, and it shows.
It’s entirely mouse controlled, with left click to move and right click to teleport between locations in a cone of purple mist. You’re vulnerable to light, but by teleporting into wall-mounted braziers you can turn them to your side, gaining a little health and a place to hide in the process. Teleporting into enemies, meanwhile, causes them to explode into a shower of giblets.
Super Meat Boy hits one million sales, Bastion passes 500,000
Great news for two top indie games. A Team Meat tweet announces that “Super Meat Boy past the million sales mark last month!” The spattery plaformer recently featured in the superb Humble Indie Bundle 4, which took more than two million dollars in total donations before it closed. “PLATINUM BABY!” said the devs, understandably pleased.
FTL: a game about managing a spaceship in an infinite galaxy
FTL is “a spaceship simulation real-time roguelike-like”, according to its website. That’s a fair description. You travel a galaxy as a spaceship, encountering random enemies, upgrading and maintaining your systems, re-routing power from life support to shields, and directing your crew to frantically put out fires. Every journey ends with your inevitable death, as your crew is killed from one calamity or another.
I’ve been playing an early build of the game, and it’s amazing. When it comes out in the middle of next year, you should play it because it’s amazing.
To convince you why you should start looking forward to FTL, I’ve written about my experience with the game below. Read on to find out why doors are important in space.
Pay what you want for lovely voxelly indie shooter, Voxatron
Voxels are a strange, discarded experiment in the history of graphical advancement. At one point a few developers thought that those little 3D pixels were the future. A few experimental games like Outcast tried popluarise the tech, but polygons muscled them out. Voxatron proves that we shouldn’t have been so quick to leave them behind. The alpha version of this charming indie blaster is available now as part of a pay-what-you-want Humble Voxatron Debut deal. As with the Humble Indie Bundles, your donation can be split three ways between the developers and charity organisations like Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Find out how in the video above.
Dustforce trailer introduces beautiful dust-busting indie platformer
What is Dustforce? That’s the question we’re asking after watching this fantastic new trailer from developers, Hitbox, spotted on Reddit. The video communicates a sense of swift agility and freedom of motion that immediately makes me want to take control of the character and experience it first hand. It’s hard to tell from the trailer what your actual purpose is. Sometimes the sprites are darting about, sweeping up dust and swathes of fallen leaves, at other points they seem to be spreading it around the map and beating the crap out of flapping leaf-bird things.
The official Dustforce site has little more information, but does have a couple of screenshots, and news that Dustforce will be hitting Steam later this year. Check out the shots below.
PCG US Podcast #281: Indie Invasion
This week, Lucas takes the helm of the PCG Podcasting Pinnace with crew-mates Chris, Tyler, Evan, and Josh, as they discuss a week’s worth of tantalizing news stories. You’ll find out which indie games we’re lovin’ right now, what constitutes a worthwhile Collector’s Edition, the verdict in co-op versus competitive multiplayer, Chris’ physical dependencies to Civilization V, and many more amusing anecdotes. Message of the week: drink booze to regain mana!
Magicka’s buggy launch: “We didn’t know the game was being released”
Wizarding adventure Magicka might have gone on to sell 600,000 copies, but the game had a rocky start. When the game first launched, players experienced bugs that made it basically unplayable in both singleplayer and multiplayer, and it was weeks before it was stable.
At E3 last month, I spoke to Emil Englund, one of the founders of developers Arrowhead Game Studios, and asked him how the buggy launch happened.
Fract trailer: a first-person puzzle game that looks like a neon Darwinia
Fract is a first-person puzzle game with that looks like a cross between Darwinia and a Daft Punk video. The puzzles are pretty simple – twisting knobs or pushing buttons to match patterns – but it looks stunning and the world responds in ways that makes solving those puzzles extremely rewarding.
The game isn’t finished yet, but you can download a beta for Windows or Mac from the Fract site. Or skip below for more screenshots.
The Cat and the Coup: free, fun and beautiful documentary game about a CIA-funded coup
The Cat and the Coup is a free documentary game in which you play the cat of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. It plays like a simple physics puzzle game, it looks like a storybook with artwork inspired by Persian miniatures, it features music by Nine Inch Nails, and if you give it just 15-minutes of your time, it’ll teach you the story of a really fascinating period of American and British history involving communist paranoia and a CIA-funded coup d’état.
A video, screenshots and some thoughts below.
Fight, build and mine in King Arthur’s Gold
Mining is basically my favourite thing to do in games, and in the last year I’ve been served well by Minecraft, Wurm Online, Terraria and, now, King Arthur’s Gold. The multiplayer, team-based sidescroller is about two teams of Knights, Archers and Builders battling for control of a level’s gold supply.
It’s still in early beta, but already worth playing. Builders can mine through rock to find gold and build structures like ladders, doors and catapults, while Knights and Archers defend and lead attacks on the enemy’s gold reserves. It’s heavily inspired by King Arthur’s World, a sidescrolling RTS on the SNES from 1993, but it plays more like a competitive Terraria.
You can download the game and find news of the extremely frequent updates at the King Arthur’s Gold website, and watch a trailer over at IndieGames.com.
The future of indie
Just look at Hawken. If ever there was a game that undermined the notion of what an independently developed project can achieve, it’s Adhesive Games’ mech shooter. Every bone in my body tells me a small studio should not be able to pull off such a gorgeous, robot-stomping shooter, but there it is, megabots hanging in the air, spitting rockets at each other across maps that look like they’ve come out of Epic or Valve.
But I’m getting used to indie games surprising me: freedom to create without interference from the men in suits is the reason their developers go into this murky, unfunded realm, trading security for the chance to follow their own path. Every developer in this list has taken the opportunity to make exactly what they want to make, using that freedom to create some startlingly original games that simply wouldn’t be made if they had a deadline to hit and had to justify every decision.
These games only exist because someone passionately wanted to bring them into the world, and it really, really shows.
GameTrekking interview: “I released a new notgame from Cambodia today”
Back in September 2010, TIGSource‘s founder Jordan Magnuson set off on an audacious project – travelling around South-East Asia, making indie games about his experiences along the way.
He called the project GameTrekking, and funded it with more than £3,000 of donations solicited from the web. Contributors to the fund get email updates from Magnuson and beta access to games in development, and those who contribute more get postcards from the road, links on his website, and even a credit in the games themselves, which are free, open-source and cross-platform.
PC Gamer spoke to Magnuson about doodling, genocide, and his experiences on the road.
