Here are a couple of good-looking old-school 2d games coming from teams known for FPS’s:
Capsized is a platform game that’s reminiscent of Exile. Coming in 2010 to Steam and XBLA, from the creators of the multiplayer FPS Nexuiz.
Locomalito, best known for their chunky FPS 8-bit Killer, are working on Hydorah, a Gradius-style shmup. It will be released as freeware at some indeterminate date.
Admittedly somewhat of a wry smile, but then I imagine that’s just how you would smile when you’ve just allocated half of your £4.5 million budget on british indie games. Alice Taylor is the Education Commissioner for Channel 4 as that linked interview reports, Channel 4 being a UK TV network already responsible for funding the BAFTA winning web-game Bow Steet Runner, which is a stunning FMV-Adventure style georgian crime drama. And really quite good.
A somewhat worrying figure in the interview is that the scheme will be supporting projects which currently have a budget of up to £800,000. Braid is one of the more recent examples I can think of where a large price-tag was admitted by the author, somewhere around $200,000 dollars, so the idea of helping out £800,000 productions is kind of confusing. The people I think it could help out most are the ones working for a hundreth of that sum, if not less. Still, if there is that much money around and brit-indies are confident in asking far less than that amount in terms of support then I’d be cautiously optimistic for them. Maybe I’m just intimidated by anyone with that much money.
What’re peoples immediate reactions? Are they any british developers who’ll be looking into this as a source of funding?
Yo, I’m in Washington right now for PAX (first time)! The show starts tomorrow, but today I got to attend a Microsoft event where some indies were in attendence. Slick Entertainment was one of the teams present, and they were showing off Scrap Metal, a “cars with guns” racing game that’s coming out to XBLA next year. As a fan of Rock n’ Roll Racing, RC Pro AM, Off Road, etc., I’m very excited about this one. The handling and physics felt great, and the action was raucous.
The inimitable and cheeky Introversion guys were also present and had Darwinia+ available to play. This game includes both the IGF award-winning Darwinia as well as Multiwinia (shown in the video above). I enjoyed Darwinia a lot but hadn’t ever played Multiwinia, mostly due to my aversion to multiplayer-only games (this might change now that I’ve tried Left 4 Dead 2). But hell, Multiwinia is great fun in singleplayer mode against the computer, too. I’ll be looking forward to grabbing D+ for the full experience.
And finally… Fez wasn’t on hand at the event, but it is coming out for Live Arcade in 2010 and there is some new footage of it in this episode of G4’s Electric Playground (around the 6:00 mark).
First of all, Derek Yu’s super popular platformer-roguelike Spelunky has finally reached version 1.0! I’m assuming everyone here has played the game. If not, give it a try already—it’s one of the best freeware titles ever, absolutely.
You can find the latest version here, at Spelunky World.
The other, almost bigger news is: Spelunky will be coming to XBLA in 2010. Derek says, “it’s going to be much more than a straight port of the PC game – I’m planning on stuffing it with new graphics, audio, and other features for XBLA users.” The game will be developed under his new label, Mossmouth. (Support of the original will continue, of course!)
All in all, pretty exciting. Check Spelunky World for more information as it’s released.
Posted by Brandon "BMcC" McCartin
Thu, 13 Aug 2009 03:40:00 GMT
The Behemoth, creators of indie hit Castle Crashers, have uploaded the first of hopefully many development videos of their next XBLA game, which they are still calling “Game #3.” The video shows that co-op, multiplayer action which I am down for. So down.
Most prominently featured is “Soul Mode” (again a tentative title), where each team must beat the souls out of the other team(s) and hold on to them as long as possible, racking up points over time. Customization is also talked about, with custom appearances and weapons promised for each player. Even this early on the gameplay and presentation look top notch. Keep watching The Behemoth’s dev blog for more tasty updates.
Posted by Brandon "BMcC" McCartin
Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:52:00 GMT
GearToyGear is a new crazy-fast tunnel shooter from shmup deity Kenta Cho. The instructions are: “Avoid incoming bullets/lasers/obstacles and destroy enemies. Hold the right trigger to speed up and earn more score.” It might be prudent to add a seizure warning as well.
Dust is just one of a number of projects being created under the ‘Elysian Tail’ franchise, which includes an independent animated feature film and of course this very pretty game. Dean Dodrill is the man behind the animation, and the programming, and the sound and.. well everything except for the music.
There isn’t much to go on currently beyond this trailer, but it seems to divulge a fair amount of the gameplay, where the majority of the action is reminiscent of a side-scrolling beat’em up with a dash of platforming thrown in for good measure. So far it looks pretty damn exciting, with special note of course going towards the animation which just makes everthing look wonderful, even if you find the character designs a little offputting at first.
Definitely the biggest barrier the game will face will be trying to cross that strange ‘furry threshold’, as so long as the controls and hit-detection feel satisfying this could be the one of the best games to hit.. actually, what is it coming out on?
As it is being entered into the Dream Build Play competition it maybe a full Xbox Live Arcade title. If not though it may end up as an ‘Xbox Indie’ title. No official word, but expect more soon!
The Behemoth dudes are always at San Diego Comic-Con, and this year is no exception. I couldn’t make it this week, but thankfully Gamespot was on hand to take videos of Game 3 and interview Dan Paladin for me. (Thanks, gents!) Something tells me that 2010 is going to be another huge year for independent games.
Independent Developer Twisted Pixel’s previous effort Maw was a fun if flawed experience. Undeniably charming it lacked any real amount of depth to keep you playing after the credits rolled.
Their new game Splosion Man just hit the XBLA this week for 800 Makeshift points and, given the amount of people involved in the production according to the credits might possibly be the last one I could get away with calling ‘indie’. However at the very least I wanted to see how their follow up to Maw fared, and it must be said it’s pretty damn fun.
Strangely, while Maw didn’t have much of a story there doesn’t seem to be any story to ‘Splosion Man whatsoever. I think he must be some kind of escaped experiment, but nothing is literally described to the player, so lets just say you play a man made of explosions ‘because videogames’. So now the story is out of the way we can talk about the game itself. It’s pretty much a standard platform/action/puzzle game where dexterity is generally more important than lateral thinking. There’s about 50 stages in the game, each about 5 minutes in length and the entire campaign can be run through in about 4-5 hours.
You only have one button that really does anything beyond the movement commands which is ‘Splode’, causing your character to rocket jump and blow up anything around him. This can be used as you would expect for regular jumping and wall jumping, but also means you can blow up different forms of explosive barrel to give yourself a much more powerful leap. It’s a simple mechanic which only really gets more complex by increasing the number of successive jumps between safe ground or checkpoints. Sometimes however you will have to press a button to cause a barrel to appear for a limited time as it fires out a depositor, in which case you’ll have to time a jump accurately in order to explode the barrel at the right time to push you in the right direction.
