Natural Selection 2 Build 170

By: Derek Yu

On: April 4th, 2011

Build 170 for Natural Selection 2 is out, but mostly I just wanted to post this video from NS2HD that shows off the updates, including some adjustments to the movement of the creepy, wall-walking Skulks.

Atom Zombie Smasher

By: Derek Yu

On: March 15th, 2011

Atom Zombie Smasher is the latest release from Brendon Chung and Blendo Games. The game plays out across a number of missions where your goal is to evacuate zombie-infested cities with a helicopter and groups of mercenaries. If you can reach your goal (determined by the number of civilians you’ve saved) before the zombies, or Zeds, reach theirs, you win.

Each month, new cities are infected and you can choose one of them to evacuate with a random set of mercenary groups, which include mobile infantry, artillery, barricades, and more. The makeup of your mercenaries plays a big part in how you do, so choose each mission wisely – conceding a difficult one will give the Zeds points and widen the gulf between you. One the other hand, beating tough missions earn you more victory points and offer more opportunities to level up your squads.

Planning and executing the perfect evacuation is a lot of fun (especially when it involves nuking the Zeds from orbit), and it feels great to make off with a gold medal victory against all odds. The cities in AZS are randomly-generated, too, so each time you play through a campaign it’s a bit different. Plus, the game has that wonderfully irreverent and stylish sensibility that’s become a hallmark of Brendon Chung’s work. Check it out on Steam – the game’s only $9 for this week (10% off).

TIGdb: Entry for Atom Zombie Smasher

Next Mojang Game: Scrolls

By: Derek Yu

On: March 2nd, 2011

The artwork is by Junkboy.

Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson announced yesterday that the other game his studio, Mojang Specifications, is working on is Scrolls, a multiplayer tactics game that’s inspired by collectible card games, board games, and role-playing games. When the game is purchased, players get a “starter deck” of cards and can buy further packs later on (although Mojang claims that you will not simply be able to buy your way to victory). Where the team plans to improve upon other CCG video games like Magic Online is by adding complex features that wouldn’t be possible by emulating an analogue game. Also, a single-player mode of Scrolls is a possibility.

If you want more information, I suggest going to Rock, Paper, Shotgun. ‘Cause they the best.

Natural Selection 2 Build 163

By: Derek Yu

On: February 18th, 2011

Dynamic infestation was a proposed feature of Natural Selection 2 as far back as 2006 (warning: video with significantly louder audio), when the game was still running on the Half-Life 2 Source engine. It’s only now, with build 163, that it’s has been added to the game’s custom engine, along with a host of other features and bug fixes. The infestation works very similarly to the creep in Starcraft – alien structures can only be built on top of it.

Natural Selection 2 is a multiplayer FPS/strategy game where players can take on the role of either a commander, who has a top-down view of the level, or a variety of grunts that are controlled from the first-person view. If you pre-order the game you can start playing the beta immediately.

Desktop Dungeons v0.14

By: Derek Yu

On: June 15th, 2010

A new version of Desktop Dungeons has been released! Version 0.14 has a number of improvements, including a more in-depth religion system based on piety, an improved interface, new areas and other added content, an in-game tutorial, and the option to play the game at 2x scale or fullscreen. Also, I donated my tileset to the game’s creators and they were cool enough to use it as the default (check out this TIGForums thread for alternatives)! Enjoy!

TIGdb: Entry for Desktop Dungeons

Revenge of the Titans Beta

By: Derek Yu

On: May 26th, 2010

The beta version of Revenge of the Titans recently came out. Puppygames, the creators of Droid Assault and Titan Attacks, have worked their mojo over the tower defense genre this time, crafting a fun game that looks and sounds great. Hats off to Puppygames’ artist, Chaz Willets, for creating a distinct art style that improves upon his previous work in every way. It’s awesome.

This free demo is quite long, and features some 20-odd levels that charge you with protecting your home base with turrets and other, more exotic, weapons. In between levels you can also research new lines of technology to bolster your defenses. This research costs money that’s earned during battle, either from destroying gidrahs (the game’s requisite hostile alien race), collecting power-ups, or harvesting energy crystals using refineries.

Reloading turrets and collecting money from refineries is handled manually by the player, by clicking on them. One of the main challenges in the game is keeping track of your turrets and refineries and making sure that they’re always firing or collecting whenever possible. Although it makes the game feel more frantic, it also reeks slightly of unnecessary micromanagement. That, and I think it might impact the strategy of the game negatively, putting too much emphasis on keeping your buildings close together (the strange acceleration of the map scrolling doesn’t help).

Another problem is that you can get kind of screwed later in the game if you’ve done badly, either by not harvesting enough crystals or by frittering away your research on things that you don’t end up using. It is possible to start over at any previous level, but right now the game doesn’t appear to update your starting state with subsequent replays. And alas, there’s really no way to know what kind of research you need until the challenge starts ramping up dramatically. Oh well.

Those issues aside, I’m having a good time with the beta and decided to purchase it for its pre-order price of $13.37 (the final game will cost $27.72). Unlike many tower defense games that move at a plodding rate, Revenge of the Titans is very fast-paced, and the production values are top-notch. I also like the levels are somewhat randomized each time you play. It doesn’t seem like it’s making any sweeping innovations to the genre, but the execution really enhances what makes these games so addictive. Definitely my favorite Puppygames project so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

His Dark Majesty

By: Derek Yu

On: May 13th, 2010

What do you do when you’re programming AI for a turn-based strategy game but modern computers aren’t challenging you enough? Put it on the 8-bit Atari! And that’s what Jakub Debski did when he created His Dark Majesty, which is free to download and is playable via a number of 8-bit Atari emulators, like Atari800Win. Links to the emulators are available from the game’s homepage, along with an interesting account of the game’s development (including screenshots). It’s a beautiful piece of work. (TIGForums thread)

SteamBirds

By: Derek Yu

On: April 1st, 2010

Andy Moore’s SteamBirds is a Flash-based dogfighting game that’s set in alternate history versions of World War I and II, where planes are powered by nuclear power or some such. The game employs a kind of turn-based combat system that’s similar to Flotilla – the action is carried out in real-time but pauses at fixed intervals so that you can adjust your movements. Your planes will automatically shoot if they’re within range, so your main goal is to outmaneuver your opponents and use the special abilities of your planes at the right times. It’s really fun and the contributions from Danc (graphics and design), Danny Baranowsky (music), and Jordan Fehr (sound effects) make it a stand-out browser game.

My biggest complaint is that the game doesn’t go far enough. It’s a problem that I feel a lot of the Flash games I’ve played suffer from: by the time you get to the real meat of the game – the massive, knock-down drag-out battles with tons of planes – SteamBirds is already winding down toward a premature conclusion. At least there are a handful of bonus levels that extend the fun and let you play around with weapons that, for whatever reason, didn’t make it into the main campaign.

Still, maybe it’s best that SteamBirds leaves me thinking of possibilities and wanting more. Andy has even been kind enough to reveal the numbers behind the project: everything from how the development was split to how he chose his sponsor, Armor Games (and for how much). Nice!

TIGdb: Entry for SteamBirds

Crate Expectations

By: Guest Reviewer

On: March 29th, 2010

[This is a guest review by PerrinAshcroft. If you’re interested in writing an article for TIGSource, please go here.]

Crate Expectations is an Xbox Live Indie Games title released in October last year. It didn’t receive a lot of coverage at the time which is a real shame. XBLIG is a strange service with an eclectic mix of the great and the terrible and sadly real gems such as this can just sink into the depths of Xbox menus never to be seen again. The developer recently released a patch for the game and so now seems as good a time as ever to shed some light on this lovely game that may have passed you by. I even contacted the developers to see if they could tell us a little more about their experience developing for XBLIG.

Looking at screenshots your first impression is probably that this is a Sokoban-style block-pushing puzzle. That was certainly what I’d thought, but the reality is very different. Create Expectations is actually a fiendish multiplayer strategy game. While the goal of the game is simply to spawn your blocks and push them along a sliding surface to the exit, there’s no real puzzle to how you’re going to get there. The real challenge of the game comes from the other players, whether they be AI or ideally your friends, as you find ways to get your blocks to the exit while simultaneously stalling and screwing over your opponents attempts to do the same.

At its absolute best this becomes a chess-like process of thinking multiple moves ahead. Deciding how many turns will it take them to reach the goal and figuring how can you increase that number for them. You can spawn ice blocks that will disrupt them for a few turns or even sacrifice some of your own blocks, leaving them static while they halt your opponents’ progress. A massive selection of maps each presenting different routes and bottlenecks means there’s a huge amount of depth to the tactics and strategies to employ in winning.

In terms of graphics and level of polish the screenshots almost speak for themselves, it’s clear the developers put as much care and attention into this as any commercial title seen on Xbox Live Arcade.

So what’s the catch here? Why didn’t this game make a bigger splash when it came out? Well I think this game was always going to have a hard time reaching the kind of players who’d love it. It has the look of a casual puzzle game but is in fact something for people into multiplayer strategy. While the AI is perfectly sufficient at kicking your ass if you set it hard enough, this is like Bomberman in that the real fun comes from playing it with two mates in the room, screaming at them when they’ve just totally shafted you.

If you’re the type of person who’s enjoyed sessions of Worms or Bomberman and can bring a few friends over to play a competitive game like this, then there’s a lot of joy to be had for only 240 Microsoft Points. I would certainly suggest you dig into NXE menus and hunt for this title.

Finally, I contacted the developers to see if they’d answer a few questions about developing the game. Rather than talking specifically of the game itself I thought it would be more interesting to find out about their experience developing for Xbox Live Indie Games and the lessons they’ve learned:

Where did the idea for Crate Expectations come from? Any other games that were influential in deciding to make it?

Duncan: I’m probably going to come across as quite cryptic by saying this, but the idea was mostly a result of the circumstances under which we had to make it! I’ll spare you the boring details, but initially we had a very small time window in which to develop the project, so we scoured through game ideas we’d had in the past to find something simple and fun that could be done justice in as little as a week of development. Crate Expectations was a distillation of a larger design that Alex had been dreaming of for some time that seemed to fit the bill.

Alex: I originally came up with the idea behind Crate Expectations quite a while ago but it really was fleshed out when we started actually making the game. We wanted to make the kind of game that we wanted to play and we wanted to play something competitive, huddled around a TV in a cosy fashion but with the option to really play dirty as well. Crate Expectations kind of became a mash up of four player chess and the crate-pushing puzzle game, sokoban with a hefty spiking of something really evil like Sorry. Local multiplayer is very important to us in our games and we’re really glad that it seems to be coming back in style!

How big was your development team and what kind of prior development experience did they have?

Duncan: The core team at Haiku consists of myself (Duncan), Alex, and Jock. One designer who pretends to be a programmer, and two programmers who pretend to be designers. We had enough dirt on ex-colleagues and talented friends that they were easily blackmailed into showering us with the great quality artwork, trailers, music and sound that we wouldn’t have had any hope of making ourselves!

Alex: Jock and I have been in the industry for quite a while doing all sorts of things for all sorts of companies. Both of us worked on so called ‘Triple A’ titles before joining our previous employer, Outerlight, the creators of The Ship Online, where we met Duncan. We were, and possibly still are, working on something that’s potentially related to The Ship in some way but we’re wrapped up in so many NDAs that we couldn’t say for certain. Crate Expectations is our baby though, we love it dearly and it’s definitely the game I’m most proud of from my career so far.

Any important lessons you learned from making and releasing the game?

Duncan: Maybe puns aren’t as big a selling point as I’d like them to be! We fell in love with the name of the game as soon as it was suggested, never for a second considering changing it. In truth, I imagine a significant number of people probably thought “Crates? Nah” and skipped right over us. Box art and title are all people judge you on when scanning through the Xbox Indies section of the marketplace. I love both of ours very much indeed, but perhaps that love isn’t universal.

Alex: Yeah, we learnt a lot of lessons, mainly don’t let your game look like a puzzle game when it’s a strategy game. Everyone ends up sad – the puzzle game enthusiasts jump in and download the trial and have their minds blown when there’s no puzzle to solve and the strategy game lovers skip straight over it because it’s probably another crate pushing game. We had an absolutely amazing Trailer made up by a really great friend from The Creative Assembly, the guy that does all the trailers down there, but looking back on it, we should have added more text explaining what the game is actually about. I suppose if we’re truly honest we also learnt that games built for the Xbox Indies Channel need to be made as quickly as possible to maximize the chances of profiting from them. Crate Expectations took two months for four people in total so the initial outlay was high and we certainly haven’t made that back but we’ve learnt so much in the process that we think it was worth it.

Why did you decide to go with Xbox Live Indie Games as your target platform, any regrets with that decision?

Duncan: Our main reason was the ease with which we could do so. We had the equipment and software we needed to get the game built ready to hand, and the costs of releasing on Xbox Indies is trivial in comparison to many other avenues. Plus developing using XNA is a real pleasure; it makes it easy for even rubbish programmers like myself to be productive!

Alex: I suppose our only regret currently is that we didn’t make a PC version of the game too. We’re thinking very, very hard about that. There is a significant outlay of work to get the game’s online multiplayer aspect working on PC and we’re not entirely sure that it’s going to be worth it but we’ve had such good feedback from the people who’ve actually played the Indies version that we’re edging closer and closer to just doing it. The Indies Channel is a great place for people to start making games but there’s no doubt that there is a larger market for strategy games like Crate Expectations on PC.

Can you share any future plans for Crate Expectations or new projects you’re working now or would like to one day?

Duncan: We’ve actually not long released our first update to Crate Expectations, which added a bunch of new levels and numerous fixes and improvements that should hopefully make the game far more accessible and enjoyable. Whether we’ll do any more updates remains to be seen, but if there’s anybody out there that would like to see it happen then speak up – it wouldn’t take a great deal of encouragement for me to crack open the level editor again!

Alex: As I mentioned above I think if we do anything with Crate Expectations it might be to make a PC version and look at Steam as a potential way of distributing the game. As for other projects, we have the aforementioned title that is very much under wraps at the moment, we’re very, very excited about that though and then we have another Indies title that is coming along quite nicely. It’s a totally different game to Crate Expectations but so far it’s looking really promising. It’s already fun to play with and it’s very much still in the prototype stage.

Flotilla is out

By: Lorne Whiting

On: March 8th, 2010

Blendo Games (the creator behind the very stylish and classy Gravity Bone) released Flotilla a little over a week ago.

Flotilla is a space exploration game where you go from star to star flirting with danger and talking to bull-slavers and cat-pirates and various other terrestrial animals piloting space ships, killing and getting killed by many of them.

The meat of the game is the turn-based spaceship combat. Turns take place simultaneously, so you have to really think about what your enemies are going to do, especially since each ship has a bunch of invulnerable armor plating that you have to circumvent. You can control the orientation of your ships, and there are a few movement options that let you trade speed for firepower and vice-versa, so it’s really a battle of lining up your ships so that you’re ships are flanking or can otherwise hurt the enemy, while making sure their shots can’t get past your armor.

It’s an incredibly satisfying system with a lot of depth, and the demo will make you cry and wish you had $10 when it ends. Or, y’know, you do and you can buy the game and everybody wins.