With the launch of the Wii-U just weeks away, Austrian indies Broken Rules have just opened up with the first video showing how they plan to use the console’s unique second-screen setup for a “hide and seek” mode in Chasing Aurora, their beautifully paper-cut and flat shaded “2D aerial action game about the dream of flight” that will mark one of the first indie launches for the console’s downloadable service.

As with a number of Nintendo’s own Nintendo Land minigames, the mode will see one player using the Wii-U controller with a global view of the game attempting to stay out of the line of sight of its four opponents, each of whom get a more restricted zoomed-in sense of the world, and all of whom are attempting to snatch the ‘golden bird’s ‘aurora gem’.

Broken Rules have also shown more of their other multiplayer modes via their YouTube channel, and have a larger showcase of screenshots and information at their Chasing Aurora home page and accompanying presskit page.

As the game just manages to squeak past its £40,000 Kickstarter goal — with some 24 days left to go — UK indies Big Robot have just published the first real-live gameplay trailer of their upcoming ‘tweedpunk’ game Sir, You Are Being Hunted, which proves it to be more or less exactly what I hope for from any first-person shooter: a tense and cerebral slow-stalking & stealthy creeper.

With their goal met, the team have just detailed more automaton foes & new ‘stretch’ rewards, should the campaign continue as strongly as it has over the past few days, including ‘The Landowner’, a new NPC robot, the ability to hunt pheasant & rabbit across its landscape for sustenance, and entirely new island dominated by a dynamically generated ruined castle.

Visit Big Robot’s Kickstarter page for more information and to donate for your own copy of the game.

Metroid fan art for an unfortunately long-passed iam8bit art show (meaning prints, presumably, are long-gone) by Barnaby ‘somefield‘ Ward, creator of the super essential (and now apparently exceedingly rare?) dreamscape comic Sixteen Miles to Merricks, much of which you can (thankfully) still read online here. [via Sugoi]

One of those duties they never really tell you about when you sign up to be a Pokemon trainer, an illustration by the previously-featured artist Rachel Morris of Scraggy, one of the game’s most mis-fitted monsters.

As usual, you can (& should) buy a number of Morris’s amazing pieces for the NYU Game Center via Society 6.

Totally taken with this new, hour-long mixtape produced by Dyad, Panoramical and Proteus composer David Kanaga in advance of his live-performance of the latter with designer Ed Key (featured here just a short while back) at GameCity7.

It’s a nicely tuned blend of jazz/folk/piano/electronic, with just enough of Kanaga’s own material for Proteus (some of which, says Key, is sampled from the mixtape’s tracks) that it gives the awesome effect of lazing with a disc-man under one of the game’s low-bit trees, with cheap enough headphones that the ambient sound of the in-game world occasionally bleeds through and fades away.

[mejsaudio src=”http://venuspatrol.com/ofiles/proteusgamecity7mix.mp3″]

You can stream the whole thing above, or download it via this new post by Key on the Proteus Live event itself, about which he adds, intriguingly, that the god-like manual controls that helped sculpt the hour-long experience will likely come to the final released version of the game, creating a multiplayer experience where “one person could play on mouse or joypad, whilst someone else controlled the environment via the keyboard.”

Super intrigued, at least aesthetically, by the latest alpha footage of NOWHERE, an upcoming “surreal creative defense game” from German husband-and-wife studio Duangle.

The new trailer was awesomely spotted by Martin ‘grapefrukt‘ Jonasson in response to a recent soapbox session from Metanet‘s Raigan Burns, where he called for more technical experimentation in modeling and rendering games, using demoscene hits like quite’s cdak (seriously, watch that, it’s only 4KB of code!).

There’s a ton more NOWHERE to be found via Duangle’s YouTube channel showing the game’s more traditional building and defense mechanics (I’m quite taken with the alarming reverberations that kick in around 1:30 of the video above), much of which hews closer to FRACT-esque flat poly constructions.

Duangle says the game will be done “when it’s done”, but ultimately promise that NOWHERE players will “witness the unraveling of a visual acid trip through IMPOSSISPACE, filled with exotic shapes, geometric patterns and appropriate soundscapes” on its release, which, I suppose I honestly couldn’t ask for much more.

A quick and very happy note here to let you know that we’ve officially launched a new responsive version of the site to make mobile browsing — particularly on the iPhone — less of a squinty chore. There are no new URLs to visit or cookies to set: just visit Venus Patrol on your iPhone (or squish your browser window in real tight) to see the new design.

The conversion was masterfully handled by Cory ‘cr0ybot‘ Hughart, who even managed to get Dom2D’s TIGSource Devlogs fully functional in their bite-sized form. For this first iteration, we’re primarily targeting the iPhone — I felt like iPad browsing the full site was still totally acceptable, and while this should theoretically work for most other mobile browsers, you may see some hitches on certain Android devices that we didn’t have lying around to test on.

Any feedback, suggestions & reports of particular problems are warmly welcomed at brandon@venuspatrol.com.

One more dose of Timothy ‘TurnisLeftHome‘ Reynold’s low poly excellence, this time a soft focused Martian landscape. You can find a ton more of Reynold’s work both at his portfolio site and dribble, and find a number of his pieces available as prints at Society6, including this one.

Like the previously featured Geo-A-Day and Brendan Zabarauskas, some crazy beautiful and evocative low-poly amazingness from Timothy ‘TurnisLeftHome‘ Reynolds, here taken from a mega-list of his isometric experiments which includes a number of gorgeous subtle animated work.

Every month, as part of the regular monthly meetings of the Austin, TX independent game community JUEGOS RANCHEROS, we do a very casual & chatty rundown of the ten or so games from the previous month for the audience, to give people — especially those curious onlookers from outside the indie community itself — a look at what they may have missed. The featured games are both local and global, and both indie and, on occasion, a bit-bigger-budget — what binds them together is simply that they’re all amazing.

In keeping with the tongue-in-tobacco-packed-cheek tone, we call these run-downs A Fistful of Indies, which are presented here on Venus Patrol for your reference, each fully-annotated, -linked, and off-the-cuff blurbed, in addition to their home on the JUEGOS RANCHEROS site.

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