[Fridays on Venus Patrol are developer Andrea ‘Bandreus‘ Portale’s day to present TIGSource DevLog Magazine, a visual guide to the newest & most interesting in-development games making the rounds on the invaluable TIGSource forums. Looking for inspiration, or just the very first look at the amazing games we’ll be talking about in the future? Click any image to learn more, and come back on Fridays for the latest picks!]
With the amount of projects being discussed weekly on TIGSource and only limited space at my disposal, it often happens that a number of genuinely interesting devlogs don’t get a spot in this magazine, including games which have been previously been featured well over a year ago but are still in active development! To help at least partially remedy that, this week we’re bringing back a few of those: Somewhere, Elliot Quest, Master Spy and Son of Nor.
But also especially noteworthy is NAVE. The folks at Video Gamo have been touring every corner of Argentina with their awesome custom-built cabinet for the past year, and are now looking into crossing the border with the cabinet. The plan is to possibly bring it to next year’s GDC, though they can’t make it without other people’s help. Here’s wishing them the best!
Be sure to check back next Friday for more: with PAX East just around the corner, we’ll be using the opportunity to showcase some of the games that’ll be showing up in Boston next weekend!
[Fridays on Venus Patrol are developer Andrea ‘Bandreus‘ Portale’s day to present TIGSource DevLog Magazine, a visual guide to the newest & most interesting in-development games making the rounds on the invaluable TIGSource forums. Looking for inspiration, or just the very first look at the amazing games we’ll be talking about in the future? Click any image to learn more, and come back on Fridays for the latest picks!]
With GDC and the IGF Awards at our backs, you’d think the indies could take it easy for at least a few days, but you’d be wrong!
This week’s issue of the Devlog is a round up of some very interesting projects — a few of which have been in development for quite some time already.
And given that EGX Rezzed is in full swing in Birmingham right now, and will be through Sunday the 30th, this issue features some of the indie games being displayed there, including TinyKeep, Kaiju Panic and Light — all of which are playable there, along with Narcissus (which was previously featured in Issue #16).
Even through I’m not sure any of us have actually fully recovered yet from last week’s That Venus Patrol Wild Rumpus Party, I don’t think I’m alone in already wishing I could relive all of its exhaustive glory over again.
Enter: Wave Patrol, the full DJ set performed by Arcane Kids (the studio behind games like Perfect Stride, Bubsy3d.com and Room of 1000 Snakes) at the party, now available online for all to enjoy, as I have been on constant repeat since the Kids surprised me with the preview link last night.
In addition to the embedded version below, you can also listen to the mix at Arcane Kids’ dedicated site for the set, where you can also find a rotating display of Vines from That Party, which are a pretty good start at recapturing what made the night amazing.
The game — a sequel to the 2009 iPhone original Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor — is set to expand on the first with an even larger and richer world, which again layers super approachable web-slinging and insect-eating mechanics over the deeper, unspoken mysteries of the locations in which it takes place, left for the player to delve into and uncover of their own accord.
To help give everyone everywhere equal opportunity to prepare to piece together those mysteries, we present here full video of the night’s proceedings. Above you’ll find a complete walkthrough of some early levels that introduces many of the mechanics you will remember from the first, as well as a number of new features, including one that changes the content of the game based on the time & weather around you in the real world.
And, at top, Tiger Style co-founder Randy Smith gives some background on the locations, magic & secret societies which inspired the fiction of the game, which will be followed by some additional new material appearing on Tiger Style’s own blog soon… along with more information on the game itself, which you can find right here.
In hopes of giving everyone a little more lead time this year, organizers of Fantastic Arcade — the indie game offshoot of Alamo Drafthouse’s Fantastic Fest — have just opened submissions for this year’s festival, which will take place here in Austin, TX on September 18th-21st.
Once again, the festival will be curated by Austin’s game collective JUEGOS RANCHEROS, and will give the developers the opportunity not just to showcase their game (including some in custom-built arcade cabinets, like at top!), but give talks in whatever manner they choose.
Even if I wasn’t part of the curatorial team, I’d still call Fantastic Arcade one of my favorite festivals of the year: it’s super open & free-form and basically exists to bring some of the best developers together for a week to eat, drink & celebrate awesome games, and the FA team have a bunch of other really cool things to announce as the date draws near.
[Fridays on Venus Patrol are developer Andrea ‘Bandreus‘ Portale’s day to present TIGSource DevLog Magazine, a visual guide to the newest & most interesting in-development games making the rounds on the invaluable TIGSource forums. Looking for inspiration, or just the very first look at the amazing games we’ll be talking about in the future? Click any image to learn more, and come back on Fridays for the latest picks!]
This is it! GDC’s final day, marking the end of one of the craziest weeks ever. What an amazing year for indie games this has been: today we’re proud to celebrate the 16th Annual IGF awards, showcasing this edition’s victors in a special issue, of course along the usual goodness straight from the TIGSource forums.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of days, you’re most likely already aware Lucas Pope’s dystopian document thriller Papers, Please swept the IGF, winning the prestigious Seumas McNally Grand Prize as Best Independent Game, on top of being awarded for Excellence in Narrative and Excellence in Design.
Papers, Please has a special place in TIGSource members’ hearts, as the game’s development process was recorded in a terrific devlog on our very own forums. GLORY TO ARSTOTZKA!
Other prizes where awarded to Jason Robert’s Gorogoa (Excellence in Visual Arts), Tale of Tales’ Luxuria Superbia (Nuovo award), Simogo’s DEVICE 6 (Excellence in Audio), Hoppo Games’ Risk of Rain (Best Student Game) and Galactic Cafe’s The Stanley Parable (Audience award). Congratulations to this year’s winners, and thanks for bringing honour to independent games as a whole by striving for perfection and pushing the limit ever forward!
Huzzah! So much goodness. But don’t let GDC and the IGF Awards grab all of your attention, as amazing indie games are constantly being worked on, even during this frantic week. Among the latest arrivals on the TIGS boards, we find Midora (a modern take on the 2D ARPG genre, inspired by classics like The Legend of Zelda and the Mana series), Party Animals (a political strategy game about winning the mayoral elections and also about the kind of sacrifices you’re ready to make in order to do so, featuring visuals by Prison Architect‘s artist Ryan Sumo), accompanied by Hex Brothers and Upside-Down Dimensions, two brand new projects of which only little is known about yet, but I’m very confident will soon be making the news.
I’d also like to give a special mention to Evan Todd’s Lemma and Steamburger Studio’s Let’s Go Camping!. The former is an innovative parkour game, in which every player’s move has the potential to alter the dynamic environments, while the latter is, in its creators’ words, “an FPS roguelike(lite) dungeon crawler” in which the player needs to hike, camp, and survive in a vast overworld wilderness in order to find procedurally generated dungeons and the treasures hidden within.
That’s all for now folks! Remember to check each and every devlog in the release, as all of these projects are well worth your attention. Happy final GDC hours and see you next Friday!
[Fridays on Venus Patrol are developer Andrea ‘Bandreus‘ Portale’s day to present TIGSource DevLog Magazine, a visual guide to the newest & most interesting in-development games making the rounds on the invaluable TIGSource forums. Looking for inspiration, or just the very first look at the amazing games we’ll be talking about in the future? Click any image to learn more, and come back on Fridays for the latest picks!]
In this issue you might notice an abundance of pixel art, but we’ll also be featuring a few notable outliers.
Halfway and Heavy Shell are both turn-based strategy games. The former puts an emphasis on tactical squads positioning, while the latter features voxel mechs and lies somewhere between X-Com and Front Mission. Elsewhere, Elysis and NDE — both in development for almost a year now — take on the action RPG genre instead.
Tako’s Japanese is an interesting educational game set to help you learn how to read and write in Japanese, while also being entertaining. And Elarooh promises to amuse you with beautiful watercolor & hand-drawn backgrounds and characters.
I also included a few games have had devlogs on TIGSource for multiple years, as development continues tirelessly on moonman, Even the Ocean and The Curious Expedition. As usual, be sure to check all of the devlogs in today’s issue — each of these projects is well worth your attention in their own right!
The new ‘Legend of Romantics’ T-shirt will be available in two colorways to start. MIDNIGHT (above) will feature glow in the dark ink that’ll let the stars & ‘legendary objects’ shine through the evening.
The other colorway we’ve dubbed ATHLETICS, and will be printed navy on heather-grey, perfect for jogging or whichever calisthenic endeavor you personally prefer.
Once again, the T-shirts will be available through the Venus Patrol Shop, powered by Fangamer, a few weeks after they make their debut at the party’s Fangamer booth (which’ll again be stocked with a whole bunch of rad stuff!).
At the same time (finally!), we’ll also be refreshing the online shop with some reprints of the original Videogame Romantics T-shirt, which have long been sold out in pretty much every women’s size since last year’s party.
I hope you dig the shirt’s quiet romance as much as I do, and look forward to more KT x VP merch coming in 2014!
With just days to go before the shindig itself, the team at Wild Rumpus & I have just announced the final lineup of our third-annual party taking place alongside this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and we’re all quite excited to note that this year we’ll be debuting a new game created with Natasha Allegri, creator of the upcoming cartoon series Bee & Puppycat.
The game — which we’re referring to as Musclecat Showdown for now — is co-created by Major Bueno, the indies behind Party Bueno and a whole host of other games created each month throughout 2013, and should be just about the best drunken fun you can have with surly, muscular cats.
Elsewhere, we’re extremely excited to have romantic beat magician and Nidhogg composer Daedelus joining a musical lineup that will include returning favorite Baiyon, Bubsy3d.com & Perfect Stride creators Arcane Kids, a new mix from Christoffer Hedborg, creator of Eleven, under his new moniker TRU LUV, and, of course, the unique stylings of DJ Phillipe Lemarchand.
The games lineup will also include a new 2-player version of Kyle Reimergartin’s FJORDS, the multiplayer dance mat version of Keita Takahashi & Adam Saltsman’s A͈L͈P͈H͈A͈B͈E͈T͈, and the stateside debut of Push Me Pull You (above), a new sports-game that exists somewhere in between Hokra and Noby Noby Boy — aka directly in my ever loving heart — and a lot, lot, lot more.
