Sound is one of those ambient touches in gaming that frequently goes unappreciated.  When it’s done well, you hardly notice it: It just falls into place in the background, subtly improving your experience.  When it’s done badly, it’s often all you can notice, and not in a good way.

“Beep” highlights the composers and sound designers responsible for bringing sound effects and music to gaming.  The filmmakers plan to travel around the world to talk to sound designers in studios in Japan, the U.S., and the U.K. to present a thorough picture of the history of video game sound.  A huge number of people have already agreed to interviews if the project is funded.

Part nostalgia for the sounds of gaming-years-gone-by, part platform to give credit to an underappreciated facet of gaming, “Beep” promises to be a very interesting project.  The journey of game sound from simple notes to complex music mirrors the development of games themselves from childish pastimes to serious all-ages entertainment on par with any commercial artform.

28 days from the end of its campaign, “Beep” already has close to 700 backers and has reached more than half of its stated goal.  Backer rewards include copies of the documentary itself, several soundtracks, t-shirts and, at higher levels, a personal meeting and meal with the filmmakers.

The campaign is scheduled to end on September 30^th.  To see more, visit its Kickstarter page.

The idea behind OUYA was to offer the console-gaming experience for the type of casual games usually played on mobile devices and tablets.  Recognizing that social gaming is the home to much of the innovation in the industry but that such games rarely find a foothold in the console market, OUYA sought to bridge that gap.

OUYA games must be at least partially free-to-play, and the console is designed to offer an affordable alternative to expensive console games.  The device itself is easy to modify and can be rooted without voiding the warranty, a feature welcomed by many.  Additionally, OUYA offers an open design to developers, providing a built-in dev kit to make building and releasing games accessible.

Essentially, OUYA seeks to usher in a future that welcomes innovation and tears down the road blocks experienced by many indie developers who want to see their games played on the big screen.

To boost the number of titles released on the console and reward independent game designers, OUYA launched its “Free the Games Fund” program in July of 2013.  This program gives a serious boost to games being funded by Kickstarter: If a game reaches $50,000, OUYA will match the funds if the developer agrees to release the game on the OUYA console.  OUYA has $1 million set aside to back this program.

Funded games can be released on PC, Mac and Linux, but must be console-exclusive to the OUYA for the first six months after release.  This exclusivity clause includes mobile devices.  To follow the revolution and see what games are being supported by #FreeTheGames, check the company’s website http://freethegamesfund.com/ or follow the hashtag “#FreeTheGames” on Twitter.

Night Trap

Night Trap was designed in 1986 and released in 1992 by Digital Pictures, a pioneer in full-motion video games and interactive movies.  Its storyline, which pays homage to the cheesy horror films of the 80s, raised concerns about the violence of its content and ultimately spurred the laws mandating ESRP ratings for video games.  Despite the controversy, or perhaps because of it, Night Trap sold over 1 million copies and continues to be a much-talked-about cult classic today.

The game utilizes live-action footage, with a storyline that can be modified through the player’s choices.  It’s part strategy game, part interactive film, and part tower defense as you lead a team to defend a house full of defenseless young women against a horde of ravenous vampires.

With its more mature themes and unique delivery, Night Trap was ahead of its time and certainly better-suited to the modern gaming scene.  This, coupled with advances in technology that can dramatically improve the picture quality, has spurred Night Trap LLC to start a Kickstarter campaign to re-release the game in a digitally remastered format for PC, Mac, PS3 and Xbox 360.

At the time of writing, the Kickstarter campaign has been live for two days and has already garnered more than $11,000 towards its $330,000 goal.  Pledge rewards include copies of the game itself, a CD single of its iconic title song, autographed copies, vintage posts from its initial release, and even documents and files related to the Congressional investigation into the game at its initial release.

You can check it out at the game’s Kickstarter page.

Not exactly a Kickstarter veteran himself, Moore explained how his attitude changed when his first attempt at Kickstarter failed, “I tried to Kickstart a project early on, and I just put it up and waited for funds to roll in. The reality is that we needed to do a lot of things to ensure our success.”

Moore learned from that initial failure and when he decided to plan another Kickstarter for his pet project Grave he had a plan in place, “We were planning the Kickstarter for 4 months,” explained Moore, We had over 1,500 Facebook likes and several thousand downloads before we even started the Grave Kickstarter.”

Moore believes that another important factor to a successful Kickstarter campaign was when Grave was invited to the Game Developers Conference (GDC) to present his unique horror game at a press event called “The Mix.”

“A lot of people go there (GDC) thinking they are going to a party and they will just meet the person who is going to fund their game,” explained Moore, “It doesn’t work that way.”

GDC can be an extremely useful event for indie developers hoping to network or increase publicity for their projects. But Moore explains that it takes a lot more than just showing up to make a game premiere productive, “You have to have an incredibly clear plan about what it is you are doing and why you are there,” he said, “Being at GDC helps a lot but if you don’t know you’re coming here to promote a Kickstarter or know the people you need to talk to or an event you want to be involved in you can’t get started as easily.”

Laying a firm groundwork and business plan before attending an event such as GDC and “The Mix” was integral to Moore’s successful launch of Grave, “The Mix gave us access to a lot of press that we wouldn’t have had otherwise,” and conceited, “I honestly don’t think we would have been able to complete our funding without it,” Moore emphasized.

Moore was clear about how important GDC and press coverage was to Grave, but included another component to the Kickstarter success that he wanted to highlight, namely a group of game enthusiasts. “The YouTube gaming community played a giant role in closing the gap at the end,” explained Moore, “We had a bunch of videos from popular YouTube gamers. YouTube allowed us access to people with a substantial interest in the game, and getting to watch it play out in front of them was a great way to show what the game was all about.”

While these various outlets helped push Grave over the edge, Moore stressed, “I’d say one thing we tried really hard to do was make a solid playable game,” Moore added, “A lot of Kickstarters focus marketing and showing something rough as a proof of concept.”

Moore feels that while this method could work, and has obviously worked with previous projects, he would take another path and says, “We’d been developing the game for months prior to our Kickstarter launch, and because we didn’t have the name recognition that some projects do, we wanted to make sure what we showed was really solid.”

Even though the Kickstarter campaign for Grave was successful, Moore advises developers to also seek funds elsewhere. “At the end of the day, only 27% of our income came purely from the game being featured on Kickstarter,” explained Moore, “The rest was earned by getting into media outlets and attracting an audience via Let’s Plays and outreach to the press.”

Moore explained one of the most overlooked aspects of his success by emphasizing the importance of press association. “I can’t stress enough the importance of having a strong connection with press,” and added, “Being featured in pieces is a really great way to get the word out about your project, and it adds to the general awareness of the game and it adds legitimacy for the public.”

Grave is another exciting launch that gamers have enthusiastically supported and while it has garnered the attention and success it deserves, it was produced with a lot of hard work, planning and public relations along the way.

Jesse has been writing video game related articles and interviewing industry professionals for almost 3 years and strives to become a professional nerd.

Yet, for all these success stories, many more Kickstarters fail. Many people have been talking about “Kickstarter fatigue” almost as long as video game Kickstarters have been a thing, yet recent successes like Hyper Light Drifter and Mighty No. 9 seem to prove otherwise. Perhaps the problem isn’t Kickstarter fatigue, but a lack of coverage. Crowd funding campaigns like Project Eternity, Wasteland 2, and Torment: Tides of Numenera had major industry names attached to them, so getting the coverage they needed wasn’t an issue. This is an edge that many indie developers looking into crowd funding don’t really have.

My goal with this article is to highlight some promising games I found on Kickstarter that could use a bit of a boost to reach their funding goal, much like a crowd funding version of my Greenlight articles. Considering the sheer number of games that turn to Kickstarter and Indiegogo these days, it will likely become a somewhat regular series

Paradise Lost: First Contact by Ashtree Works

Paradise Lost has a funding goal of $70,000 and, at the time of writing, is sitting at 83% of its goal with 20 days left. It also has stretch goals going all the way up to a Wii U port at $250,000. In this 2D stealth/action game you play as an alien plant that has been captured by an organization called GER and transported to a bio-engineering lab for study. It features some Metroidvania elements in the form of acquiring new abilities as you progress that allow you to access previously unreachable areas, and some RPG elements in the form of evolution paths. It seems to be primarily a stealth game along the lines of Mark of the Ninja, but there appears to be some combat-focused abilities like spore bombs and armor plating. The minimal tier for a copy of the game is $12, and also includes a PDF with some artwork.

STASIS by Christopher Bischoff

STASIS is currently hovering at around 53% of its $100,000 goal with 26 days left. At its core, STASIS is a traditional point-and-click adventure game played from a 2D isometric perspective. The game promises a mature sci-fi horror storyline with an aesthetic and atmosphere heavily inspired by Alien. The game puts you in the role of John Maracheck, a man who has just awaken from stasis on a repurposed mining vessel called the Groomlake, a seemingly abandoned ship that is secretly used to hide horrifying and illegal experiments conducted by the massive medical conglomerate the Cayne Corporation. At the $20 tier you’ll receive a DRM-free copy of STASIS, a wallpaper, your name in the credits, and access to the backers only area of the forums.

Confederate Express by Maksym Pashanin

This game is already at 308% of the $10,000 goal, but I’m including it so they can hit some more of the stretch goals before the campaign ends in a week. Confederate Express is an isometric tactical shooter where you play as a member of a sort of high risk delivery service in a future filled with zombies and rogue androids. Your goal is to deliver packages and earn money to build up a crew and purchase more advanced weapons and upgrades to tackle increasingly difficult deliveries and even bosses. As with many indie games lately, Confederate Express also features permadeath. The fairly impressive lighting effects deserve a special mention in this 2D pixel art title. A mere $10 is enough to get a Steam key of the game once it’s finished.

The Mandate by Perihelion Interactive

I mentioned The Mandate in my last Release Valve, but this extremely ambitious title is still at only half of its $500,000 goal with 20 days left. The Mandate looks to be a really odd space opera that blends mechanics and elements from several different genres. You have a very story-driven RPG with character interaction, relationship-building, political negations, trading, and galaxy-changing choices to be made, yet there is also ship-based RTS combat as you slowly build up a fleet and XCOM-style battles during boarding operations. Part of me worries that the sheer amount of different mechanics in the game could easily cause the game to fall apart somewhere during development, but the more optimistic side hopes that the developer’s ambitions are fully realized as an excellent and complex space RPG. The $20 tier for this game is very generous, including a DRM-free copy of the game, the soundtrack, digital artbook, wallpapers, backer exclusive ship decals, and avatar profile pictures to use on your favorite social media websites.

The Girl and the Robot by Salim Larochelle

This charming adventure game is at 83% of its $15,000 goal with 17 days left. The Girl and the Robot looks to be a more combat-focused version of Ico, made by an international indie team that includes beautiful artwork reminiscent of Studio Ghibli’s work. As the title suggests, it is the story of a girl and a robot who must work together to find a way out of a mysterious castle ruled by an evil queen. Gameplay is divided into puzzles that require the unique abilities of each character to solve, and combat as the knight-like robot. The combat looks slow and deliberately clunky, not unlike Dark Souls, and even promises to have very hard difficulty settings. At $9 you receive a Humble Store key for a DRM-free copy of the game, access to the current alpha build, and a digital artbook.

Dwarven Delve by TinkerHouse Games

This game is currently at 35% of its actually rather modest goal of $30,000 with 18 days left to go. Based on the videos I’ve seen, Dwarven Delve looks rather far along in development and is targeting an early 2014 release. As for what it is, Dwarven Delve is a unique blend of puzzle gameplay and dungeon crawling where you control a band of six dwarves through maze-like caverns full of monsters. The most unique aspect of the game is the ability to rotate corridors to change the layout of the dungeon, avoiding really strong foes or leading pursuing monsters into traps. As the developers describe it, the goal is ultimately to reconfigure the dungeons in a way that maximizes rewards while minimizing risks. For $10 you get a copy of the game, your name engraved on the “founder’s stone” on the official website, and an art pack containing wallpapers, avatars, and icons.

That’s it for now. Even if you don’t plan on actually pledging money to these games, still remember to at least check out their Greenlight pages. Most of them have one, with a link to it somewhere on the Kickstarter page.

          SCALE is a first person action puzzler in which the player must manipulate the size of objects in the world in order to solve its puzzles and advance through its levels.

The game follows a young physics savant named Penny Prince, inventor of the SCALE device, a tool that can extract the size from one object and inject it into another. As the game opens, she finds herself imprisoned for the murders of nine million people through the accidental destruction of the east coast. They took everything she held dear, especially her cat, and put her in jail with a rehabilitative therapy coordinator implanted in her head. After hastily constructing a new SCALE device, she sets out to escape her prison, save her cat and regain her freedom.

          SCALE is being developed by CubeHeart using the Unity3D engine and is currently raising funds for production on Kickstarter. Their goal is set at $87,000, and with 28 days remaining they have already hit $24,656 . We here at Gameverse are very excited to check out this title in full and experience a new kind of first person exploration. For backers of the project there are a plethora of rewards, from soundtracks and beta access to a prop SCALE device of your very own.

If you are interested in learning more about the project and donating funds to bring SCALE to even greater heights, you can visit their Kickstarter page here.

If I were to rank all the countries in the world based on their game development prowess, it would be a while before I got to Turkey. Nowhere Studios is looking to change that with their thematic puzzle-platformer, Monochroma. Founded in 2011 by Burak Tezateşer and Orçun Nişli, Nowhere Studios is a small team of people looking to make a big name for themselves in a hurry. Monochroma is their first game, and boy does it look like a great first effort.

Set in a chilling alternate history 1950s dystopia, Monochroma is the story of a boy and his brother who discover a terrible secret about a massive corporation, and then work to bring this evil company down. The game is absolutely gorgeous, with well-designed puzzles, a masterful use of tension, and music that fits the art style like a glove. I was deeply intrigued from the moment I first discovered it, and I recently got to sit down with Burak Tezateşer, who also works as the executive producer of Monochroma, to ask some questions about the game and the studio.

Gameverse: First off, tell me a little bit about the history of Nowhere Studios, and how you came to be in the position you’re in.

Burak Tezateşer: I was working on a small project when I met Orçun, our creative director. We had totally different experiences, but very common views about how a game should be. We both thought about games as a storytelling medium. We first worked on the theme and the story of Monochroma, and then gameplay evolved over it. We formed a drama curve of the story, added some magical moments, a dramatic ending, characters. Later on we decided about the gameplay and we gathered a team to build it.

GV: Monochroma is set in a unique 1950s dystopia. How did you decide on this setting?

BT: It’s during and after the world wars that we saw the negative effects of industrialism and where we became a society of consumers. We are looking to criticize the consumer society in the game. It’s up to the players to find out what we meant, but you can make many different readings on Monochroma.

GV: With the artistic and lighting style you have chosen for Monochroma, comparisons to critically acclaimed indie title Limbo are inevitable. Do you invite such comparisons, or would you rather the focus be on what Monochroma does differently?

BT: We’re of course open to all kind of comparisons and feedbacks. It’s our chance to make Monochroma a unique and better game. Limbo is my personal favorite puzzle platform game. It did almost everything perfectly. We wanted to choose a black and white, German expressionist, noir theme because it’s the best way to tell a silent dystopian tale in 1950’s. Gameplay is also inspired [by] Limbo, but we differentiated Monochroma with its original relation of brothers, the use of light, and unique puzzles.

GV: From what I can tell, your game development history involves a few Turkish Facebook games, and not much else. How did you decide to go from that to the much more serious and artistic multiplatform game that is Monochroma?

BT: Monochroma was the kind of game we always wanted to develop. We believe a new kind of gamer evolved that looks for more depth in games and that seeks a similar satisfaction of having read a good book or watched a beautiful movie when finishing a game. We’re targeting those people with Monochroma. We’re a generation that grew up with games but we don’t want to stop playing games because we’re grown, we just want better, deeper games.

GV: You mention on the Monochroma Kickstarter page that you are one of the few game development companies in Turkey. What’s it like being a developer in a country where you don’t really have many peers? Are there any studios, in Turkey or elsewhere, that inspire you or that you like to compare yourselves to?

BT: The most inspiring studio in Turkey for us is Taleworlds, they developed Mount & Blade where there are almost no game developers around. It’s really motivational to see them producing rocket science in a prehistoric era. Now there are more people in game development, a lot of talented guys, but not much specialized workforce. Most of them are like one man armies, great developers, but we want to bring in the team formation and build on that culture.

Worldwide, I’m inspired [by] Klei, I still can’t understand how it is possible to make each game great where they are all in different genres. Brilliant people.

GV: The Kickstarter page mentions some extra levels and game modes as stretch goals. Does this mean you would be open to releasing more maps and game modes as post-launch content? Are there any plans in the works for this sort of thing?

BT: There won’t be any downloadable content or Monochroma II with a similar gameplay (I won’t say we will stop telling stories in the setting though). We are thinking about adding some exploration taste to the game if we can reach those stretch goals.

GV: Are there any plans for an open beta of any kind? How about a Steam Early Access release?

BT: It’s possible, we can even make an update and add it as a reward. We’re also doing great on Steam Greenlight, possible that we might be Greenlit soon. We would put the game to Early Access if we can but now we’re focusing on achieving our goal on Kickstarter.

GV: What’s next for Nowhere Studios? Do you have plans for another game already in the works? Or are you just focusing on finishing Monochroma first?

BT: We’re currently very focused on Monochroma and Monochroma’s success will determine the scope and style of our new projects. We will continue to do what we’re doing as we will have an established fanbase with expectations. We’ll find new ways to satisfy their needs and bring in more people to experience the tastes we’re bringing to game design.

GV: Thanks for your time.

Monochroma is on Kickstarter, Steam Greenlight, and has a playable demo.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Fans of the tabletop miniatures game Warmachine by Privateer Press have been asking for a video game adaptation for a long time. Years back, indie developer WhiteMoon Dreams announced that they were working on a Warmachine video game, and even showed off a demonstration of what they were aiming for behind closed doors at GenCon 2010. Then there was an E3 trailer that same year. It looked okay, if you can get past the eardrum-melting choice of terrible dubstep for the soundtrack.

Then the game disappeared. Every now and then someone from WhiteMoon Dreams or Privateer Press would pop up and tease that the game was still in production, and hint that their problem was finding a publisher and the funds needed to make this a high-budget action-adventure game for PC and consoles. Many fans, including myself, had just assumed that the game was canned.

Yesterday, Privateer Press finally released the update that Warmachine fans have been waiting for: The game is still alive, with a teaser trailer this time. In a lengthy blog post by Matt Wilson from Privateer Press, he explains that the game’s development has been pretty rough over the past two years:

“In the past two years, we’ve changed course several times, reinventing our approach to the game in an attempt to get in front of what publishers were looking for. Uncertainty regarding the future of consoles and the untamed frontier of mobile gaming means that what publishers and financiers are willing to risk money on changes moment to moment. Decisions aren’t based solely on the strength or merit of a property—in fact, that’s probably one of the lesser considerations. Rather, a game is chosen for production based on complex market evaluations that can take months or even a year or more. And the results are disproven nearly as often as they are rewarded, as the high number of cancelled projects in the video game industry attests.

We are continuing to pursue the goal of the high budget action-adventure game and are currently entertaining multiple interesting possibilities that may accomplish that goal. Around the first of this year, though, we realized that the fluctuating state of the video game industry meant it would likely be a good while longer before we’d be able to make real progress. What’s more, the situation would probably become even more difficult before beginning to improve. So, we’ve decided to take things into our own hands.”

            What he means by “taking things into our own hands” is revamping (which hopefully also involved burning the dubstep tracks with holy fire) the previous action-adventure title into the more manageable Warmachine: Tactics, a turn-based strategy game for PC and Mac that will be coming to Kickstarter in the near future. The game will feature a single player campaign and multiplayer, with Cygnar and Khador as the two starting factions. Stretch goals will include launching with Cryx and The Protectorate, the other two “prime” factions in the miniatures game. They also mentioned supporting the game with DLC, which I assume will probably involve adding the other Warmachine factions and integrating Hordes, the sister game to Warmachine– that involves the wilder factions of the setting. At least, as someone whose main faction in the miniatures game is Skorne, I can only hope that Hordes will be added later.

I must admit, I’m still a bit skeptical here. Both WhiteMoon Dreams and Privateer Press have taken to the forums to help reassure people, but WMD’s tendency to go long periods of time without updating us is worrying for a game that is about to hit Kickstarter. Hopefully a successful Kickstarter will solve this, as most of the issues seem to be because of the problems they had getting funding and a publisher. We’ll just have to wait and see.

I think I’m more excited about the idea of future Warmachine/Hordes games, should this one prove successful. Matt Wilson said that their vision is to make a whole library of Warmachine games eventually. Can we expect the Surgeon Simulator 2013: Morghoul DLC Pack in the future? Dominar Rasheth’s Titan Tycoon? Agonizer: The Reckoning? Look, I just really want a Skorne-themed video game.

Remember when you were two years old?  Everything looked larger than life and the world was full of wonder and amazement?  Then, when the sun went down, the world became a spooky place where every bump and shadow was out to get you?  No?  Well, Krillbite Studio wants to remind you with its upcoming title Among the Sleep.

Of course, it’s up to you, the audience, to help them bring their surreal nightmare vision to life.

With only 3 days remaining on their Kickstarter campaign, and about $4K left to meet their minimum goal, this small Norwegian indie company could use everyone’s help to finish out the home stretch.

But what is Among the Sleep, and why should you spend your time and hard earned dollars to support it, you ask?  Well, savvy consumer, allow us to enlighten you.

Even the simplest settings can get awfully creepy when the lights go out – and you’re 36 inches tall.

                Among the Sleep is a first-person horror adventure that focuses on exploration and atmosphere.  The catch?  The game puts you in the role of a two-year-old child.  But the developers are quick to point out that “this is not just an FPS with the camera closer to the ground.”  The player will be immersed in the role of a child, using their small size to their advantage when seeking out places to hide from the things that go bump in the night.  Everything viewed from a child’s perspective is slightly surreal, and Krillbite seeks to capture exactly that in their environmental design.

Players will need to use the environment as well as the character’s small stature to find hiding spots when things get spooky – like this closet!

                Like any indie developer worth their salt, Krillbite’s goal is to avoid publishers and remain independent.  Take the time to watch their Kickstarter video and you’ll see a studio full of people just as charming as the project itself.  Their passion for innovation and dedication to their art is truly the embodiment of the indie spirit from which gaming greatness is born.

Support this project.  Tell your friends.  Help keep indie gaming indie.

…or this guy will haunt your dreams.  You have been warned.

For more from Krillbite Studio, check out their experimental side-project, The Plan, for free.

My previous article focused on Greenlight games with active Kickstarters. Three of those Kickstarters have since ended, and I’m happy to report that C-Wars, Chasm, and Worlds of Magic were all successfully funded. C-Wars was extremely successful, ending with $95,574 (goal was $32,000) and reaching every stretch goal. Chasm only met two stretch goals, but still made a respectable $191,897 (goal was $150,000). Worlds of Magic ended with £45,593 (goal was £30,000) and was just shy of getting its final stretch goal. Worlds of Magic also has an alpha funding campaign, and any money earned from that will go towards the content promised in the final stretch goal.

Among the Sleep has 4 days to go and has only reached $184,247 of its $200,000 goal. A.N.N.E. still has 8 days to go and is just over its goal of $70,000, with a long list of stretch goals to hit. Since my last article, I also wrote a short article about Ghost of a Tale and its Indiegogo campaign. The Indiegogo campaign has 8 days left and is sitting at 34,612€ of its 45,000€ goal.

Since my previous Greenlight article there was also a mini wave of three Greenlit games. Papers, Please, Edge of Space, and Venetica made it through this time around. It is great to see both Papers, Please and Edge of Space make it. Papers, Please is an oddball game that sounds like it wouldn’t be too interesting, but manages to be very compelling with fun gameplay and a real message worth exploring. Edge of Space looks very promising as a fun alternative to Terraria and the other increasingly popular block-based building games. Venetica is an action RPG that has been out for some time. It also wasn’t very good, but it isn’t really my place to complain about such things here. Valve has stated that they will do these mini waves more often to help speed up the Greenlight process.

Now that the updates are out of the way, time to get on with today’s Greenlight Spotlight. This time I wanted to focus on some so-called “Concept Games.” This section of Greenlight is mostly devoted to games that are extremely early in development. The goal here isn’t so much to get Greenlit as it is to get as much feedback as possible, or even find people who would be interested in helping out with development. Because of this, most of these games are primarily concept art, target renderings, and extremely early prototypes, but they are all interesting and unique in their own ways.

The Somme by TopHat Studios

The Somme is marketing itself as the first commercial attempt at making a multiplayer-focused WWI shooter. Like Red Orchestra, The Somme will be heavily focused on teamwork and tactics, and TopHat Studios is doing everything they can to make it as authentic as possible. It will use a class-based system and feature the ability to ride horses and use vehicles. The tanks in The Somme will operate much like they do in Red Orchestra, where you need a whole crew to effectively use them. So far they are looking to include Somme, Passchendaele, and The Battle of Lake Naroch as maps, with more coming later. The renderings and animations look pretty good so far; TopHat Studios is using Unreal Engine 3 to make The Somme.

Junkers by syaped

Junkers started as concept art and videos created by just one animator, and the developer is currently looking for people with the necessary skills required to make this game a reality. In Junkers, players manage a crew of scavengers in space, so-called “junkers,” as they raid derelict spaceships for anything worth selling on the black market. Gameplay will be made up of both real-time tactical battles during the raids and a management screen where you have to handle your crew’s finances, hire new crewmen, trade and sell materials that you scavenged from derelict ships, and more. The target renderings look really charming; it reminds me of Syndicate and many other classic isometric tactical games from the ’90s.

Ludus silva by Jayelinda

Ludus silva is an interesting sandbox strategy game where the goal is to build a thriving forest by using an editor to design plants best suited for the current environment. The editor looks quite robust so far, and you’ll have to consider many environmental factors to ensure that the plants survive. One example the developer gives is that plants with big, broad leaves are more effective at gathering sunlight, but also susceptible to UV damage if you don’t carefully consider where you put such plants. This means that to create a thriving forest you’ll need a diverse range of plant species of various shapes and sizes. Some examples of environments to expect are fertile plains, deserts, swamps, and mountains.

The Realm by Atomhawk Design

This game has been getting some buzz lately because of its active Kickstarter. The Realm is an adventure game set in the distant future, where some event has caused our world to be reclaimed by nature. Humanity is now limited to small, sparse rural communities where magic exists and our modern technologies have long since been abandoned and forgotten. Players will control a young girl named Sarina and her giant stone golem companion Toru on a quest to find a cure for a mysterious illness afflicting Sarina’s mother. The game will focus heavily on solving environmental puzzles using the strengths and special abilities of both characters. The Kickstarter could use a boost; The Realm is only 31% funded with just over a week left. The game is mostly a concept at this point, but the art direction is gorgeous.

The Stomping Land by Alex Fundora

Like The Realm, The Stomping Land also has an active Kickstarter, but it is already over 200% funded with nearly a month to go. The Stomping Land is an open-world multiplayer survival game where you play as a primitive hunter on an island full of dinosaurs. The goal is simply to survive by hunting smaller dinosaurs. The process of hunting is made difficult by the fact that the smell of fresh blood attracts larger carnivores, giving you a limited window to gather meat from a kill.

You can improve your chances with traps, distractions, or simply forming tribes with other players. Creating tribes and hunting parties with others is a pretty big part of the game. It not only improves your chances at a successful hunt, but also allows you to more easily stockpile food and other resources vital for your continued survival. The game also incorporates the idea of raiding other tribes and fighting for access to prime hunting grounds.

That’s all for today’s Greenlight Spotlight. Remember to check out the previous articles to find more interesting games. Of the 15 games I’ve highlighted in this series so far, only one (Cradle) has been Greenlit. Also remember to check out the Kickstarters I’ve brought up in both this article and the previous one.

Greenlight Spotlight 1

Greenlight Spotlight: Kickstarter Edition

This morning’s press release from Ouya also boasts $15M in new funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, most of which will be used to better meet anticipated retail demands, as well as improve the Ouya game development community.

Ouya will be available for purchase in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. on June 25th. The console will sell for $99, with additional controllers selling for $49.99. Ouya consoles can be pre-ordered through Amazon and other retailers. (Note, Amazon is still posting the June 4th release date.)

As we get closer to the June 4th consumer release date for Ouya, the question on everyone’s mind is about the games that will be available. It’s well known throughout the video game console industry that what games are available at launch or soon after can make or break a successful console. We saw the value of an established catalogue of exclusive software during the last console wars when Microsoft was able to release their Xbox 360 way before Sony’s PS3 hit shelves. The lessons learned that will apply to the long-term success of the Ouya game platform are all centered on the software available – there has to be a collection of really good games or the console will fade away into technological obscurity. While the business and tech-savvy individuals behind the scenes have been great about creating a developer-friendly platform to publish on, none of us want to sift through a ton of mediocre games in the Ouya store. This issue has plagued certain mobile platforms and can leave a potential customer thinking that the console is not worth the price because none of the games are very memorable. I’ve put together a short list of some titles that will no doubt make the console not only worth the low price but also a great living room gaming experience to compete with the already established “big guns” of the console industry.

Final Fantasy III
This wonderful slice of the well-known series was originally released in Japan in 1990 on the Nintendo Famicon (known as the NES in the U.S.) A full 3D remake was done for the handheld Nintendo DS system and released in the summer of 2006 and it is this remake that will be available on the Ouya at launch. I know this will be one of the more reliable titles for Ouya because the Final Fantasy series wrote the book on replay value. It is titles like this that will continue to sell Ouya consoles.

The Ball
Tripwire Interactive’s shooter/puzzle hybrid The Ball will be a welcome addition to Ouya strictly because of the beautiful visuals. Built on the Unreal Engine, this title will push the Ouya hardware with its impressive graphics. The Ball belongs on this list because there aren’t very many Ouya games that succeed in replay value as well as top-notch graphics. Portal was an extremely successful title and this game captures some of the same feel. The Ball should be a great addition to the Ouya!

Saturday Morning RPG
This game from Mighty Rabbit Studios began as a Kickstarter project and does some interesting things with narrative and the “episodic” release timeline. SM-RPG is chock full of side quests, neat places to explore, and a bunch of 80’s pop culture references that will provide many hours of enjoyment for us gamers that remember what was popular in the 80’s. RPGs in any form are a good genre for the Ouya because they take time and offer different play-through options. I look forward to this one just because of its mis-matched, eclectic art style.

Stalagflight
This simple little Indie game is a direct product of the mobile game boom which means that it is easy to learn and difficult to master. Simple games like this are a blast to play with your friends when you are chilling out at home and they will have their place on the Ouya console. The home game console has become a center-piece in the living room entertainment and having fun, fast-paced competitive games to play with friends or family is a must. With a simple objective of “jump…. and don’t stop!” this will be the game I challenge my wife to when we don’t want to hook up our SNES and boot up Mario Kart!

Legend of Dungeon
This great title from the husband and wife team Robot Loves Kitty will be available at the Ouya launch. LoD is a great combination of true co-op gameplay, beat-em-up style combat, and RPG elements all smashed together underneath some amazing pixelated artwork. I am looking forward to this title because the devs moved into a treehouse in order to afford working on it full-time. That is dedication. All natural living arrangements aside, great gameplay and artwork will make this a hit on the Ouya platform.

Canabalt
Adam Saltsman’s indie hit Canabalt will be available for the Ouya from the launch and this will be another great living room multiplayer like Stalagflight. With a very simple control scheme of jumping when you’re supposed to, this game will port to a console with a controller really well. Similar to the way the 2D platformer genre worked so well on the early consoles, I think Canabalt will be a very popular download.

A Fist of Awesome
This game from Indie developer Nicoll Hunt features the familiar mechanics of basic beat-em-up titles such as Final Fight or Double Dragon with the addition of a lumberjack….. who fights homicidal forest creatures. Sign me up for two, please! The style of gameplay here will make it a blast to play over and over and I think there is a unique sense of humor about this game that will make it a diamond in the rough. Seriously, at what point in life will you get to punch a wild bear in the face?

StarBound
This one is my personal favorite title coming to the console and one of the main reasons I will be getting an Ouya myself. Starbound is the spiritual successor of Terraria, one of my favorite Indie game experiences of all time. Starbound developer studio Chucklefish were one of the lucky developers to win an Ouya console during the developer giveaway and team members tweeted about adapting the control scheme to the Ouya controller the moment they won. Starbound will take the best building mechanics and aesthetics we have seen from the likes of Minecraft and Terraria and add different planets to explore and quests to complete. Tiny little social life that I do maintain = gone!

Recently we got a chance to hop aboard with Yacht Club Games for a long chat about the already popular upcoming title, Shovel Knight. Along the way we discuss their origins as a team, their inspirations for the game, the Kickstarter campaign, the story, and other amazing details. Let’s take a look!

Could you say your name and what your responsibility on the team is?

Woz: My name is Nick, I go by Woz. I do everything that is not programming or music. I’m not solely responsible for that stuff, but I do contribute a lot of stuff to the game.

Sean: I am Sean Velasco, and generally I have designer, directorial duties [at WayForward.] That’s pretty much what I’m doing here, too, except since we’re a smaller group we have to wear a lot of hats. So I’ve been doing a lot of pixel work.

Ian: I’m Ian Floyd. I’m primarily a programmer or gameplay programmer on the project. But, just the same, I’m involved in various areas of the project.

Erin: I’m Erin. I do a lot of the illustrations, the graphic work, logos, and character design.

Sean: Yeah, every pixel model that we put together Erin does a sketch of it on paper first.

How did you all end up coming together on this project?

Woz: We worked as a pretty close team at WayForward. We did Double Dragon Neon recently.

Sean: We’re part of the team…

Woz: Right, not us exclusively, but a lot of us are part of the core team.

Sean: The majority of all our careers have been in WayForward. I assistant directed Contra 4, and then I directed A Boy and His Blob. Then there was BloodRayne: Betrayal, which Erin did concept designs for, and Woz did a lot of the effects for. So we’ve been working together for quite a while. That’s how we all got together.

What stage of development are you at right now? Alpha? Pre-alpha?

Woz: Way before that.

Sean: Basically we have kind of what you’ve seen in the PAX demo and what’s on the Kickstarter page. Other than that, we’re still in the very early stages of development. So…we’re maybe like ten or fifteen percent done.

Has it been hard to get back into development since your Kickstarter came to an end?

Nick: Once we’ve been in the weird pitch mode on Kickstarter for so long, it is a little bit daunting to get back into the actual production.

Sean: Just starting like that, it’s been all hands on deck doing the Kickstarter, doing promotion, getting the word out about the game, responding to comments. We’re just going start getting back into development now.

Often when you see the ‘making of’ footage it shows progressive character designs that resemble little of the final product. Did you guys go through a lot of variations before his final look?

Sean: There were a couple [designs]. We knew from the beginning that he was a diminutive knight with horns that carried a shovel.

Woz: We knew the basics of it. Sean did a basic sprite of it, and then I took a pass at it. It kinda went back and forth a little bit and finally landed on a sprite we all liked.

Sean: The sprite Shovel Knight and the Illustrated Shovel Knight are two different models, basically. So it was two different efforts. Shovel Knight also went through some revisions and you can even see that the models on the Kickstarter page are slightly different, because we were still getting the character design one hundred percent locked down.

Woz: Yeah, figuring out if we can get it to look right in-game and if it feels NES-y enough. The best example I can think of is if you look at the King Knight sprite on the front page. You can see he’s pretty detailed, but in the actual gameplay footage you can see he’s not totally rendered the same way and has a lot of simplifications. That way he feels more NES-y.

So what about the bosses? Did that go fairly quickly once you nailed down the Shovel Knight’s appearance? Did you have a pretty good idea of what you wanted them to look like?

Sean: I think the bosses went through more revisions than Shovel Knight. We spent a lot of time working with those.

Erin: Just seeing what we could what can we do with a knight mask, or how can we implement different masks for each boss was a big part of it. And then sewing on a simple, yet pixelable character was a big deal. Color choices came from what was available on the NES palette.

Sean: We wanted to make sure all the knights fit in together as a group, so we wanted to make sure we had good representations of big characters and little characters. We wanted to make sure each one felt different, so they went through a lot of revisions, and I think we ended up with a pretty solid lineup.

They look pretty fun. The Polar Knight is my favorite so far. What do you guys go to for inspiration? Have you found yourselves getting a little creative block, and if so what do you go to in order to alleviate that?

Sean: We play a lot of games together obviously. It’s like we’re embedded with each other. The whole Yacht Club is together almost all the time, so it’s a free flowing of ideas. Art is happening all the time. So I think generally if one of us is having a block, we just talk to the whole group and then you can work through it.

Woz: And that means writing down our ideas, having a brainstorm session the whiteboard, or just getting lunch together and hashing out a concept or an idea. If it’s a character creation, Erin spends time getting inspiration from various other artists. We kinda source everything, right?

Erin: Real knight helmets for the bosses in particular.

Sean: It’s just a big group effort for the most part. Now the cool part is, with Kickstarter we have the Director For a Day and Design Hangouts, so now we’re going to start bringing some of our Kickstarter backers into the fray to help come up with ideas and to implement cool stuff. We haven’t really started with that yet, but we have done a few livestreams where we have a lot of creativity and wackiness.

How many backers did you have for that?

A couple hundred actually.

Wow.

Sean: We probably won’t be bringing in each person individually. Instead, we’ll do like a Twitch TV stream or Google Hangout style of thing. Everyone will be in the channel, we’re going to talk through the problems, maybe we’ll be at the whiteboard, maybe we’ll be typing it into the [design] document, and then people can throw in ideas, and we can have a dialogue with the whole group.

Woz: Yeah, we want to make it feel as organic as it does when we’re actually designing stuff as a group together. If somebody has an idea and other people latch onto it, then we’ll talk about that idea. It’s not just people observing what we’re doing, it’s a lot of interaction and getting ideas from the group.

Sean: Whatever makes us laugh the loudest.

Woz: Basically.

So you’re kinda pushing the record for largest indie team with that number.

Sean: Yeah. [Laughter]

Let’s talk about the story. What kind of format are you presenting it in? Is it going to be cut-scenes? Are we going to meet characters mid-level? What can you tell us about that?

Sean: That’s something we’ve been talking about a lot recently. We’re really big on story, and theme, and tone, but we hate it when it gets bogged down with too much narrative. So imagine you’re playing a game and you stop and all your momentum is lost because you have to have a cut-scene interaction with a character. That’s something we definitely want to avoid. So we’re looking for ways to make it so we’re not stopping the action. Maybe we’ll do, like you were saying, conversations or talking heads, but it would be in a pretty limited capacity. Like maybe before boss battles, or if we were to do a town or a merchant I imagine you would have some dialogue lines there where we could inject some more personality.

Woz: But a lot of the story is going to be situational. In gameplay, what you see in the background, how we decorate certain things, you’re going to get a sense of what’s happening without being overtly told that you’re going to the last boss of the game, or whatever.

Sean: Like in Super Metroid, right before you fight Kraid, there’s a dead space marine that looks sort of similar to you. I feel like that one sprite just sitting there tells more story than a lot of other games. That type of thing. Or if you’ve played A Boy and His Blob, that’s another game that I directed that some of us worked on, that game does a lot with story without too many cut-scenes. There’s actually no written dialogue in the entire game. We want to go more that direction. That’s our approach to story.

Aside from the bosses, the level design is so neat to watch because it’s nostalgia, it’s excitement for what’s coming and what we get to do again. It hearkens to all the great things that made gaming awesome growing up. When you were designing levels, how many different games did you reference as far as your inspiration for what you wanted to do?

Woz: For the level design specifically…how did that work out?

Sean: We had a brainstorming session and the only level we’ve really gone through is the King Knight’s level from the PAX demo. We went through a ton of different gameplay objects, the falling chandeliers and the book that makes the pages appear. And even enemies, like the wizard that shoots at you that you can reflect back, the knight that you have more of an actual dual with. We planned out how the flow of the stage was going to be, so we said in the beginning that you’re going to be outside the castle, then you’ll be sort of storming the interior, and then you’ll go down into the abyss like into the actual proper interior of the castle which is the library room, and then you’ll come out of it get to the throne room where King Knight is.

We thought about it in the context of a story, and we thought about how these gameplay objects would all interact with each other and with enemies. Then we just started putting it together and iterating.

Woz: The level design comes from games we played in the past like Mega Man, or other Capcom titles like Duck Tales.

Sean: The screen transitions are entirely Mega Man.

Woz: It feels very solid. You have a good sense of what a room is, and where you can actually go. There’s not a lot of weird camera movement. That’s captured pretty well in Mega Man, and we wanted to retain that. A lot of the combat ideas we’ve been talking about have come after playing Zelda II a lot. There’s a little bit of Dark Souls in there, how we deal with the player’s value systems and how death incorporates into that so you want to keep the things you have because dying makes you lose a lot of it.

Sean: That sense of fear…

Woz: The tension, yeah. So, it is a lot of games but it is starting to feel unique. We definitely are obviously referencing Nintendo games. Nintendo is who we are, it’s in our blood, and it’s where we’re going with this game. It’s an NES palette, so it feels like it’s on the NES.

What makes it feel like its classic is that it’s done design first. How is the fun going to work, how will the interactions work, and what is the gameplay going to be like? We built everything around that. So because we did that, it’s a more abstract sense of fun, and that’s what you generally find in Nintendo. Not just ones from the past, but modern day ones.

It’s really cool to see the way that this project has spread out. It got the attention of the original Mega Man composer (Manami Matsumae), who is contributing two songs. Where will those songs appear, and how will you be collaborating?

Woz:  That was a really random thing for us, too. Like you said, she reached out to us. She was working with these guys over at Koopa Soundworks. He saw Shovel Knight and wanted to support it, so he looked us up. She’s real excited about it. She wants to get back into the Western Market, and be relevant to the current gamespace. It’s pretty cool to be able to facilitate that.

Basically they are doing chip tune album with a lot of notable composers on it, and she was one of them. So that’s how we got hooked up.

Woz: We don’t really know where she’s going to fit as far as like what songs specifically in the game. We’re hoping she does a couple level tracks.

And perhaps a collaboration with Jake. Kind of like a dueling banjos sort of thing, where they are contributing to a single song.

Erin: That’s going to awesome.

I’m sold.

Woz: Yes! I want the soundtrack so bad.

Thanks guys! Next up we’ll talk about Kickstarter rewards, Director For A Day, future game designers, and recapturing the glory of the NES days! Tune in next week for Part Two!

Before I get to the real meat of this article, it’s time for a quick Greenlight update. As I reported, 18 games have been Greenlit since my previous article. Of the games I featured in the last Greenlight Spotlight, only Cradle made it through this recent wave of titles. Sadly, Rekoil, 99 Levels to Hell, Driftmoon, and GoD Factory: Wingmen are still waiting in Greenlight limbo. Please remember to go check these games out and leave them a vote and comment if you are interested in seeing them on Steam.

One other sad piece of news to report is that one of the games that made it through the latest wave of Greenlit titles has since been canceled. After a failed Kickstarter and alpha funding campaign, Death Inc.‘s developer Ambient Studios announced that they will be closing their doors. They simply don’t have the money to keep operating, and will be issuing full refunds to the alpha backers in the coming weeks.

Things aren’t all doom and gloom though. Some pretty promising titles made it through the Greenlight process and will hopefully be on Steam before too long. The steampunk action MMORPG City of Steam made it through, as did Frozen Endzone, the next game by the developers of the critically-acclaimed and commercially successful Frozen Synapse. After highly successful Kickstarters, both Shovel Knight and Battle Worlds: Kronos also made it through.

All this talk of Kickstarters brings us to the common theme shared among today’s five spotlighted games: each one currently has an active Kickstarter campaign. If any of these games interest you, and you have some money to spare, perhaps you should also consider a pledge to their Kickstarter campaigns in addition to a vote-up on Greenlight.

Worlds of Magic by Wastelands Interactive

By the time this article is posted, Worlds of Magic‘s Kickstarter will have less than two days left. Luckily, they have already exceeded their funding target of £30,000, but as with most Kickstarters there are always stretch goals to hit.

Worlds of Magic is yet another 4X fantasy title trying to recapture the feeling of the classic Master of Magic by Microprose back in 1994. The game still looks really rough, as expected of a pre-alpha, but it seems to have the foundation of a solid 4X fantasy game. There is set to be nearly 100 units spread across six factions, twelve diverse schools of magic, multiple planes to explore and conquer, and who knows what else could be added if the Kickstarter campaign is successful enough.

Among the Sleep by Krillbite Studio

This rather unique take on the Amnesia-style of classic horror gaming gained quite a bit of buzz when it was announced a while back and now it is on Greenlight and Kickstarter. As I write this, their Kickstarter campaign is just over halfway to its $200,000 goal, and they still have plenty of time to reach it.

For those of you who’ve yet to hear about it, Among the Sleep is an atmospheric, exploration-based horror game from the perspective of a two-year-old child. The idea of playing as a toddler in a horror game is actually pretty brilliant, and based on the trailers Krillbite seems to be doing a great job with the concept. Everything seems so big and monstrous through the eyes of a young child with an overactive imagination. The game will be tackling the themes of how surreal dreams and confusion over the way the everyday world works can make things seem more frightening than they actually are.

Chasm by Discord Games LLC

Action RPG Chasm‘s Kickstarter has just under two weeks left, but they are pretty close to their $150,000 goal. At the time of writing, they are about 78% of the way to being fully funded.

Chasm is a 2D Metroidvania-style action RPG/platformer that creates a procedurally-generated dungeon with each play through. In other words, each time you play should be a unique experience as the dungeon layout and loot drops are randomized. Bosses will also be randomized in the same way that items are. Multiple modes allow you to tackle the game as either a “score attack” or slightly more roguelike experience with permadeath.

A.N.N.E by Gamesbymo

On the subject of 2D Metroidvanias, A.N.N.E has been getting a lot of attention over the past week or so. It’s Kickstarter campaign went up around a week ago and it is a little over halfway to its rather modest $70,000 goal. Most of the stretch goals are related to porting the game to other platforms like PSN, the WiiU’s eShop, and the OUYA.

A.N.N.E is an open world 2D Metroidvania/action RPG where you can explore both on foot and in a ship. The game seems to have a basic physics system where you can use your ship to pick up and move heavy objects, thus allowing you to get to new areas.  The game is meant to be truly open, in the sense that you can theoretically get to areas you “shouldn’t” be yet if you are smart and skilled enough to overcome the obstacles and higher level enemies blocking your path.

C-Wars by Onipunks

C-Wars is doing really well for itself on Kickstarter. They are well past their target goal of $32,000, and they are now focusing on stretch goals that include ports to other platforms and contests where fans can vote for new weapons and options to be added to the final game.

C-Wars is an oddball game that is pretty hard to describe. I’d recommend watching one of the trailers. It is a combination of an action RTS/RPG roguelike where you fight on a grid in real time. You micromanage a powerful hero unit while also deploying various allied units that fight with you. It looks a lot like the old Mega Man Battle Network games on the GBA, combined with some sort of tower defense/action RTS and permadeath. If nothing else it is quite a unique game that looks pretty fast-paced and hectic.

As with all Kickstarters, remember that just because a game has reached its funding that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pledge some money if able. Every little bit counts, and a campaign meeting its stretch goals just means that the final product will be that much better. Also remember to leave these games a vote on Greenlight. A successful Kickstarter is great, but getting the chance to sell your game on Steam is even better.

A new Jagged Alliance reboot, subtitled Flashback, is currently looking for funding via Kickstarter. This new installment in the classic turn-based squad tactics game is being developed by an indie studio named Full Control in Copenhagen, Denmark. Full Control is also working on a Space Hulk game for PC and tablets.

Unlike the other recent (and rather terrible) Jagged Alliance reboot Back in Action, Flashback is returning the series to its turn-based roots. Flashback takes the series back to the 1980s, when Cold War tensions were at their highest. As a CIA operative, it is your job to assemble an elite team of mercenaries from across the world to overthrow a Communist regime on the tiny island of San Christobal. Flashback promises the return of all the deep squad-based tactics and management of the old games, along with more RPG elements in the form of tough choices that can affect the outcome of the story. This game will also take us back to the events that lead to the founding of the mercenary company A.I.M. from the previous titles.

If you wish to learn more about Jagged Alliance: Flashback, or pledge some money, head over to the Kickstarter page. At the time of this writing, the campaign is sitting on $83,822 out of a targeted goal of $350,000 with 27 days to go.

Ouya and the independent game scene

The summer of 2013 will bring us all something that we haven’t seen in a while: the breakout of a new game console to compete against the big three that have ruled the console market for years now. Ouya, the difficult to pronounce new hardware contender, is centered on bringing gaming back to the television and the living room. Ouya is the brainchild of game industry vet Julie Uhrman who put together the most successful Kickstarter campaign the online pledge system has ever seen. With an initial goal of $950,000.00 to get the development process moving, we all got to watch in amazement as they raised almost ten times that goal in a very short time. While gaming innovations over the last five years have almost always been geared toward the exponentially expanding mobile market, Ouya seems to take the best creativity we have seen in that realm and put it back on the living room television where it can be enjoyed by the massive demographic that is the hardcore console gamer. Based on what we have seen out of Ouya so far, this will be a wonderful platform for the independent game scene and many of us are excited to see how its release will reverberate throughout the entire industry.

With a recently announced retail launch date of June 4^th, 2013 many Kickstarter backers and development studios began to receive their brand-spankin’ new Ouya consoles during the last week of March and into April, 2013. There are quite a few hardware reviews and “first impression” articles out there to check out if you are interested.  Some familiar names from the indie scene are amongst those that have backed the project since day one; Notch and Mojang studios are on board, Canabalt developer Semi Secret Software have their flagship title already included in the game lineup, and other major players such as Brian Fargo of Interplay and Robert Bowling of Robotoki are all providing the needed support to make this indie console a reality. Indie smash hits such as Minecraft, Canabalt, and Terraria’s spiritual successor Starbound currently in development by Chucklefish in the UK will all be part of the Ouya experience. I already have a small spot cleared off my desk next to my monitor that would be perfect for the tiny console.

In tune with what today’s console gamers expect with their purchase of a game console as an all-around media machine, games are not the only interactivity the Ouya will offer. Twitch TV, a network/community of broadcast gameplay and tournament coverage, is already included on the console as a native app. Iheartradio is proudly wearing the badge of the first confirmed radio app for the new console and hopefully we will see the likes of Hulu, Netflix, and even Facebook available on Ouya in the future. While this plethora of games and apps put together in one piece of technology sounds suspiciously like every other game console on the market, there is an underlying independent spirit and philosophy behind the development and eventual release of this platform. The complete development tools are available with the purchase of each console and the ability to get your game published on Ouya is going to be drastically easier than other platforms that allow the same avenues. The Ouya homepage even boasts that you will not void your warranty by tinkering with the hardware itself and they even express interest in seeing what hardware mods are created by the users. For us console gamers, it has been a long time since we have seen a company truly embrace what the user community is capable of and the nod in our direction is much appreciated. It is the reason that I will be preordering this great console to be a part of this experience. Directly from the Ouya website, “The revolution will be televised!”

Founded in 2011, Yacht Club Games is comprised of six talented individuals formerly of WayForward whose range of experience spans the AAA gamut from Thor: God of Thunder to the sleeper hit A Boy and His Blob. Deeply devoted to the idea of creating games that create a hybrid between modern and retro themes, the indie community has given considerable buzz to their upcoming platformer which is due for release in September of this year .

Anything else you want to know? Head on over to Reddit and ask away!

Manami Matsumae

In an exciting new update that already has fans of the classic sound of 8-bits raising the roof, Yacht Club Games announced Thursday that Manami Matsumae, composer for the original 1987 Mega Man game and its 2010 sequel Mega Man 10, is currently penning music for their upcoming retro classic Shovel Knight. Just a week after soaring past their Kickstarter goal of $75,000, the indie team announced that they’ve brought aboard the freelance composer who will be contributing two music tracks to the game, which is due out in September of this year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22qJa6tZfXA

According to a statement from Yacht Club Games on their Kickstarter blog, this will be the first American game Manami has worked on in her decades-long career.

“This is the first time I’m working on a Western game!” said the beloved composer. “It’s quite exciting! Shovel Knight and I are a good fit. So…let’s get shovelin’?”

The team at Yacht Club Games couldn’t be more excited.  “Matsumae’s music perfectly captured the tone for Mega Man and all of its sequels. She is a master of injecting personality into a stage or character through her music. We are humbled so greatly to have her contribute to the creative force of Shovel Knight!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzLJols_sU

The opportunity was made possible by The Koopa Soundworks team, a music subsidiary owned and operated by indie label World 1-2 who collaborates with other video games artists to create new music.

Stay tuned to Gameverse for more coverage of Shovel Knight as development progresses.

Three weeks ago we took a look at indie game Spate, a surrealist 2.5D platformer from designer and animator Eric Provan. This week I talk with the developer about his beginnings in the industry and pick his brain about what the game has in store for us, touching on the theme of the games and how they will affect the player.

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The world of Spate and its gameplay mechanics look incredibly unique and compelling. How did your initial concept come about and how has it evolved over the course of development?

Eric: Spate has evolved so much in the 3 years that I have been working on it, but I do remember setting some guidelines that have stuck. First, I wanted the game to be extremely rainy and damp. This grew out of my love of films like Stalker, Angels Egg, and Dark City. There’s a certain feeling that I have when watching and listening to rain, and I wanted that to come through in the game. Second, I wanted there to be no HUD and the controls to be very simple. I feel like games have gotten too convoluted. Things are kept relatively simple in Spate to keep the player in that world. It’s more important to me that the player is lost in thought rather than thinking. The actual drinking mechanic came very late in the games development. I always had the idea for this character to slowly go insane throughout the game. And I introduced drinking very early into the story. But, it wasn’t until game designers David Jaffe and Jenova Chen played Spate (on IGNs Game Boss show), that I added the actual drinking mechanic. They enjoyed the demo very much, but felt like there was nothing connecting the storyline to the gameplay. This is where the drinking mechanic was born.

In the trailers it makes mention that the absinthe makes Detective Bluth hallucinate. Will players be able to explore a different side of the story under the influence? Are there other negative impacts that the insanity brings?

Eric: Players can beat the game whether they choose to use the drinking mechanic or not. There are just parts that will be easier if the player uses the mechanic because it lets them run faster and jump higher. This forces players to think the way a drunk would think. “Yeah, it would be nice to get wasted, but then again, things around me could suffer because of it.” I am also toying with the idea of having a few different endings depending on how many times a player uses the drinking mechanic.

I should also mention that there are more factors in the game that are making this character go mad then just the drinking. I was very inspired by Journey, and how in that game it felt like this world got harsher and more challenging, but you always kept moving on because there was that feeling like there was a light at the end of this long tunnel. I’ve modeled Spate this way, in that these mysterious islands start off simple enough, then you start to see weird stuff, and by the end you are climbing a mile high tower that is growing out of a female statues head. Because of this progression, I think the players feel the madness that the character is feeling.

About how long a journey will it be? Have you made any painful cuts that might turn up in a future work?

Eric: The game takes me just under 2 hours to get through it. I imagine a new player is looking at 2-4 hours. I think the length works perfect for the kind of game Spate is. The story is very much structured like a film and I think to get the full emotional impact of the game, its best to play through it in one sitting. I have had to cut a lot of things in the development of Spate. This is something that is hard to learn as an artist but sometimes you have to “kill your babies”. I have recently been recording entire playthroughs of the game and then editing it down after watching the playthroughs. A lot of the recent cuts have been to keep the game simple. The more complex things get, the more the player gets pulled from the world of Spate.

One thing that I cut from the game that I may use in the future is physics based puzzles. I should be clear, I didn’t cut all of them, but in the beginning, I drew out tons and tons of puzzles and then had to scratch many of them. The cuts came because they broke up the flow of the game to much, and quite honestly, they were hard to program for a new programmer like myself. Perhaps I will go back to that sketch book and use them in the future!

How did you get your start in the entertainment industry? Did games come first or animation?

Eric: I started my career at Take-Two’s Kush Games working on their 2K MLB and NHL series. It was a good experience, but as an aritst, I quickly got bored working on realism. This led me to work on characters at The Jim Henson Creature Shop. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to get out of the game industry, it was more that I wanted to step away from realism and work on something with a bit more style. Henson provided that.

What was it like working in the beloved Creature Shop? I grew up watching his work and loving movies like Labyrinth and the short lived Jim Henson Hour. Any favorite project you look back on fondly?

Eric: I grew up the same way. If you haven’t seen Henson’s The Storyteller series, you have to check it out! When I was there, they were transitioning a lot of their TV stuff to CG, so I didn’t get to work on anything to memorable. With that said, just going to work at the Henson studio in Hollywood every day was a trip. I remember on my first day, I took a wrong turn and ended in a hallway that had an original Skeksis puppet from Dark Crystal. It was that kind of stuff that I remember most.

I remember seeing the episode “Fearnot” as a kid and having the heebyjeeby’s scared out of me by the Half Man that dropped out of the chimney. “Master of Illusion” was another favorite. The whole series changed my writer’s imagination permanently. What are your favorite stories that you use to stoke your imagination when you need some creative juice?

Eric: My favorite was “Sapsorrow”. Jim Henson does Cinderella? Count me in! As far as what gets my creative juices flowing, it really depends on the project I am working on. For Spate, I have a rolodex of about 20 films that I go to for creative inspiration. The Name of the Rose (1986) and Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders (1974) being two great mysteries that I found in the process.  I love stories about solo character’s given unbelievable tasks. Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea falls into that category and is definitely inspiration for Spates main character.

It’s amazing how story resonates with us on such a deep level. How do you think players will feel about Detective Bluth? I don’t want to pry too far into the story until everyone gets to play it, but what kind of emotional resonance will we walk away with when we come to the end of his journey?

Eric: I think players will relate to the Detective and his battles. We all have our own demons (as I chug a soda), overcoming these demons is no easy task (as I chug soda again), and there is a familiar feeling of emotional achievement and satisfaction from overcoming these demons. That’s the feeling I believe the Detective in Spate and his journey through the XZone will pass on to its players.

Any last thoughts before we part ways? Do you have an anticipated release date, or do you share Blizzard’s stalwart response, “When it’s ready?”

Eric: The release date for Spate has been a tricky thing for me. I’m lucky enough to have had a successful Kickstarter campaign with over 750 backers of Spate. Keeping them waiting has weighed heavy on me. The original release date for Spate was Dec. 2012. Personal matters, and design matters collided and pushed that date. Spate is [much] different than any project I have ever worked on. I see it as my one big chance to create something special. Something that people will really enjoy. For this reason, I have definitely adopted the Blizzard way of thinking. I believe that the game and the players deserve for this thing to be done right. And, if that means a bit more time, then I’m going to take that time and make the most of it. The best estimate I can give right now is summer 2013.

Eric, it’s been great talking with you, and we hope to catch you again closer to release!

Eric: It’s been a pleasure speaking with you! Thanks for giving me a platform to get some of my thoughts out here. All the best!