Experimental Shooter

Experimental Shooter is a nice little puzzle shooter cross-over where the rules of the game change each level. You control a little "cannon" in the middle of the screen and you have a number of "enemies" (white balls) either moving around or lined up in some way on the level. Your goal is to clear the level according to the rules of that particular level. In one level you might have to shoot all your targets within a certain time, in another you need to bounce your shots at least once before hitting the enemies, in yet another you get to play pool and try to pocket the enemies.

http://armorgames.com/play/12154/experimental-shooter

Games that I want to try

I've been slacking this summer when it comes to keeping up to date with the latest and greatest releases on the indie scene. I've started building a list of games that I'd like to test, and by the looks of it I will have lots to play the entire autumn. Here are some of the highlights:

Infested Planet
This game is still in beta, but I have acquired a copy and intend to start playing soon. "Take charge of 5 veteran solders and fight an alien army of 100,000. It's all about striking hard and killing lots of squishy alien bugs. To do this, you get an arsenal of awesome weapons; from walking tanks with miniguns to field artillery, you're set to kick the aliens back down their slimy hole."

Infested Planet Trailer from Alex Vostrov on Vimeo.

Bastion
Bastion seems like a mix between Torchlight and the old Fallout games. It's set in some kind of post-apocalyptic world recreated in stunningly beautiful hand painted graphics. It promises a deep storyline and a lot of action.

http://supergiantgames.com/?page_id=242

Capsized
"Capsized is a fast paced 2d platformer focused on intense action and exploration. As a intrepid space traveler, your ship has crash landed on a mysterious alien planet. You must navigate through the perilous environment and fight off blood-thirsty creatures to save your crewmates and escape with your lives!" How could things possibly go wrong when you're equipped with a jetpack and a gravity hook?

http://beta.indievania.com/games/capsized

Hammerfight
"Hammerfight is about 2D battles of flying machines equipped with various slashing, piercing and blunt weaponry". The controls seem rather unique with the physics of the game tied to how you wave/swing your mouse pointer to build momentum with your weapon.

http://www.koshutin.com/

Cuboy Hot Pants

This is a really silly game where you need to rush down the side of a volcano while dodging patches of hot lava. The controls are really easy, you can either go down the left side, the middle or the right side. You need to constantly move so you can't spend time pondering if you should go left-left-middle-right or left-middle-right-middle to dodge a particular patch of lava. On your way down you can also pick-up different power-ups to assist you. You race against your own previous record and unlock bonuses the further you reach.

http://www.agame.com/game/cuboy-hot-pants.html

One month until the next ARRP

Yesterday was one month until the next Annual Roguelike Release Party. The purpose behind the ARRP is to "provide moral support as we struggle with resurrecting code we left in an untenable state three months earlier", "encourage developers to release at least yearly through the wonders of deadlines" and to "celebrate the size and vibrancy of our community". If the developers can repeat the amount of releases made during last year's ARRP you can expect a lot of good roguelikes in September. Dweller will of course make a release then as well, but I also intend to make a release before that.

Spore prototype tools

Today I discovered a wealth of prototype software made by Maxis, the developers behind the acclaimed Spore god-sim game. The tools were used in early stages of development to test many different concepts and all of it is available online. One of the tools that I really like is BIOME. BIOME use cellular automata rules to create game of life like environments. The software support both standard rectangular and the more exotic spiral automata that can be used to simulate galaxies. There's a lot of example rule-sets for everything from galaxies, to terrain gen and fire propagation.

Other cool stuff among the tools are CityMaze (agent-based city simulation), Cell Culture (spread of life across a planetary surface), Gaslight (self-propagating star formations). You find all of the tools here:

http://www.spore.com/comm/prototypes

Chaos Stream - ASCII Shmup!

I came across a link to a crazy project this morning. How about a shoot 'em up done in ASCII? Yeah, I know it sounds crazy but have a look at this video:

The game is done using the libtcod console library. libtcod is used in many roguelike projects nowadays and it's refreshing to see that it is being put to use elsewhere as well.

There's a demo ready for download as well in case you wanna test it: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8626299/ChaosStream.zip

Save games broken in 1.8.4

Several players have contacted me with problems with their saved games. Things like items that won't stack or the warrior not being able to equip a shield is among the reported problems. All this boil down to changes I made to the data file that I overlooked when naming the new version 1.8.4. The new version should have been named 1.9.0 to make sure that save game incompatibility would have been detected on startup. I'm afraid I can't revert this if you are playing on an Android device since the Android Market doesn't allow me to revert to an older version. If you use the J2Se or J2ME version it can be downloaded from www.roguelikedevelopment.org/dweller/old/

If you start a new game things should be working as expected though. I'm sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused you. The new 1.9.0 version has been released and is ready for download.