Posts tagged with “indie”

Got an XBox 360, and want a fun old school platform puzzler for $3? Then go onto the indies channel (XBLIG) and download Escape Goat, the latest offering by Magical Time Bean.

In escape goat you star as an inexplicably purple colored goat who has been imprisoned for witchcraft. Teaming up with a small mouse with a taste for magic hats you have to navigate and escape from 64 puzzle rooms using a relatively simple rule set of jump, dash, push button, avoid fireball. The game shines because the level design is fairly tight and most of the levels are fun and interesting to play, and the few bits of dialog you encounter are relatively amusing.

My gripes with the game are few; the graphics aren’t very impressive, some of the critical elements blend into the background too much, and the game elements all have a similar look and feel (for instance, keys and magic hats look almost identical). However none of these points are damning, and we found ourselves coming back to this for more on a regular basis until we beat the game. The title even comes with a level editor that is surprisingly easy to use and fun to make your own levels.

If you are an indie fan and want a puzzler then this is certainly one to get. And for $3 it’s pretty damn cheap. Go on XBLIG and grab it now!

Oh yeah, and if you like the game’s music (composed by the dev, mixed by Chainsaw of Twisted Pixel fame) then you can grab it for whatever you want here.

Our good friends over at Owlchemy Labs have just come out with their new game, Snuggle Truck, for the iPhone and iPad. And it’s awesome! In the game you control the driver of a flatbed pickup filled with a bunch of cute stuffed animals, and speed up and slow down the truck by tilting the iDevice. As you zip around your truck bounces on the uneven ground and the cute animals can pop out. If all the animals fall out you lose! Every now and then a baby animal flies out and you have to catch it, doing so gets you a rocket boost.

The game is super fun and feels like a mobile version of one of our favorite games, Trials HD. It’s silly, fun, frequently hard, and the kind of game that you’ll play over and over and share with your friends. And we’re not just saying that because Alex and Yilmaz are two of the most awesome Boston Indie developers (but they are, did we mention that?).

There’s also been a fair amount of silly, ginned up controversy over the game. Originally titled Smuggle Truck, you were supposed to help illegal immigrants cross the border to get into the US. The game was a parody based in part off their friends’ trouble immigrating here. However it got picked up a few months back by Fox News and a few others who didn’t understand that the game was satire and took it at face value, complaining that the game was corrupting teh childrens or something. The upshot of all this was that the original game got rejected by Apple despite being high quality and fun, and Owlchemy had to resubmit with the new title. It’s kind of ridiculous, but I suppose that any press is good press and at least they got a ton of coverage out of this.

Go check out the game now if you haven’t yet! They’ve also got a PC/Mac version if you don’t have a fancy iWhatever. Congrats Owlchemy!

OK, I’m seriously pumped. It’s incredible how much of a roller coaster the past 24 hours have been. First the game goes up on PSN. Then BAM, the entire store is reskinned with a SBS theme. AMAZING. And then if that wasn’t enough, today Tycho let us post our story on Penny Arcade. I don’t even know what to say at this point, I’m totally floored at the support we’ve been getting.

So maybe I won’t say anything about the game, and will instead just say thanks to everyone! I hope you’re all enjoying playing Slam Bolt Scrappers as much as we enjoyed making the game.

For those of you new here to the website, welcome! Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting more information about how we created Slam Bolt Scrappers and the challenges we faced along the way, so if you’re aspiring to jump into the indie game dev biz this might be as good a place to start reading up as any. I also wrote a great post last year on last year’s PAX East panel about starting your own indie studio, maybe you’ll enjoy giving it a read.

Let’s check in on what’s happening with some of our friends in Boston, shall we?

Our good friends at Autobahn Games are now accepting pre-orders for their next title, “1… 2… 3… KICK IT! (Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby)“. In addition to consistently awesome game naming the DJ ban guys really know how to put together a fun experience, and their latest offering is no different. I’ve been playing pre-alpha builds for a while, and Kick It is kind of like a mash up of Aaaaa!, Rez, and AudioSurf. If you know any of those games then you’ll understand why I’m so excited about this game. Pre-ordering gets you an early playable alpha build now, and then you get constant updates as they come along. If you like being on the cutting edge of games I strongly suggesting picking it up!

But perhaps you aren’t into games about base jumping, and prefer a good old interactive fiction experience? In that case you should stop reading this post now and go play The Warbler’s Nest by Jason McIntosh. It is a very short old school IF game where…. well, you’ll just have to play it. The whole thing can be played in 10-15 minutes and it is super solid. I normally don’t care for the IF genre but after about 5 minutes I got really sucked in and couldn’t get enough, and the ending is absolutely fantastic. Go play it for free now!

Want more free games made by Boston devs? Well ok then! Exanaut is a explorative platformer (or to use the hip slang, “metroidvania-like”) by Matthew Fister. It’s a free download for Windows where you star as a space man with a jetpack and gun searching for… alien artifacts? I dunno, it’s not super plot heavy. The game is a bit rough around the edges as it is one of Matthew’s first games, and it’s pretty damn hard. I wound up enjoying it a lot more after editing the python files and giving myself tons of health, jetpack fuel, and a super high level gun.

Of course, not everything is cheery in Boston Indie Land, and I’m very sorry to announce the folding of one of our flagship indie studios, MacGuffin Games. Founder and local indie hero Scott McMillan wrote a farewell post detailing what happened, with the short of it being that Mustache Mercenaries didn’t perform nearly well enough to keep them afloat. Happily it looks like the MacGuffin team will be moving on to bigger and better things, so while we will be pouring out a bit of beer tonight at our local indie meet up we will also toast to their future success.

Remember when games were hard? No hand holding, no tutorials, just throw-you-in-the-mix-and-let-you-figure-it-out hard? TerRover, by Creat Studios, is a new game out on the PSN ($15) that is hard like that, and in an awesome way. You control a cute little tank, and your only goal in life is to navigate the level and get from start to finish. Of course your path is blocked by lots of sharp things that kill you, but luckily the game provides lots of save points so if you die you are only set back a little ways. And that’s great, cause you’re gonna die a LOT. The controls of the game are what’s really difficult though – you can flip around in all sorts of ways, and between that and the bouncy physics you are frequently surprised by where you end up.

Now I’ve seen some reviews online bashing the controls, but in my opinion they are totally looking at them the wrong way. The controls are hilarious, and you wind up having an awesome time messing around with them (remember, we loved QWOP). Sure, they can be frustrating at times, but if you go with the flow you will find yourself laughing and having fun a lot more than anything else. And when you do get over that challenge hump or past that insane spikey ball of death you have a great feeling of accomplishment.

However, the game has one stellar feature which far and away outshines everything else. The multiplayer race mode in which 1-4 friends can race together is FANTASTIC. I haven’t yelled, screamed, and laughed so much with my friends since WarioWare. The race is really amusing, with people dying left and right, respawning at odd points, and just general mayhem. This feature alone makes the game worth purchasing, and I *strongly* recommend playing this with friends. If you at all like party games and/or hard games, I promise you you’ll love this one.

Full Disclosure: We hung out with the Creat guys @ E3 in the SOE booth and they are local Boston indie devs, so we’re friends with them. That said this review is impartial and not influenced by that friendship.