Eskil Steenberg’s Love

LoveWhat you see here are not watercolour paintings, but screenshots. The vibrant and beautiful images depict not static, empty scenes but living vistas soon to be inhabited by thousands of people. Love is an upcoming MMO, to feature a huge dynamically alterable world and innovative interrelated gameplay systems. It is the work of a single person, Eskil Steenberg.

The game’s stunning visuals are thanks to clever procedural programming, which dictates much of Love’s underlying design as well. One-man-band Steenberg utilizes intelligent techniques in order to reduce the workload and create vast amounts of content; he has created his own tools to aid his development process, which are even available for anyone to try.

Love Alpha Client Love Love

The game surfaced early last year during GDC 1)http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/02/20/for-the-love/, immediately drawing attention with its impressionistic imagery. It was at this year’s GDC, though, that substantial information was finally revealed, detailing the fundamental world-building mechanics, resources and communications system 2)http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/10/23/rps-interview-love/. Steenberg initially released a haunting first trailer, embedded after the jump, and later a full gameplay demonstration in which he gives a walkthrough of the basic mechanics. And last week he released an alpha client to the public, so that people could finally witness the game running realtime in full glory.

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Spelunky: Snakes, I Hate Snakes!

Spelunky is a roguelike, but not like any roguelike I’ve ever played before. Rather than being a top-down dungeon crawl viewed from overhead, the game is a side-scrolling platformer. Not content with the characteristic ASCII symbol set that comprises most roguelikes’ graphics, it features fully detailed pixel art tiles and sprites.

Spelunky

As the title suggests, you play as a whip-cracking cave explorer, sporting a fedora and leather jacket to complete the image. You have at your disposal some bombs and ropes as well as additional tools found along the way to help you navigate the levels, overcome enemies, and find treasures. Inhabiting the dark caverns are various dangerous creepy-crawlies like snakes and spiders, and friendly NPCs like shopkeepers and damsels in distress.

Spelunky Spelunky Spelunky

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Resonance Cascade

XII Games’ Vince Twelve has just announced a pledge-based donation drive for his forthcoming indie adventure game, Resonance, which according to Twelve, is a game of “Speculative Near-Future Hard-ish Science Fiction!” The developer has even promised to put this astonishing, genre-bending tag-line on the game’s retail box if certain requirements are met. Here’s the bottom line on the deal, straight from the source:

I’ve set up a Kickstarter project for the game. Kickstarter collects pledges from kind individuals like yourself and, if the project meets it’s fundraising goals by the deadline, delivers your pledges to the creative endeavor that you’ve pledged your support to (in this case, Resonance!) In return, supporters get gifts or rewards for their pledge amounts! If the goal is not met, then no money or gifts change hands.

Twitter-toting tomfoolery aside, players of Resonance will get to control four unique characters, each of whom are searching for the secret vault of a spectacularly murdered particle physicist, and must work together to keep the scientist’s horrifying discovery from reaching the clutches of a dangerous organization looming in the background.

My two plus two cents, a trailer, more images and the various types of pledge after the jump!

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Super Jazz Man Review

Nostalgia is to memory as kitsch is to art –Charles Maier

Stevie Jack, I’m sorry to say, but we just didn’t get you. Or more importantly, we didn’t expect you, at least not to come waltzing down the street, dropping Barthes and Foucault, least of all, amidst all that jazz. We received you expectant of two things only: A sequel to The Apprentice, and colourful, fantastical artwork and animation.

Strictly speaking, we got neither.

Only now, three years later, am I prepared to face the fact that I was not ready, Stevie Jack. After all, in ‘06, the commercial AGS scene was still very much in its infancy, with very little on the market beyond The Adventures of Fatman. We had yet to accustom ourselves to the idea of rewarding indie game designers for their time, with the scene additionally still steadfastly shackled to the gaming heritage of the early 90s. All this despite the flavours and flairs of contemporary retro adventuring having already largely reached the plateau of its predecessors: The freeware version of The Shivah, for instance, had been released in June of the same year, and free games like Reactor 09 continued to push the content envelope.

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Ludum Dare 15: Caverns

Ludum Dare is an indie game development competition held regularly every few months which pits developers against a 48-hour deadline to create a game from scratch, based on a given theme. The main site is a community hub for a creative niche in the indie gaming scene that takes part in more than just the competition – like recording time lapse videos and post-mortems of the development process.

Beacon 2XUE The Walls Are Not Cheese

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