Upcoming sci-fi shooter Rogue Invader looks like a massive HyperCard stack in glorious motion. Currently on Kickstarter to fund the last bit of development, the roguelike game is the brainchild of Squishy Games founder Nathan Rees, who’s been making games ever since he discovered the joys of MacPaint as a kid.
Video games let us experience murderous rampages, violent carjackings and the horrors of war. But should virtual entertainment take us through a real-life tragedy with depictions of the actual people who lost their lives?
The developers of Titanic: Honor and Glory are prepared to answer that question as they build out a game based on the 1912 sinking of the luxury liner that claimed more than 1,500 lives.
Lat Ware is a pretty loquacious dude, without a bit of shyness in his persona. We came across Ware at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco the first week of March and tried out his upcoming game, Throw Trucks With Your Mind. He was strapping headsets onto conference attendees and keeping up a steady stream of patter to keep them off balance when trying to manage their character in-game.
You see, Throw Trucks With Your Mind uses an $80 headset from NeuroSky to actually read your brainwaves. Ware has set it up in the game to track opposite parameters: focus and relaxation. When you focus intensely, the onscreen red bar will fill up, allowing you to do things like jump, push, and toss heavy in-game objects. When you relax, a blue bar fills up and lets you do four other cool things for a total of eight different ways to interact with the game using your mind.
Try that while some chatty indie dev is all up in your ear, trying to distract you.
Back in August, a new game arrived in the iOS App Store and almost immediately vanished without a trace.
“I received a few great reviews from news sites, but not enough to have an impact,” says Robert Topala, founder of RobTop Games and developer of the disappearing game. “Since I had no marketing budget it quickly dropped in rankings after release.”
For most games that would have been it. And if the story stopped there, it wouldn’t have been a tale of total failure: Topala wasn’t a professional coder, and had only been making mobile games for a couple years at the time. Simply finishing a game, getting it in the App Store and picking up a few accolades would have been nice enough.
But that wasn’t Topala’s story.
A simple glance at the stunning games perched atop the App Store game lists reveals we are experiencing a golden age for mobile gaming.
From the surreal, mind-bending Monument Valley to the Pixar movie brought to life that is Leo’s Fortune, 2014 has seen some of the most startlingly original gaming experiences in years arrive on iOS.
“I do feel like we are in a boom period,” says John Comes, design director at Uber Entertainment, the company behind games like the newly released Toy Rush.
Although Apple has been a hub of gaming going back to the glory days of the Apple II, today’s crop of hot titles are reshaping the landscape like never before. The present explosion of innovative iOS games results from several fortuitous factors coming together. Here’s why there’s never been a better time to be a gamer.
Two coders who’ve never met sat in their respective man caves 1,400 miles apart making a game that proves once and for all that whiz-bang graphics aren’t necessary when it comes to building a hit.
Called A Dark Room, their “minimalist text adventure” has stormed the App Store — averaging 10,000 downloads a day (at $0.99 a pop) and currently holding the No. 1 position for paid iPhone games (see our review here).
Here’s how Michael Townsend and Amir Rajan created an indie iOS game with no graphics that became the most unlikely success of the year.
Head on over to the Hyper Light Drifter Kickstarter page and you’ll immediately get a sense of just how hot this new bame from Heart Machine is going to be. With a modest goal of $25,000, the project garnered over $645,000 before it finished, and it looks to be well worth every pledge.
Just check out the moody, atmospheric video below, and you’ll see why we’re hyper-excited for this new indie adventure game.
SAN FRANCISCO — The Game Developers Conference is an odd beast, less a trade show and more a topical conference that caters to the folks actually making the games you while away the hours with on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac, plus that console under your TV.
Cult of Mac will be on the scene when a gaming tribe of 23,000 comes to town — that’s about the population of Poughkeepsie, N.Y. — and here’s what you can expect.
The Independent Games Festival (IGF), held every spring at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, is a celebration of the independent spirit. It’s both a gauge of the cutting edge in game design as well as an increasingly popular event among gamers of all stripe.
This year, the list of nominees for the awards contains a veritable boat-load of games that are available on iOS or Mac. It’s a who’s-who of the hot new games tat everyone’s talking about as well as a notice that mobile gaming is definitely on the map.
The Humble Indie Bundle has always been a fantastic source of solid Mac games for a very reasonable price. How much, you might ask? Well, the five initial offerings in this year’s bundle would run you almost $90 retail, but the price you’ll pay for them here is totally up to you.
Yes, you could pay no money at all for games like Rochard or Torchlight, both solidly great games that have been released on other platforms. But you wouldn’t do that, would you? The Humble Indie Bundle gives the money you decide to pay to the developers, to EFF, and to Child’s Play, a charity that raises money for games and consoles for sick kids in hospitals. See? I told you that you wouldn’t pay nothing.
Remember that great Humble Bundle For Android 3 we told you about last week? Well, it just got better! Four new games have been added to the list of bonus games customers will get for paying over the average (which is currently $6.33). That’s a total of 9 games for just over $6! Plus you get to feel good about helping out the Child’s Play Charity (no affiliation with Chucky) along with great developers who make these games. A win-win situation for everyone!
