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Kickstarter’s always busy with new ideas popping up all the time for people wanting to fund their ideas through the power and funds they can get through crowdsourcing. A number of the games we’ve featured in the past on the Indie Game Show were Kickstarter-funded and more wonderful ideas are coming through all the time. Here’s just a few:
This game sees you as a low-poly ‘lost’ dog in a randomly generated low-poly city inhabited by many other dogs and humans… who are low-poly. The aim of the game is simple: survive any way you can.
The game lets you play as any one of a number of breeds with some customisation of colours and markings allowed, and ultimately the results of the game depends on what actions you decide to take. Will you steal food, beg for it or scavenge in bins for a tasty scrap? And will you stand your ground against other hostile dogs or turn tail and run? It’s ultimately up to you.
Also at every backing level this game comes packaged with another one – a multiplayer game called Dog Park that lets you and your friends just basically mess around as virtual dogs in a park. Simple but cute and sounds fun.
The game has 28 more days to go on its Kickstarter and has made $38,268 of its $50,000 target.
This particular game has quite an interesting history. It started on a Tumblr post of all things a few years back where someone proposed the idea of your typical zombie apocalypse game; but with 50s housewives instead of the typical rugged male heroes or other ‘badass’ character stereotypes. The idea was quite popular and so Sketchy Panda Games took that core idea and worked it into Aberford.
The game has a graphic adventure-style campaign to play through, which switches to brawler-style play when in battle with zombies. The story itself deals with the immediate after part of the ‘turning’ and has the 50s wife characters teaming up to discover what exactly happened in Aberford to bring about the sudden zombie oubreaks. There’s also a freeplay/challenge mode that’s multiplayer to let you and your friends just have fun dispatching zombies in the best ways you possibly can.
The campaign has 16 days left to go and has made $75,225 of its $675,000 target so far.
I like the art style of this game, its simple but not too basic. Just what you need for a 2D arena shooter really.
Crashnauts will feature six different races of being to choose from (although two are currently being worked on) with a few different customise options for each piece of your character. The aim is simple: shoot stuff that’s not on your team and don’t shoot things that are on your team. There will be a number of gamemodes, including classics such as Free-For-All, Team-Deathmatch and Hold the Flag across either single-screen enclosed maps or ‘progressive’ ones that scroll across the screen as battle pushes one way or another. You can also use your respawn crashpod to squash other players, which is just brilliant.
Crashnauts has only made $4,818 of its $40,000 goal so far, with only 5 days to go. Be quick if you want to see this game made!
This one’s a little different to the rest. It’s a card-based game which caught my eye with the subtitle: “A vampire kitten game.” How could I not look?
Made and developed by a French studio, you play as a Hunter whose job is to catch as many vampire cats as possible, aided by items and weapons that you can buy with coins. The game has already been designed, playtested and has a prototype so this campaign is to fund the printing of the game to sell in the market.
Dracucat has made €1,297 of its €1,900 goal so it just needs a little more funding in its remaining 26 days to make the campaign successful.
And in news of Kickstarter success stories Battletech has made quite a name for itself by making $1,300,535 so far with 32 days still to go; far in excess of its original $250,000 goal.
Some of this is undoubtedly down to having the name of Jordan Weisman behind it, who has worked on previous BattleTech games as well as ShadowRun. This is also the first turn-based BattleTech game in two decades that has been available for the PC, so interest is high.
If you’ve been playing games for any length of time, chances are you’ve seen the Havok logo before. Havok is a middleware company and it’s Havok engine provides all of those lovely ragdoll physics you are used to seeing in various games. It seems that Microsoft has been rather interested in the company, as they have just acquired Havok from Intel for an undisclosed sum. A corporate article regarding the purchase reads, in part:
Microsoft’s acquisition of Havok continues our tradition of empowering developers by providing them with the tools to unleash their creativity to the world.We will continue to innovate for the benefit of development partners. Part of this innovation will include building the most complete cloud service, which we’ve just started to show through games like ‘Crackdown 3.”
IGN reached out to Microsoft for further comment and recieved a response to several questions, the most pertinent being the availability of Havok to other console manufacturers:
“We will continue to license Havok’s technology to the broad AAA games industry. This also means that we will continue to license Havok’s technology to run across various game consoles including Sony and Nintendo.”
Havok, of course was recently used to power such games as Destiny, Watch_Dogs, and Dark Souls 2.
IO Interactive show us the latest installment of their hit assassination’em up, Hitman!
The developer session kicked off showing us some pretty standard gameplay for a Hitman game, however there are options, lots and lots of options. It seems that as per the words of Travis and Sven, the two employees of IO Interactive who took us all through the Showstopper Level of Hitman,
“You will experience a rich and detailed sandbox, every person has a name”
It certainly looks like they’re correct at least on the rich sandbox part of that statement, the level is very densely populated, the crowds move, mill and mingle around as one would expect a large crowd of posh twats to and the level itself is pretty bloody expansive, including a large manor house with two floors, large garden grounds, numerous balconies (with vantage points of course) and plenty of staff members and civilians with nicely tailored clothes to steal.
Keeping with the whole options angle I mentioned earlier it doesn’t stop there. We’ve been given numerous types of poison, the ability to have weapons and equipment dropped into the level before the player begins and even ways to smuggle weapons and equipment past security checkpoints. Which is something I look forward to utilising, even Metal Gear Solid doesn’t have a feature like that and that’s pretty much the franchise that wrote the book on stealth. We’ll undoubtedly have the usual staples of the series however, I’d hate to see 47 without his Silverballers and Garrotte wire.
But there is a ton to see and do in this level, it isn’t just kill one target, in this Showstopper level we have two. One is the man behind the fashion show and the other is his accomplice who is holding a secret auction to sell off “deadly secrets” to some very unscrupulous people and of course all these options can come into play. Maybe you’ll drop one of your Silverballers that’ll get picked up by a security guard, taken past a checkpoint which you will then bypass and retrieve your gun afterwards which you will then utilise in a trigger pulling fashion to silently kill someone…maybe. There’s even more than one escape option, a chopper or a speedboat though you will have to find the keys. You may decide to get a Sniper Rifle smuggled in, camp out on a vantage point and shoot your way out afterwards or my personal favourite, attempt to bypass everything in a disguise and get discovered almost instantly. Almost mind you.
So allow me to summarise. Options. You need to take out the target, pick a path and get to it.
You can watch the full developer session below, Enjoy!
This year’s EGX featured games of all genres and titles, and I was lucky enough to be assigned Hellblade. Presented by Ninja Theory’s Dominic Mathews, this developer session was as much about the process of creating a game as it was about the game itself. For their latest game release, Ninja Theory are taking the novel approach of allowing the audience to follow the production of Hellblade from concept to animation and story-building to completion. Whilst they realise this can leave the small team of 15 staff open to a lot of criticism, it also provides people outside of the games production industry a unique insight to how our beloved games come to be realised.
Another unique aim of the team who created ‘Devil May Cry’, is the type of title they want to release. Dominic detailed the main draw-backs of triple A titles being a set budget, spiralling costs and a loss of creative ownership in order to deliver a product expected from customers of triple A titles. Instead, the team are aiming for a title hallway between triple A and Indie, lovingly named “independent Triple A”. This will allow the developers to take creative risks and ensure an immersive storyline and gamer experience, without limited their production values.
The game Hellblade, follows the fantasy adventures of Celtic warrior “Senua”; a female protagonist plagued by psychosis and visual and auditory hallucinations. The thing that impressed me most about tackling such a controversial subject is the amount of research the team conducted to portraying the reality of mental illness in everyday life. Not only did the team interview people who deal with psychosis on a daily basis, but they worked with prominent psychiatrist Professor Paul Fletcher to create a truthful representation of psychosis. In this author’s opinion, mental illness is a subject that is only just receiving the attention it requires in wider media. The developers of Hellblade are striving to disband the usual stereotypes and to really help those with no experience, understand what sufferers all over the world have to cope with.
Continuing with the open development style, we were shown a ‘vertical slice’ of the game. This is a small cut scene created to demonstrate the sound, graphics and storyline standards the game will eventually be made to. To stay true to the Independent Triple A title, the team have created an in-house performance capture studio using materials obtained from Amazon and Ikea to keep costs down. Using Vicon 30 technology, not only have the actors portraying in-game characters been captured, but also rocks and trees in the real world have been scanned. The single environment artist on the team will be using these objects to create the background to Senua’s adventures, allowing a realistic environment for the player to experience.
The journey of Hellblade has already begun, and you can follow them at www.hellblade.com. Here you can catch up on developer’s diary videos, weekly blogging and Q and A sessions. All in all, Hellblade promises to be an immersive, creative experience, which I can’t wait to play.
To watch the entire developer session for yourself, click below:
