One of the developer sessions on-stage on this last day of EGX was an interview/ Q and A session with Indie developer Mike Bithell, known for 2D puzzle platformer Thomas Was Alone and more recently stealth game Volume.

Bithell was very talkative about the indie game scene, saying that checking out the new games and new small studios exhibiting there was one of the things he most looked forward to about attending gaming events such as EGX and others. He spoke about his history and how Indie Game: The Movie filled with what he considered the “first generation” of Indie Devs had inspired him and others to create their own games and therefore become the “second generation” to inspire the next wave of developers and so on.

On changes to the scene he said that now it was a lot easier for Indies to get noticed than it had been 3 years ago when Thomas Was Alone was released, partially due to the fact that Indies were now taken more seriously by the gaming community, and thanks to bigger publishers being willing to take chances on small, quirky games that might not have cost a lot to make but target and resonate with their niche audience well. He also mentioned that while he had to call in a favour to get Thomas onto Steam, nowadays Indies found it a lot easier to get into the big digital distribution market of Valve’s. He did note though that work was still required to have a hit on your hands, and that developers still needed to promote their game and get it into as many hands as possible to hopefully build their audience.

When asked on future projects Bithell said that while he and some of the team who had worked on Volume had a number of ideas he wasn’t yet going to reveal any to the public although he did note that after two years of developing Volume he was thinking about doing something smaller again before the new big project.

The developers of Prison Architect today were on stage at EGX 2015 to talk to us about the new things we could expect from the game as it moves towards its final full release.

Prison Architect has currently been in alpha/early access for the last 3 years, slowly being developed on a monthly basis with several new feature being added over that time. In fact it was revealed to the audience that there had been a large spreadsheet of features that they had wanted to add to the game before they would release version 1.0. The full release will be October 6^th 2015, but the biggest pieces of news announced were that there would be two new game modes added to Prison Architect upon release.

The first is your standard Story Mode campaign, extending the brief story-driven introduction you get to the game and will also serve as a tutorial for the game, although you don’t have to play it first and the sandbox which the game has been up until now will be available right from the off.

The second was covered in a lot more detail and is called Escape Mode. There exists already in the game the possibility of being jailed yourself if you do a poor enough job managing your prison and so this mode is an extension on that, with the aim being to escape naturally. Any player-made map on the Steam Workshop will be playable in this mode and you can steal things from different areas of the prison and causing trouble will earn you ‘Reputation Points’ which you can then spend on things like upgrading your character, recruiting other prisoners to follow you, upgrading your followers and so on. The aim is to over time build yourself up so that you can escape the prison you find yourself in. There’s also a Skip Punishment button for when you find yourself sentence to solitary. Nice.

Other things of note were that while versions are coming to mobile platforms there aren’t any concrete plans for console versions… yet. We also had a hint at some future updates when talking about making the guards more realistic in that they could vary in how they handle the job and whether they would accept bribes or other things.

It was a very interesting look into a game that has done Early Access right in my eyes. They even said during the presentation that without the community feedback Prison Architect would not have been as good a game as they would have wanted to make, and that if you do Early Access that you need to respect your community. And they have. We all too often hear about Early Access games being left unfinished but here at least is proof that it is possible to get it correct and release a game through it.

Twitch is the biggest name in game streaming right now, with many contenders coming and falling. Now however it has some serious competition in the shape of Youtube Gaming and it seems to have made them sit up and take notice of their own faults.

Today at the first TwitchCon event, Twitch announced that a handful of new features were coming to the streaming platform early next year and the two biggest changes of note seem to be an attempt to compete with Youtube invading ‘their’ space. Most importantly of the two; Twitch will soon let you host video uploads without streaming it live first.

The video uploads means that you can record yourself playing a game and edit it into a cutdown format, before uploading it onto Twitch who will host the video for you and allow you to customise its thumbnail, description and tags as well as letting you put a bunch into a playlist. Stop me if this sounds in any way familiar. It’s a far cry from the Twitch that set expiry dates on the hosting of VoDs of your past livestreams.

However the other big thing is that Twitch are finally following the curve and are updating their video player to finally rid it entirely of Flash. Many other video sites, including Youtube, have already ditched Flash in favour of HTML5 and Twitch has already made a partial step in theirs being part-Flash, part-HTML5. This does tax computers though so the update will be welcomed by many, myself being one of them.

Other features will include things like a dedicated Playstation app coming at the same time and improved whisper functionality as well as many other smaller tweaks and fixes that will hopefully allow Twitch to just run smoother. Popular and wide-used it might be, but everyone who has used Twitch as a streamer or viewer knows that it could do with some improvement and it seems like we might finally be getting some at last. That’s good.

Shame there’s nothing you can do to patch out trolls in the Twitch Chat.

Today’s Homefront: The Revolution developer session was a bit of a surprise today here at geek towers. We all expected Homefront 2, as the Devs from Dambuster Studios also joked about at the start of the session.

What we got, was a more than pleasant surprise. We started seeing what we first thought was another open world dirge fest. What we saw, was a structured area game (including green, yellow and red zones where gameplay takes place as separate maps), that including stunning graphics and effects including weather effects, such as fog and rain that creates puddles that then dry out naturally as the tarmac warms up again and a real day/night cycle (an overly inflated one by the devs to show it off to better effect). To the near end of the presentation showing off the dynamic enemy spawn areas, meaning that no two people doing the same mission will see the same troubles.

It’s this dynamic enemy placement that Digmbot and I most found interesting. The idea that a snipe could be around any corner, or as you walk through a building, a full enemy patrol with an APC may be there to surprise you (or for you to surprise)

They ended the session with a bit of info about the map they were using at EGX this week, which also happened to be the Gamescom map aswell this year, and that they had been pulling player activity info the whole time. Including where people died in the map, how they died and which enemy killed them, including one sniper who accounted for the most players deaths (apart from self inflicted ones). The funniest statistic was how many players had set themselves on fire. Not been set on fire from an enemy as none in that zone had flamethrowers or similar, but had walked through flame (your clothes are flammable) and even those that had misused Molotov cocktails (including one guy who must have dropped one at his own feet at the very start of the zone, which they took great delight in laughing about, I hope that guy wasn’t watching)

This all culminated in a beautiful looking game that I went from not caring about to being determined to play it tomorrow when I’m back at EGX and may even get early next year when it’s out!

Great Job Dambuster Studios!

Homefront: The Revolution is slated for a Spring 2016 release on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and STEAM

David Braben and members of Frontier Developments took to the EGX stage today to talk about the future of Elite. They started off by showing the Horizons trailer and talking in detail about everything coming to the game.

For starters, Horizons will allow players to land on planets, with rocky planets being sized at up to seven times the size of Earth. Players will be able to enter an orbital cruise mode to allow them to move around the planet quickly, and from there will be able to drop down into the atmosphere and cruise about. Once they decide to land, they will be able to deploy an armed exploration rover. Mining and exploring human settlements are just a few of the things Frontier hinted at as activities once on a planet. In addition, they also confirmed that Season 2 of Elite will finally bring us multicrew ships and fighter bays for the larger vessels. This means that you can deploy a small parasite fighter from a larger ship and use it to escort a fellow crew member as they explore in their rover. Or, you could leave your ship on autopilot and deploy in a fast, powerful fighter to take on those nasty pirates sneaking up on your flank.

They also discussed the inclusion of looting and crafting. Mining and looting from wrecks and other sources will allow players to craft unique weapons and items for their ships. This could range from changing the color of your lasers to creating a weapon that causes system malfunctions on an enemy ship. They then revealed….BOBBLEHEADS. Thats right, bobbleheads are coming back. Those of us who played the original beta grew quite fond of our bobbleheads, and I for one am glad to see them making a comeback. For a limited time, a David Braben bobblehead is available in the Frontier Store.

The final bit of information worth touching on is the inclusion of the Cobra Mk 4 and the Viper Mk 4. The new Cobra was revealed in the Horizons trailer, while the new Viper was just revealed today. It trades some speed and manueverability for better internals, making the ship much tougher.

Elite Horizons and Season 2 are due out this Holiday season.