Games in Development

Freshly launched on Kickstarter, Dwerve is a tower defense-dungeon crawling combo with a lovely, smooth pixel art style. We’ve seen the tower defense mechanic mixed previously in Aegis Defenders (a platformer), but this time we get to experience it in an RPG with a ¾ top-down look and plenty of action.

A bunch of well-known pixel artists have ties to the project. Leonard ‘Sun Pixels’ Leon is behind the wonderfully big dialog portraits, Enchae does various stuff from enemies to environments, but most of all, Dwerve is shaped under the hands of Peter 'Pixel Pete’ Milko, who has a substantial following on his very educational YouTube channel. Besides him, Percy 'PJ’ Legendre is responsible for designing (and also coding) their brain child to life.

It makes me very happy to see the Kickstarter campaign already funded, which will move PJ and Pete from 2 years of previous development (on the side of freelancing) into full-time status. If you’re into action RPGs with a bunch of strategic defending and towering and storytelling to go with it, you can support the project on Kickstarter ($15+ for the game, macOS, Windows, Linux, with stretch goals for additional platforms).

Sabotage Studio won’t have trouble funding a prequel to their debut title The Messenger as they’ve already gathered close to half a million dollars on Kickstarter for their next project, Sea of Stars. The Canadian indie team is shifting from side-view platforming to a top-down turn-based RPG, inspired by Chrono Trigger and the like (they even have the Chrono series’ composer Yasunori Mitsuda on board as a guest).

I especially wanted to mention the title since the visuals not-only look 16-bit gorgeous, but are also somewhere close to Pathway’s dynamic shading wizardry.

If you check the trailer closely, it doesn’t look exactly as precise as Pathway’s completely volumetric approach, but even if it’s using a somewhat more faked technique, it looks darn proper. Even better, daytime changing is an essential gameplay mechanic that underscores the story of solstice warriors who manipulate the powers of the moon and the sun to their advantage.

I gave a talk about Crowdfunding today. I was working on it for the majority of this week and during my research I found some ongoing projects to write about (on top of a couple already on my TO-DO list). Brace yourself for an overview of Kickstarter projects in the next few days!

I’ll take pretty much any chance to post some artwork from Norco: Faraway Lights by @geographyofrobots​. Above are new screenshots from the recently updated website, and we got an official trailer as well:

I’m always happy when I can post some game art without UI elements, so here are backgrounds/locations from General Interactive’s Chinatown Detective Agency, drawn by Ricardo Juchem. 

I really like Ricardo’s story. He’s been a web designer for most of his career, but eventually got drawn into pixel art and started posting his first works in 2016, quite prolifically so in the #Pixel_Dailies community on Twitter (here is my archive of his works from that year). 

His dedication to studying art on a daily basis is seriously inspiring. By tackling on everything from digital painting to 3D, he assimilates general art knowledge and brings it back to pixel art. This way, Ricardo’s works quickly rose from simple vignettes to elaborate scenes, culminating in a career switch to pixel art in 2017. He got involved in multiple game development projects, first a cyberpunk point-and-click adventure Future Flashback, and as announced this year, Chinatown Detective Agency, which is inspired by the world-exploring series Carmen Sandiego.

Chinatown Detective Agency is one of the most popular games on IndieDB right now and is in the running for the annual Top 100 Indies of 2019 award. If you enjoy the project as much as I do, you can help the game by voting here (no registration required, just a click is needed).

Since we were talking about Indonesian indies yesterday, it was about time for me to try the Coffee Talk demo. It’s been out for over a year now, but boy does it still feel as warm as a hot chocolate on a cold December rainy day.

Coffee Talk is being developed at Toge Productions where it’s pixeled by one of my favorite artists, Hendry Roesly a.k.a. @iceztiqarts​ (art lead on the project is Dio Mahesa, an amazing character artist as well). The game is essentially a visual novel in a fantasy 2020 Seattle where you get to listen to everyday stories such as a love drama between an elf and a succubus, an alien’s attempt to understand life on earth, or a dreams-come-true tale of a writer trying to switch from journalism to writing a novel … It all feels incredibly chill and cozy, thanks as well to the lo-fi jazzy soundtrack and the fact that you help these characters feel better by serving them delicious, hot beverages.

As a person who never even tasted coffee in their life, I grew surprisingly in love with becoming a barista. I truly appreciate every game in which I can learn something and thanks to Coffee Talk I finally know a difference between a latte, a cappuccino, and an espresso (if you were as uninitiated as me, it’s basically the amount of milk added to coffee from loads to none at all, in the respective order). 

The barista simulator goes so deep that you can even make latte art. Every time a piece of entertainment excites me so much that I pause the movie or alt-tab from a game to go read Wikipedia, my hat is off to you. With Coffee Talk it wasn’t too long before I had YouTube opened, learning how to make hearts, tulips, and rosettas by pouring milk into the steaming blackness. 

Here lied my only moment of disappointment: the liquid simulation just isn’t close enough to reality to reproduce what I observed in online tutorials—a missed opportunity to have even more transfer of knowledge between the game and the real world. On the other hand, the misbehaving simulator breeds creativity as you try to find ways to make cool shapes in your own way.

We submitted SKUL to Busan Indie Connect exhibition.

New trailer for NYKRA, the existential narrative-driven cinematic sci-fi adventure from solo developer Seth ‘ENDESGA’ Groom! 

I think the falling leaves add a lot of atmosphere. This is the scenario I dislike the most though, I really don’t know why exactly (maybe the colors). But I’ll keep trying to improve it. 

Alex Kidd in Miracle World [Remake]