If you didn’t know, most video game consoles from the 80s and 90s are still getting new games added to their library every month — just not “officially.” There’s a thriving indie development community centered around the NES, Game Boy, Genesis, and the 90s’ final gift, the Dreamcast.
We recently hit Play NYC, a New York based convention that highlights local video game and tabletop game developers. We spoke with Salim Larochelle of Flying Carpets Games on his studio’s upcoming survival horror game, Hiboka. Hiboka is the spirit underworld of Malagasy folklore. The game features two playable characters. The first playable character is Alexandre Leblanc, a wealthy teenage boy grieving the loss of his mother. The second is Ramala Fifaliana, a Malagasy girl Alexandre encounters during his search to find the entrance to Hiboka. Together, they hope to uncover the truth behind the cursed Sanatry Mansion.
We recently covered Play NYC. a two day local New York convention that spotlights New York-based indie video game developers and tabletop publishers, Nerdy Thirty Podcast co-host, Christina Crisfield and I spoke with Alexis Brutman (Studio Founder / Producer) and Sarah Schaffstall (Owner / Marketing Director) of Astral Clocktower Studios about their upcoming game, Kristala. If you’re missing a souls-inspired ARPG with badass anthropomorphic cats, Kristala might be right up your alley.
One of the most annoying things about human society is the disconnect between those who make games and those who supply the money for those games to be made. The developer has one goal in life: to make a good game, something they can be proud of. The publisher also has one singular goal: to make money, and in the pursuit of that goal, doesn’t care whether the games are good. Unfortunately the developer very rarely has the cash to produce their dream game themselves and must rely on someone who does — the publisher. But when the publisher gets in the way, the games aren’t very good and the production process isn’t very fun. Like we said: annoying.
It takes a lot to stand out in the crowded indie game scene these days. When we say a game has a “unique look,” that means a lot, and well…this one does. Of all the visual styles that are now out there, “medieval parchment” is not one we can say we’ve seen before.
Ever since GB Studio was first released, retro gaming enthusiasts have been crafting new and exciting titles for the obsolete system. One of the more interesting is Glory Hunters, a game that is currently funding its own physical release on Kickstarter.
This is quite the unpleasant surprise to wake up to (you might NEED some coffee first) but Indonesian game designer Mohammed Fahmi, creator of the popular indie game Coffee Talk, has passed. He was only 32.
Like a lot of other, larger publishers we could name, tinyBuild has been on a studio-buying tear lately, gobbling up indie dev studios like Dynamic Pixels (Hello Neighbor), Hologryph (Party Hard 2) and HakJak Studios (Guts & Glory). This week they revealed they’ve acquired THREE more: We’re Five Games (Totally Reliable Delivery Service), Hungry Couch (Black Skylands), and Moon Moose (Cartel Tycoon).
In 2015 Lexaloffle Games released the Pico-8, a brand new game console…that doesn’t exist and never did. The Pico-8 is actually a game engine that self-imposes the limits of retro consoles, challenging developers to find the best methods of working around those limitations. There are those that prefer it!
Korean indiegame studio PLAY Mephistowaltz has released their action puzzle platform adventure DOOR: Inner Child to Steam Early Access.
We’ve told you before about NESMaker, the game creation software that lets you put together NES games in a fraction of the time it took the dev teams of old, using menus and modules to snap together a platformer, a Metroidvania or an adventure in the vein of Zelda. Every year, the creators host a competition called Byte-Off where everyone is given one month to create a complete demo for the NES using NESMaker. Fifty entries made it in this year, and the judging process is now underway.