Latest Publications

New release: Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon

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Jay Barnson (recently interviewed here) has released the first episode of Frayed Knights, a comedic party-based first-person dungeon delver in the spirit of the old Wizardry games.

In his press release, Jay writes:

On top of the serious, ‘hard-core’ engine, The Skull of S’makh-Daon layers a world and story with a decidedly more tongue-in-cheek approach to the genre. Spells and skills have names like “Power Word: Defenestrate” and “Size Doesn’t Matter.” In a world of jaded heroes and veteran adventurers, the player’s party is a team of misfits: Arianna, a dainty warrior with an attitude problem; Dirk, an adrenaline-junky rogue who doesn’t seem to understand the word ‘subtle;’ Benjamin, a nature-priest and newcomer to the adventuring lifestyle, and Chloe, a ditsy sorceress with a love of cute, fuzzy animals and setting her enemies on fire.

Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon is now available as a digital download at http://frayedknights.com. It is unrated, but should be content-appropriate for most teens and adults.

Features include:

30+ hours of gameplay
Challenging, turn-based combat in a game
A spell named, “Power Word: Defenestrate.”
Over a hundred base spells, most with several upgraded variants
Over 80 feats to customize the party as they progress through the game.
Nearly 200 different items to be used and abused by your characters.
A “Quarterstaff of Nad-Whacking.”
Sixteen “dungeons” (interior adventuring areas), five outdoor areas, one village, an alternate dimension, and some green dude’s one-room hovel.
A 69-page (PDF) manual

Sounds about right. I spent some time with Frayed Knights: TSoS-D in preparation for my interview with Jay, and I can confirm that it’s quality. This game is the first of a planned three-part series, and will run you $22.95 for the full version. Buy it here or nab the demo to see if it’s your speed.

New release: The Fall of Gods

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GeexGames writes in to announce the XBLIG release of The Fall of Gods (TFoG was evidently released for the PC on July 26, 2011).

I’m not going to bother summarizing TFoG’s generic story. (Playing the game, one gets the overwhelming sense that the developer didn’t care much about it, so why should we?) That said, TFoG uses a pretty neat implementation of the RPG Maker XP engine to produce an action RPG a la the old top-down Zeldas.

The free demo lets you play for up to 60 minutes in 8-minute increments, so feel free to give it a try and see if you like it. To buy the full game, you will need to pay (and I quote) “9.99 USD or 7.50 USD.” The link to buy the PC Version of the game takes you to a page where the price is $9.99, so I can only assume that the XBLIG version accounts for the alternate $7.50 pricing.

While you wait for the demo to download, here is the game’s official trailer:

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Telepath RPG: Servants of God Demo update, pre-order discount to end

GameBanshee reports:

there is only one week left to pre-order Telepath RPG: Servants of God, their Adobe Air-powered JRPG/WRPG crossbreed, for the initial price of $19.95 (it jumps $5 next week). Chances are that you won’t see it at its current price again until well after its release, so you may want to consider springing on it now.

However, if you want to know what you’re getting yourself into first, you should try your hand at the updated demo while perusing their web-based guide to ensure that you’re able to get it up and running, and running smoothly.

The game’s price will jump to $24.95 next Tuesday, so that should give you a solid 6 days to decide if you want to nab it at a discount.

Drox Operative announced

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Steven Peeler (known for fantasy action RPGs such as Din’s Curse) wrote to me last week to announce a new RPG by his company, Soldak Entertainment, this time set in space. He did a pretty thorough job describing the game, which description I will now reproduce for your reading pleasure:

Drox Operative is a starship action RPG with warring alien races, fierce space battles, a dynamic, evolving galaxy, and co-op multiplayer.

Eons ago the Drox ruled the galaxy through their mighty Operatives. These elite starship captains were trained to accomplish the impossible at whatever cost necessary. Whether employing stealth or brute force, they were always deadly. Using these Operatives, the Drox built a starlane system for quick travel amongst the stars, colonized and conquered millions of planets, and ruled the galaxy with an iron grip for over 100,000 years. Eventually realizing their Operators were a threat, they attempted to assassinate all of them. They failed. The following Galactic Civil War was devastating.

Thousands of years later, the Drox are extinct, but the secretive Drox Operative guild lives on. They have learned their lesson though: loyalty to any one race is foolish. They now work for whoever can pay. And pay they do! Empires might span hundreds of planets and thousands of ships, but when a critical task arises, they still turn to an Operative.

In the new space race, the major races are scouting, colonizing, and expanding, trying to take over the galaxy by diplomacy, technology, war, or any other means their scheming minds can contemplate.

As a Drox Operative it’s NOT your job to manage all of those annoying people, build thousands of buildings, play nice with your enemies, or balance the budget. It IS your job to pick the winning side and maybe even help them conquer the galaxy if you’re being nice, more importantly though is to rake in as many credits as possible, well that and build the coolest, deadliest ship in the known universe. Not many screw with an Operative captaining a Dreadnaught!

Drox Operative is scheduled to be released in the 1st quarter of 2012, however it will be released when it’s done.

I asked Peeler if he had any screenshots I could show; unfortunately, it seems the game isn’t yet at that stage of development. However, Peeler did give an interview to Space Game Junkie about the title earlier this month, which you can read here if you want to find out more details.

New release: Hero Mages

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Have you ever heard of Hero Mages before? I hadn’t. So as far as I’m concerned, this is a new release (even though it was apparently released, like, a year ago).

Hero Mages is a top-down perspective, turn-based tactics game by D20 Studios. At first glance, it looks a little bit like one of the battles from Telepath RPG: Servants of God, but with a three-unit cap and a more traditional fantasy setting. Upon closer examination, however, one can see that it strongly incorporates CCG elements that change the flow of the game considerably. Here is how the developers describe it:

Hero Mages is a game of strategy that plays just like a board game. A 13×11 grid represents the field of battle. A roll of dice determines the results of combat. A deck of cards represents the power of magic.

At the start of the game, each player is dealt a hand of seven cards and assumes command of a team of 3 heroes consisting of 1 Mage and 2 Guardians. These heroes are represented on the game board as animated models called “units”. The concept of the game is simple: players take turns moving and attacking with each of their units in an effort to eliminate all of the opposing heroes. The player with the last surviving team of heroes is victorious!

Units possess diverse statistics and abilities that give them distinct strategic advantages within the game. Your Mage is your most powerful unit. In addition to having four unlockable special abilities, mages are the only unit that can cast spells. Spells are potent magical abilities that allow you to empower your units with strength, unleash the fury of the elements upon your foes, manipulate the battlefield, and create additional units called “creatures”. Leverage the powers of your units and spells to develop creative ways to dominate the battlefield.

Here is a trailer:

You know, it’s funny: I thought I was so original when I started developing a game like this last year. But apparently I’m just one of two or three studios that had that idea. After years of getting almost no games like this, we are soon to have an embarrassment of options. That said, only Hero Mages is out right now. Since it’s free, why not pop over to their site and give the game a try?

Also: they just announced an Android version of the game that’s in progress. Here is a peek at that.

Interview with Jay Barnson

IndieRPGs.com recently had the pleasure of conducting an exclusive interview with Jay Barnson, whom you may know as the curator of the Rampant Games Blog (and the guy responsible for the occasional indie news round-up).

What you may not know, however, is that he is a veteran game developer working on a humorous first-person dungeon crawler called Frayed Knights. Jay likes writing words, and his responses below reflect that proclivity. Buckle in for some lengthy discussion of Frayed Knights and RPG design in general!

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Hi Jay! Why don’t you tell the readers a little about your background and what got you interested in making RPGs?

I am a refugee from the mainstream game development industry.  I learned a lot of my chops working at a company called SingleTrac, making games for the Sony Playstation. We had a reputation for making games that were really fun to play and did some amazing things for the time that really broke the mold, but didn’t always have the most fantastic graphics in the world. It’s a trend I’m pretty comfortable with as an indie.

I’ve always been a big fan of RPGs: pen-and-paper, computer RPGs, console RPGs, even MMORPGs (starting way back when they were text-based and “massively” meant over 30 users at a time). I made crappy little RPGs and adventure games to teach myself to program as a kid. When I was in mainstream development, we kept lobbying to make an RPG-like game, but were shot down at every turn. Even back then, few people in the games biz got to make the game they wanted to make, and it’s only gotten worse since then.

I went indie to make the kinds of games I wanted to make. That’s not been exclusively RPGs, but even when I started I was working towards that goal. The engine I wrote for Void War was originally planned to power a multiplayer RPG. I had a tiny, crappy dungeon and everything. It ended up using space ships instead.

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New release: Misfortune

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Michael Omer of LoadinGames writes to me with word of a new browser-based, first-person RPG called Misfortune. The creators summarize the game thusly:

Misfortune is a single player online RPG, in which you find yourself lost in a strange city. The story unfolds slowly through a series of short unique missions and strange events.

Two things I like about Misfortune: the art is quite nice, and you will frequently encounter text-based vignettes as you explore. You will seldom have more than one or two choices during these events, but some of them involve ability checks with branching results, which I appreciate.

The game uses a grid-based first-person perspective, and has a definite dungeon-crawling vibe to it even though you spend all of your time traversing city streets. The game runs in real time a la Dungeon Master, but you play only a single character.

Unfortunately, there is a noticeable lack of variety to the missions themselves, as well as the environments where they take place. Dungeons are generally fairly linear and simple to navigate, and lack any significant traps or puzzles. Moreover, you cannot return to areas once you’ve cleared them. I would not be surprised to learn that these missions and their associated dungeons are randomly generated. Combat literally plays itself out for you: the only interaction required of you is to click on each enemy once to target it. To put all this another way: there is no challenge to navigation, and battles are almost entirely devoid of tactical complexity. This might be a nice, gentle introduction to RPGs for the new player, but there really isn’t enough there to keep an old hand at the genre occupied.

Misfortune is free to play, though it relies on certain tricks common to Facebook games of the Farmville variety (e.g. limiting you to a certain number of missions per day and prompting you to post things to your friends’ walls when you finish quests or gain achievements). Even moreso than the last browser-based RPG I posted about, this feels like something Zynga might release. Whether that is a good thing or not, I leave to the reader’s judgment.

Phantasmaburbia announced

Banov has now officially announced his newest RPG project, Phantasmaburbia. “But Craig,” you say, “didn’t you post about this befo–” Yes. But now it’s official. More importantly, he’s released a new demo and a trailer for us to play/look at, respectively, which means that it’s news.

Here’s that trailer:

The Real Texas Announced

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Kitty Lambda Games has announced The Real Texas, an up-and-coming action adventure game in the Zelda style.

The Real Texas is an action adventure game that plays like a mashup of Zelda: Link to the Past and Ultima VI.

Sam, and [sic] ordinary Texas rancher, is on holiday in England when he falls into a blue portal and lands in The Strange Texas.

Sam finds himself in The Strange Texas, which is really just a sort-of satire of our own world. When you’re not shooting stuff you’ll be rooting through people’s houses, collecting items, and getting clues from NPCs.

Objects usually have a few purposes, and while there are definite solutions to the main quests in the game, there’s also lot of optional secret-hunting and easter eggs, if you’re into that kind of thing.

The game is planned for a Windows, Mac and Linux release. Here is a trailer!

 

The Real Texas – Official Trailer #2 HD from Calvin French on Vimeo.

New release: Bastion

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Word has reached my ear that well-received action RPG Bastion has been released on Steam for Windows.

And yeah, sure, I’m a little late with this one (somehow it passed under my radar), but look at it this way: the game has been patched repeatedly since its release, meaning that you’re going to have a better experience with it than all of those “I knew about it the day it came out” people anyway.

Here is the game’s trailer:

Also, here is a review by the venerable John Walker of Rock Paper Shotgun. His thoughts? “I recommend you don’t read this, but instead just go and buy Bastion and play it.” For this privilege of buying the game, the game’s makers demand a patronage of $14.99. My advice: grab the free demo, give it a try, and see if you like it.

Oh, also: you can check out the game’s soundtrack here and buy it for $10. It’s really good.

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