Michael Akinde of MicaByte Systems writes in to announce Pirates and Traders, a pirate-themed trading game / RPG hybrid. Akinde states that P&T is modeled on the old PalmOS game Space Traders, but is set in the 17th century Caribbean and features attributes, skills, and menu-based combat.

The premise:

Sail the Caribbean in this turn-based strategy/role-playing game. Will you be peaceful trader, traveling from island to island with goods trying to exploit circumstances of high supply and demand? Or will you be a rapacious pirate, waging war on sea and on land against the enemies of your country. You decide!

Akinde describes the combat system like so:

Standard turn-based RPG combat, without the spatial element. It’s essentially similar to what you would have in a basic pen and paper RPG just a bit less complex – although it still has combat stances, some limited skill usage, and an injury system complete with maiming – got to make it possible for players to need eye patches, hooks, and peg legs.

Akinde states that he continues to update Pirates and Traders with new content regularly, and that he intends to add two more main storyline quests to the game. Pirates and Traders is currently available for Android devices on the Google Play store for free with ads, or for $4.99 without. The $4.99 “Gold” edition also “adds 1 new starting background (buccaneer), and adds 5 additional starting ships (pinnace, coastal barque, fluyt).”

Seattletek informs me that they have been working on a new RPG called Beasts and Blades. Having looked at a bunch of gameplay videos, it strikes me as something of a Western take on the modern Square jRPG formula.

The premise:

The game opens in a scene where a royal investigation team (five main characters) has been put together by Lord Crewe to investigate recent disappearances, including that of the High Mage’s daughter, in the Mereen Forest south of the main town of Elmere. The players find only an abandoned ritual camp, or what seems to be abandoned. In a series of strange events, an evil force reveals itself from a portal to another realm, and takes control of the team. Each player finds themselves alone, in an unfamiliar place, and must battle their way out to find the rest of the investigation team and find out who is behind all of this.

Seattletek have posted a video showing gameplay (though inexplicably, the first minute-and-a-half is just spent sitting on the title screen doing nothing–I’d skip past that part).

They also have a video showing off outdoor exploration with day and night cycles.

Seattletek have reportedly made a beta version of Beasts and Blades available, which you can grab right here. If you like where they’re going with this, you can help fund the project on Kickstarter.

Steven Peeler has emailed me to announce the release of a public demo for Soldak Entertainment’s upcoming space-based action RPG Drox Operative. (You can see me playing a beta version here, and failing terribly it.)

The demo is available for both Windows and Mac. It’s 120 MB, which is surprisingly small considering how much stuff the game has going on in it. Grab it here.

No word yet on when the full release is coming, but you can pre-order the game at a discount right now.

Delver has been in the pipeline for quite some time, but it hadn’t had a website, so I was hesitant to feature it. However, it now has one. In fact, not only does it have a website, it has also now been released as an open alpha. (What can I say–I’m late to the party here.)

Delver is a real-time, first person dungeon delver with permadeath and procedurally generated dungeons. Created by Priority Interrupt (i.e. Chad Cuddigan), Delver is described as a cross between a roguelike and Ultima Underworld, which probably isn’t a bad way of characterizing it. Put another way: Delver strikes me as a much slower-paced, lo-fi cousin to Tomes of Mephistopheles.

Cuddigan put out a video way back in April talking about the game and doing a playthrough. It’s an old build, but it gives a pretty decent idea of how Delver plays:

Delver is currently available as an open alpha on Android devices on Google Play for $1.99; you can also download the latest alpha build for Windows, Mac or Linux for free. Development continues–Cuddigan is currently working on supporting towns and outdoor areas with procedurally generated landscapes. No word yet on an estimated final release.

Last night was election night, which means that it was a pretty late night for me. Luckily, I still managed to finish up a pretty massive article I’d been working on concerning the uses and abuses of randomization as a way to create unpredictability in turn-based RPG combat systems. Here is a snippet:

A cunning opponent can be hamstrung by an overly simplistic combat system. Consider Tic-Tac-Toe, a deterministic game with (as games go) a tiny possibility space. Every turn past the first presents only a single optimal move. The only option for a clever opponent is to fight the player to a draw. (As Randall Munroe of XKCD puts it: “The only winning move is to play, perfectly, waiting for your opponent to make a mistake.”) Because the optimal counter to every move is predictable, there is no tension in fighting a clever opponent in a game of tic-tac-toe.

Chess and Go, by contrast, have massive possibility spaces. On any given turn, there are numerous viable moves; if there exists a single optimal move, it is obscured by the massive number of choices on offer and the unique state of the playing field. This renders the game unpredictable.

I choose to call this phenomenon second party uncertainty, since it concerns uncertainty about what the second party—the opponent—will do. Second party uncertainty differs fundamentally from the uncertainty imposed by randomized results, in that its tension arises not from whether the game will choose to nullify your commands, but from whether those commands are themselves good enough. To analogize to real-time games for a moment: second party uncertainty is the equivalent of playing a hotly contested match of Super Street Fighter IV and feeling out your opponent for weaknesses while trying desperately not to slip up. Randomized results are the equivalent of knowing that the game is going to occasionally not register your button presses. Both offer tension and unpredictability, but one is of a clearly superior variety.

You can read the full thing here.

After that last posting, I realized I’d need another one. Luckily, Awkward Pegasus Games was there to clumsily swoop in to the rescue! (Get it, because it’s an awkward pegasus? Never mind.) After Awkward Pegasus Games left, I noticed a new jRPG lying there. After.

…no, no, After is the name of the game. Come on people, get with it! And after you get with it, here is the premise for you to read:

Transported to a world that’s eerily perfect, an under-confident teen chases after a criminal who claims to know the way home; but when the teen discovers the truth about this perfect world he must decide the value of his own life before condemning another to a fate worse than death, or killing himself to save them.

Developer David Kuelz states that the game has a branching storyline with multiple different main quests and eight endings, which sounds pretty ambitious. Also, the game apparently has 10 different character classes and sub-classes, which also sounds fairly ambitious.

And if that wasn’t enough for you, here’s a trailer!

After is out now for Windows. The game has a free demo; after you’ve played it, you might want to play After. You can grab After right here after you pay $14.99. After.

Jonathan Dixon writes in to let me know that Modest Arcade has released Alcarys Complex, the The Secret of Mana-style action jRPG that we last covered back in June.

The premise:

Welcome to Elcaea, the world of the wicked.

In the place of heroes and villains are people – for the most part – doing what they can to take back their lives from those who would seek to control them for pleasure and profit.

Visit a dark world rotten with corruption in this story-driven 2D action RPG, gain experience by story progression and interaction with the citizens of Elcaea, rather than random acts of violence, and, most of all, do what it takes to survive in a world that would rather see you dead than free.

The world might rather see you dead, but I’m willing to bet that you’d rather see you a trailer:

…I apologize for the grammar in that last sentence. I’m trying here, folks.

Alcarys Complex is now available for Windows at a $20 price point, though you can get it for only $15 until the end of the week. There’s a free demo available so you can try it out before you purchase.

Though the game is currently Windows-only, Dixon informs me that a Mac port will be seeing release by the end of the year.

Remember the good old days of Game Boy jRPGs like Final Fantasy Legend III? One brave soul by the name of Jesse Shepherd has undertaken to make a jRPG as if for a Game Boy. His game: Soul Compass.

Soul Compass will be a combat-driven, difficult, short, turn-based RPG. No grind, no random encounters, no exploration. The game features an engaging story, linear progression, 15 fixed normal encounters, 6 bosses, and possibly bonus challenge levels.

Shepherd has no web site, and neither does Soul Compass. However, Shepherd has released a few videos showing his progress so far; here is the most recent of those:

Soul Compass is planned for release for Windows at some point in 2013. The developer tells me that he expects to sell it for no more than $5.

Since first checking out the oddball RPG / point-and-click adventure Dark Scavenger back in July, I’ve had a lot of questions percolating in the back of my mind. Thankfully, Alex Gold of developer Psydra Games was good enough to sit down and answer them.

Hey Alex! Thanks for taking the time to answer some questions.
First, tell me about Psydra Games.

Psydra Games was established by a team of industry professionals with a backlog of pent-up passion, looking for an outlet to unleash it. Sometimes in the industry, you’re not always given the luxury to choose what you get to work on, so a few of us decided to branch out on our own.

Developing our first game, though frustrating, was ultimately a liberating experience. Whether or not we will pursue another project remains to be seen.

The mechanics for Dark Scavenger are unusual, to say the least. What were you aiming for while designing the game’s systems?

Our goal with the mechanics was to craft them specifically to the needs of the narrative. As we knew art support was going to be limited, we intentionally designed the gameplay to accommodate.

(more…)

Greg “Banov” Lobanov has just released Phantasmaburbia, his jRPG opus about a suburban subdivision infested with ghosts and the small band of teenagers who must fight increasingly desperate odds to save it.

The year is 201X (twenty-X-teen) and Owl Creek, a small modern neighborhood, has suddenly been overrun with ghosts. Four local kids, wielding weapons found in their homes and assisted by spirits of their ancestors, go on a suburban adventure to fight them.

If you liked the minigame-filled Dubloon (Banov’s previous game), this one will be right up your alley. Like Dubloon, Phantasmaburbia is a highly streamlined experience with a lot of tricks up its sleeve to keep gameplay varied and interesting. However, Phantasmaburbia has the advantage of being much more polished and atmospheric than its predecessor.

Here’s the launch trailer, which starts off silly and eventually gets around to showing some of Phantasmaburbia’s cooler features:

You may recall that I recorded my first impressions playing the game here, if you want to get a slightly better sense of how Phantasmaburbia plays. Or better yet: grab the demo and try it for yourself!

Phantasmaburbia is currently $9.99 for launch, though Banov informs me that the price will be reverting to $14.99 in roughly two weeks’ time. Phantasmaburbia is Windows-only, though Banov has stated that a Mac port is on the way. Grab the full game here.