The Arkh Project is a new 3D action RPG currently in the early stages of development “by individual people who would like to see more representation for the underrepresented.” Specifically, these anonymous individuals are making the game for the primary purpose of creating an RPG with “queer people and people of color as main characters.”

In all honesty, while I would quite like to see minorities receive more representation in RPGs (to say nothing of games generally), this actually made me cringe a little. An RPG needs to have an interesting story, interesting mechanics, or (ideally) both in order to be compelling. “My RPG is going to have an all-minority cast” really isn’t enough.

Luckily, after digging around their site a little, I discovered that The Arkh Project does have a plot premise that sounds like it could actually be quite interesting if handled well:

Follow the story of a deity bored with life amongst the gods, who leaves to find a purpose in life and seek out a lost love. Reincarnate your deity onto numerous worlds, live through the lives of others and gain life experience…but watch your God Energy, you need a lot of it to continue your astral journey.

Fight monsters only you can see, sometimes around very particular civilians who refuse to get the heck out of your way. Collect world-specific plants to enhance your healing items, and acquire numerous different kinds of weapons and scrolls from all different cultures.

The game draws inspiration from real mythos, from all sorts of different cultures, and each world reflects the culture it draws from.

Unfortunately, I can’t find any mention on the site of what sort of mechanics the game is going to have, and the developers are keeping tight-lipped, unwilling to divulge anything more specific than “It will, however, have a focus on the narrative/story, and be an action-RPG.”

The game is currently very early in development–as in, concept art stage. The devs say that more information will be made available at the end of the month, so if the project interests you, you may want to check in on their website in a couple of weeks.

Anne Mönkkönen of Instant Kingdom writes in to report the release of a 5-10 hour demo for top-down action RPG Driftmoon. You can download the demo here, and read more about the game here.

Jesse Zoeller, creator of the original first-person dungeon delver Darklight Dungeon, has released a sequel by the name of Darklight Dungeon Eternity. Looking at the feature list, I get the feeling that the new adjective is meant to describe how long it takes to beat the game:

Explore a vast dungeon totaling 50 floors. Defeat over 200 unique types of monsters as you solve puzzles, riddles and the mystery of DarkLight Dungeon. At your disposal is; 120 magic spells, over 600 items, 24 skills and many unique combat feats.

With three difficulty levels and 60+ hours of gameplay on normal difficulty alone, there is plenty to explore in DarkLight Dungeon Eternity!

A demo (allegedly with a whopping 10 hours of gameplay) is available here, but if you loved the original and have faith in the quality of this one, you can take a leap and simply snatch up the full game for an entirely reasonable $9.95 right here. Zoeller never released a proper trailer, unfortunately, but he did make a gameplay video, which you can have a gander at below:

Cannon Technologies writes in to announce the development of a game called Fabula Divina for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Fabula Divina is a 2D tile-based affair modeled on the classic Ultima titles of yore. (So far it reminds me mostly of Ultima V, but it’s too early in development for me to draw any sort of firm conclusions.)

They offer the following blurb to describe what they’re shooting for, though mostly it just kind of makes a vague appeal to nostalgia:

You can get the latest public alpha for free on this page of the Fabula Divina website and test drive the game yourself. Be warned: it’s still in that early stage of development where core systems are still being added and refined, so there isn’t too much to see yet content-wise. The developer accepts Paypal donations, which you may contribute if you feel the urge to see this project come to fruition.

Oddball, creator of one of the two ubiquitous roguelike graphics sets from the TIGSource Assemblee competition, has finally come out with a roguelike of his very own by the name of Hack, Slash, Loot. He describes it thusly:

Hack, Slash, Loot(HSL) is a single-player turn-based dungeon crawler for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Take control of a lone hero and explore sprawling dungeons, fight dangerous monsters, and most importantly, plunder valuable treasures.

It isn’t at all clear from that bare-bones description exactly what it is that sets HSL apart from the roughly gagillion-and-a-half other roguelikes coming out right now. Luckily, Adam Smith of Rock Paper Shotgun has taken care of that for us. According to him, the thing that makes HSL unique is the game’s simplicity:

It may well be the simplest roguelike I’ve ever played, with actual visual approximations of the things you’re looting, hacking and slashing, a point and click interface, and no inventory to manage. There’s equipment in abundance, but it’s a case of choosing what you want and leaving the rest on a dank floor somewhere.

Oh, and there’s no leveling up; you can only improve by getting better equipment. Which probably makes this not-an-RPG. But my guess is that most people will still think of it as a proper roguelike, so I’ll allow it.

Have a computer that runs Windows, MacOS or Linux? (I certainly hope so.) Have $10? (I hope that’s so, too.) Want to buy this game? (Oddball probably hopes so.) It can be yours for the price of $10. Buy it here, or grab the demo (W/M/L) for a substantially cheaper $0. Finally, as is our custom, we present you with a trailer so you can see what you’re getting yourself into:

Mysterious Castle is an isometric, graphical tactics roguelike by Jeremy Jurksztowicz. There has been a developer’s log for this game for months, but last I checked, the game was exclusive to iOS, and I lost track of it. Well, no more of that! The game is now available in the app store, as well as for Mac OS and Windows. Here’s the premise:

Peace, justice, honor. Society is at a pinnacle undreamt of by mankind of old. The king reigns over dozens of tribes peacefully, justly, honorably. Grievances are few, and dealt with swiftly and openly. Everyone is content, the people love their king, the nobles serve the people, and society advances…

Such is the tale told to naive children, the illusion that keeps the poor common folk from seeing the horrible reality. Their world is crumbling. A corrupt nobility props up a vain and cruel king, who in turn sends young soldiers to vicious pointless wars. Every corner of the kingdom is aflame, the great royal army streched thin, facing enemies that fight like ghosts. The tribes of the kobolds, elves and orcs see the kingdom tottering, failing under it’s own weight, and sieze their chance at vengeance.

Amidst the chaos, people whisper rumors. Rumors of conspiring cabals, of a great ‘plan’, of a foreign invasion. Some say that a war is coming, some say that a revolution is arising. But the wise know better. Sages and holy seers look at the wheeling stars in their slow precession and see that the great cosmic clock will soon strike midnight. The artifacts of the ancient ones hum and resonate in anticipation of… of something.

In this desperate landscape, there is a place, a forgotten forest with it’s forgotten people. From this lost corner of the world, strange broken rumors have drifted out, hardened scholars have returned changed into blathering prophets. They speak of ancient stones, magic beyond the comprehension of mortals, and of a mysterious castle.

Jeremy is currently developing the game for iOS, OSX, Windows and Linux, with an iPad port planned for the future. The game is $2.99 in the Apple App Store and free for other platforms. Jeremy has stated that he plans to move the free version to a pay-what-you-want model with a minimum payment of $0. Here’s a trailer showing off the game:

IndieRPGs.com recently sat down with Greg Lobanov (a.k.a. “Banov”), creator of the innovative pirate-themed jRPG Dubloon, for a chat about his latest project, Phantasmaburbia. We also talk about RPG pricing and his experience so far with transitioning from free games to commercial work.

(more…)

Developer Kot-in-Action Creative Artel has announced the development of Tomes of Mephistopheles, a first-person action RPG with randomly generated dungeons and a quest for a MacGuffin hidden therein. It’s first-person action roguelike, basically (insofar as the category “roguelike” can encompass something first-person, real-time, and not grid-based).

The developers give me this description of ToM:

Basically Tomes of Mephistopheles takes place in a fantasy world, where player is set to search for the ancient books written by the Devil himself. The Tomes grant enormous power to its beholder and have been searched for by various characters. Player has to find those Tomes and destroy them.

So, in short, it’s an adventure with a lot of magic, spell casting, cold steel combat, hordes of demons to fight against in virtually endless randomly generated multi-floor dungeons. We are still experimenting with outdoor areas, but most likely we will have virtually endless (but for practicality sake just vast) outdoor areas with towns and villages, where player can trade his(her) loot and gear.

Single-player / Co-op is what we are aiming for.

Well! That certainly sounds ambitious, doesn’t it? Below, you can check out an early teaser trailer, as well as a video showing off a neat bomb-based tunneling mechanic:

Wes Falls of Secret Arts Games writes in to announce the development of Valor Seed, a retro jRPG designed to mimic the sound and appearance of an NES game. Wes reports that he’s managed to get the likes of Alexander O. Smith and Sean Beeson working on the game with him, which is fairly impressive for an RPG Maker project like this. His summary of the game follows:

Valor Seed is an NES retro-clone made to feel, look, and sound like an RPG made for that system.  It uses the NES’s color palette for graphics, and sound chip for music and effects.  Unlike actual NES-era RPG’s, Valor Seed will sport modern game play elements such as dialog, item creation, multiple endings, and a very flexible battle system.

The setting of Valor Seed places Pharamonde in a Dark Age following its repulsion of a foreign Crusade. The Crusade ended with the deaths of all of its heroic personalities. There was no victory for anyone involved, there was simply a return to the state of being before it all began with one significant difference: there was nobody to believe in, anymore. No King, no Roland the Hero. This is how The Calm snuck in. The Crusade was the product of men reaching too far for what they did not need. Therefore, if no men reach, no more Crusades will come. Blacksmiths quenched their forges, coopers left their barrels half-assembled, and everywhere the people cast away their gold and silver coins for their then pointlessness. Each town became an island in the wilderness, surviving all on their own. In the capital, the Heart of Pharamonde, the addle-minded Prince ignored the duties of the Royal Throne, Siege Pharamonde. With no strong Will guiding the Heart of Pharamonde, the land and its people stagnated.

Wes reports that they’ve just jumped the last hurdle in creating the battle system, and are now focused on designing windows (of the GUI variety, I gather) and the item crafting system. A free version of the game, made in RPG Maker XP, is due for release sometime late this year; a commercial version created with XNA is planned for the future release this fall.

There is no official trailer for Valor Seed yet, but you can have a look at some in-progress screenshots of the game below:

Another year, another Independent Games Festival; another Independent Games Festival, another group of finalists; another group of finalists, another army of aggrieved developers who didn’t make the cut. There has arisen something of a tradition among indie developers of complaining about the Independent Games Festival. There are reasons for that. For one thing, the stakes are high. With thousands of dollars and widespread publicity on the line, a strong showing in the IGF can make all the difference for an indie developer. More than that, it’s very expensive to enter, so people want to feel like their entries have been given a fair shake. Oftentimes they don’t feel that way, which leads to grousing and drama.

I have never felt the urge to submit anything to the IGF myself, and as such, I’ve ever had any personal stake in the fairness of IGF proceedings. However, it certainly hasn’t escaped my notice that, year after year, the IGF conspicuously passes over RPG entrants–and now that I run this site, I feel that my role as an advocate for indie RPGs requires me to explore the issue.

(more…)