Despite still not having a job and my graduation ceremony soon, it has been a packed week. Full, mostly, of indie games. I tend to collect them in my room, filling the floor and tripping me up in the night when I go to the bathroom.

Illustrations

I talk about this quite a lot, but I have still been keeping up with my daily design blog. It has become soul crushing and something of a chore at times but passing day #200 makes me feel like I accomplished something. There have been quite a few lately, so I thought I'd post some of them here. Only 2 game related ones for now. I have been trying to cut down. Some Journey fan art that was retweeted by thatgamecompany, and a design concept for a T-Shirt.

Higher resolution versions are on the blog, and let me know what you think. I love reading comments. I do so much of this stuff and I often hear nothing back from anyone, good or bad.

Here are some other designs from the past month or so, including a harry potter poster and my favourite drink in the world: tea.

Gallery

Half Life

I have owned all of the half life games for quite a few years. Half Life 1 is not for me. I have never enjoyed pre-2000 first person shooters. I will not attribute the floaty control and style of shooting to it being dated, it just doesn't suit me. First person platforming sucks. I can't hold it against Half Life 1 in the same way as Duke Nukem Forever. It was released in 1998, not 2011. It does feel dated in very arbitrary ways but

So far the lack of explicit narrative is really killing my desire to finish it, the guns aren't much fun to shoot, the loose and floaty control really hinders the platforming, and I suck at the game so I fall to my death and get killed by enemies a lot. The worst thing of all is the lack of autosave. I have lost hours of progress because the game puts it on me to save all the time. I take it for granted that games checkpoint themselves so frequently. Autosave is a very welcome trend, and I look forward to not having to quicksave every 30 seconds after I finish this game.

I can't blame Half Life for everything I don't like about it. A game from before a time when I started to really enjoy and appreciate them. A lot of the criticisms against it most likely apply to games I did enjoy from the same era, but I have no nostalgia, no appreciation, no love for the half life series. If I had played it 13 years ago I might feel differently, but I didn't.

I will finish it though, and move on to the rest of the games.

Indie Madness

Through Steam sales and Xbox Live I have picked up a lot more indie games than I already owned and didn't play.

Bastion

Starting the show with a show stopper. I first saw this game on Building the Bastion, as I'm sure a lot of people did. Jen Zee's artwork is the first thing that captured my attention. As a designer, I can only hope to ever come close to anything she created for Bastion. Unfortunately, the bright, colourful, cartoony nature of the art style gets put in the 'indie camp', some people even going as far to dismiss this 2D illustrated style of a game as being easier to produce.

The problem I have with a lot of modern big budget games is that they fail to have a unique visual identity, like a brand would. That is why the internet is ablaze with comments about games feeling 'generic'. Indie games by nature have to possess unique and attractive art styles to stand out from bigger budget games and their contemporaries. That doesn't mean big budget games can't do the same. I am not talking about 'realism' or realistic art styles. That can still be used with a visual identity or brand. Mass Effect 2 did it successfully, I feel, over it's predecessor.

Back to Bastion, I am having a great time with it. Everything about it feels very well put together and hand crafted. No area feels copy and pasted, the combat is fairly dynamic and they mix up the enemy types and spawns to make encounters feel different. My favourite thing so far is the song 'The Singer', well, sings when you find her. It is beautiful, and I hope I can own it some day.

The passive, almost ambient nature of the story works in it's favour and ends up being much more powerful than leading the player through cutscenes. Narration plays an important role in doing this, and Bastion has shown me the most impressive use so far. I could listen to The Stranger's voice all day, and the game obliges by having him convey the story as well as dynamically comment on events and gameplay behaviour.

Ms Splosion Man

I haven't played too much of this so far, too many games. It feels very much like Splosion Man, which is great. Already frustrating, which is how I felt about the first. I like that though. Much better visuals than the first, with varied backgrounds and loading screens. I still hate Twisted Pixel's awful copy and paste menus. UI is important people. It won't cut sales, so is often neglected. Just make a nice menu, please?

Cthulhu Saves the World

I bought this along with Breath of Death VII. Comedy, when it isn't funny to a particular person, can be offensive. People get angry about comedians and TV shows that do not appeal to them. The particular style of comedy in Cthulhu is laid back enough that this isn't as much of an issue. I didn't have to laugh out loud every time they broke the 4th wall or made a weird RPG convention joke, but it adds a lot of flavour and lightheartedness to an all too serious genre.

There is a quicklook up on the site for you to see for yourself, but I highly recommend it to anyone curious. For the low, low price you can hardly go wrong. Having finished it this week the game is a decent length. It goes on a bit too long but that may have been my eagerness to finish the game. The gameplay doesn't change, you just get more powerful. The challenge only ramps up near the end, but the challenge isn't the reason to play this. The story, dialogue and characters are what makes this game special. They wrote custom dialogue for each individual set of drawers and bookcase in the game! That is attention to detail, beyond what I would expect.

Swords & Soldiers HD

I don't know why I bought this, but I am glad I did. A side scrolling 2D RTS is not something I have ever encountered before. They streamline a lot of RTS concepts such as unit and base building, as well as economy. Instead of buildings everything built works like an upgrade, you just select it from a menu and after the 'build time' you can start unit production.

What I didn't realise, however, is that units are entirely automated. Once you have built a unit they march from left to right and attack anything they bump in to. To compensate for the automated nature of the combat they give you the ability to use a large variety of magical abilities to aid your units and kill the enemy. Another indie game with a great artstyle as well. It is a shame that a lot of people dismiss these as glorified flash games, having been spoiled by free games created by extremely talented developers who go on to make these kind of indie games.

I also played and finished (some) more indie titles such as The Maw, Bit.Trip Beat and Bit.Trip Runner, Atom Zombie Smasher, and Amnesia: Dark Descent.

That's it for this blog. Hope somebody reads it, took way too long to type. See you all next time.