Toronto indie Asteroid Base’s Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime.
Taken as a snapshot of what’s hot in indie game development right now, a scan of GDC 2014’s Indie Megabooth paints a picture of a scene in which local multiplayer continues its resurgence, adding a personal touch to the more expected offbeat and experimental gameplay present this year.
The standout game in 2014 is undoubtedly Lovers In a Dangerous Spacetime, the IGF-nominated co-op platformer wrapped up inside a space shooter. Two local players must run around within a shocking neon pink spaceship, navigating the vessel with a central steering wheel while dashing between gun turrets and controls for the ship’s defenses, fending off the ship’s beautifully-drawn attackers. Progression through the game comes by moving across the huge map and assuming control of enemy bases. Unsure of a release date and currently around 50 per cent complete, the game’s developer Toronto indie Asteroid Base has a potential hit on its hands, nonetheless.
Nearby, Nevernaut Games’ Slashdash also attracted a lot of attention, a riotous four player capture the flag game whose simple moveset allows for both quick-fire thrills and a surprising amount of tactical play. Sentris is an abstract, hypnotic puzzle game about ‘playing’ music from Timbre Interactive, in which the player must fit coloured blocks into frames of the same colour by pushing them onto the field of play. Though it was difficult to actually do that without making a mess, perhaps that’s the point – building the stage’s soundscape is reward enough.
A duo of twinstick shooters took differing approaches to the genre. Australian indie Witch Beam’s Assault Android Cactus hosted co-operative action for up to four players, while Barkley 2 took the form and couched it within an adventure, with NPCs and dialogue.
Nevernaut Games’ Slashdash was a hit, attracting plenty of attention with its quickfire fourplayer capture the flag play.
Zanily-named studio SwackSoft softWorks WorkShop’s Burrito Galaxy was easily the oddest game on show at the Indie Megabooth. It’s a surreal, dialogue-heavy firstperson game in which the player moves along one grid square at a time with the WASD keys, turning jerkily 90 degrees with the Q and E keys. The only other commands are ‘interact’ and ‘switch item’, and it was difficult to ascertain what the player was meant to do – its typo-packed webspeak and deliberately terrible hand-scrawled graphics might just make this game too odd for its own good.
At least the familiar tactical combat in Behold Studios’ Chroma Squad could be understood, though its offbeat conceit isn’t quite so familiar – you are tasked with building a superteam to act out a Power Rangers-style Japanese action show, in which the stronger your team becomes, the bigger ratings it draws. KO-OP Mode’s iOS game Gnah! has a neon-tinged look reminiscent of its Indie Megabooth contemporary Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime, and has the look and feel of a brightly-coloured, alternate-universe The Room. Imagine the locked cabinets from Fireproof’s iPad hit replaced with gurning robot heads and you’ve got the gist – it sits somewhere between a puzzler and a plaything and it looks fantastic.
Like Gnah!, there were other games present with familiar mechanics but a dash of indie innovation. Cross-Product’s Airscape: The Fall Of Gravity is a simple platformer based on navigating stages by using shifts in the centre of gravity – think Super Mario Galaxy’s sidescrolling sections with an octopus instead of a portly plumber. Castle Pixel’s Rex Rocket was a sumptuously-animated Mega Man-meets-Metroidvania affair rendered in pixel art; another gear-gated sidescrolling adventure Tetropolis casts the player as a rejected Tetromino escaping a factory, who learns abilities along the way. The puzzle-platforming is wrapped up inside a neat meta-puzzle, as the game’s stages are also shaped like Tetris blocks. The player is able to zoom out and rearrange the stages to open up new routes, and the game’s realtime physics means that the water and crates react realistically when you rotate them.
KO-OP Mode’s Gnah! was like The Room, but with beatifully tactile robot heads instead of complex cabinets.
Dragon Army’s Robots Love Ice Cream asks the player to drive around the circumference of a cartoon planet in an ice cream van fending off the titular robots, while Sets And Settings’ Trestle is an arcade combat game which pits red team versus blue on a 3×3 grid. Two games also reflected the growing number of games with controlled randomisation (if such a thing exists): Terrible Posture Games’ Tower Of Guns is an exuberent, old-fashioned twitch firstperson shooter while Rocketcat Games’ next iOS title Wayward Souls takes the form of an action-adventure dungeon crawler with permadeath.
Though there were plenty of fresh ideas on show, it was Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime which was the most consistent crowdpuller. Its creator told us that it has been in a half-finished state for too long now; if the build on show at GDC is anything to go by, the finished game will certainly be something to look forward to.
The post Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime steals the show at GDC 2014′s Indie Megabooth appeared first on Edge Online.
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