"In the 24th century, humanity is at war with a hostile alien race. Outnumbered a million to one, mankind's only hope of survival is the J.U.M.P. Corps. Its mission is to fight the alien menace hive by hive and planet by planet.

Hive Jump is one part Spelunky, one part XCOM, and all parts alien ass-kicking. You and your friends assume the role of JUMPERS, and blast your way through subterranean alien hives in run-and-gun 2D platforming action. Kill aliens, avoid traps, collect resources, and defeat the hive queen lurking at the bottom of the hive to complete the JUMP."

Hive Jump is a cool Kickstarter that is only a 26 hours away(at the time I wrote this) from completing so if you want in on the action you'd better hop to it. The art style is reminiscent of Altered Beast and worked really well with the score.

Hive Jump will drop when it's ready on PC, Mac, Linux and Wii U.

The Huffington Post created an interesting video mashup of Video Games in movies. The footage seems to be mostly comprised of 80's and 90's films.

Get psyched!

I haven't been too interesting in playing a modern Civilization game in some time. I enjoyed playing many hours of the original Civilization on DOS and had a really fun time with Civilization: Revolution but haven't found a love for a modern PC version. I have Civilization V and all the DLC waiting, but I haven't taken the plunge to actually try it out yet. That said, I saw a video for the new incarnation of Civ, Civilization: Beyond Earth that looks really intriguing. Taking a tip from Alpha Centauri, Civilization: Beyond Earth extends the scope of the typical Civilization game up the tech tree to sci-fi and other planets. Something sounds really exciting about a sci-fi Civilization game and Beyond Earth really looks like it delivers.

Civilization: Beyond Earth will drop October 24th on PC and later be ported to Mac and Linux.

A few months ago I posted that Cheerful Ghost was publishing it’s first game and today I am happy to introduce you to Starship Rubicon!

Starship Rubicon is a space shoot-em up that modernizes the physics and mechanics of Asteroids combined with the ship modification and roguelike elements of FTL.

In Starship Rubicon, Earth has been casually destroyed by a mysterious race of space-faring invertebrates. You are a fighter pilot whose cryopod has been collected by a possibly-insane AI, who has placed you in the unenviable position of being humanity’s savior. Shanghaied and alone, you must gather the remaining human survivors and traverse the surprising biodiversity of deep space to find a new home.

Here are a few in game screenshots to show off some of the gameplay:

http://imgur.com/a/Ggqey

Starship Rubicon is developed by Wick, a local Portland indie game developer. We have been in contact throughout this part of the game’s development cycle and I thought it would be interesting to ask him some questions about the game.

jdodson: Where did the inspiration for Starship Rubicon come from?

Wick: The core mechanics of shooting and moving date back to Asteroids. I looked very closely at FTL, Crypt of the Necrodancer, and Spelunky after deciding that the most efficient way for me to create replayable content was to go faux-rougelike. The AI’s sentence structure is ripped straight from Zero Wing. The ship modification system is probably closest to Megaman Battle Network, though I played probably about a dozen other games with vehicle modification (e.g. Mechwarrior, Gratuitous Space Battles, EV Nova) for comparison. There’s only so many mission types you can do with just moving and shooting, and Space Pirates and Zombies does pretty much all of them -- I tried to nab the most interesting ones.

I copied so much of the excellent weapon, ability, and enemy designs in Bastion that I should probably send Supergiant Games some royalties. Luftrausers showed me the ultimate form of juicy 2D flight controls. I pretty much copied the unlocking-content system from Lego Star Wars. I played around with overworld movement a la Nethack / JRPG overworlds and the terrain modification of battles from Age of Wonders, but the design ended up being too uncontrollable and I was forced to scrap it in favor of FTL node-movement.

I think there’s an Oscar Wilde quote that says something along the lines of: “If you steal from one person, you’re a plagiarist. If you steal from a hundred people, you’re well-educated.”

jdodson: Why did you decide to work with us on releasing Starship Rubicon?

Wick: After the 3-month Kickstarter development completed, I put the original Rubicon up for free and released the source code as per my campaign promises. However, turns out that putting up your game on a backwater personal tumblr (wickworks.tumblr.com) and then not doing anything to promote it means that literally (figuratively) nobody is going to see it. I’m pretty sure the only people to play Rubicon 1.0 were the original Kickstarter backers. I had a bunch of cool ideas on how to refine the game, but since the audience wasn’t there I had little motivation to implement them.

When Jon approached me about distributing it via Cheerful Ghost, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. I’d met Jon several times before and been left with a strikingly good impression- he seemed happy to get to know me and obviously cared about creating a good online space for games. Promotion is decidedly not my strong suit and selling the game meant that I would be able to afford to add tons of content to the existing engine. The terms Cheerful Ghost is offering is quite developer-friendly, which is delicious icing on the cake.

jdodson: To date, what has been the most challenging part of working on the game?

Wick: Programming challenges can take a lot of time, but they usually all have solutions and it can be fun puzzling them out. Ditto for graphics and sound, plus it’s satisfying to finally see them as animated finished products.

I think that, hands-down, I’m gonna go with design. It’s nebulous and scary. You have this immense freedom to put anything in the world on the screen. Tell any sort of story. You could say anything. Do you even have something worth saying? What is the experience you’re attempting to create? Is this the best possible way to create that experience?

There are constraints, of course, and I try to narrow down my options by being conscious of them. That makes it more mechanical, more solvable. But there’s always this spectre that there’s a better way to structure it, or an easy flourish that would bring the game to life. I feel like it becomes a reflection on yourself, that if you had a more interesting perspective or were a more witty person, then the game would show it.

jdodson: Lots of people want to get into Indie game development. Do you have any advice for people that want to start making games?

Wick: Start small. Wholeheartedly begin ten million different projects and finish none of them. It doesn’t matter that you never finished that 100+ hour RPG with a revolutionary plot, because you ended up learning A* pathfinding while putting together the starting town. Having your projects be in a whole bunch of different genres is useful because it’ll throw a wider array of challenges at you.

After you have at least one or two chops, do a game jam. They force you to finally scale down and design something doable given your skills. Plus it feels really nice to finally get something finished!

jdodson: What are you working on with Starship Rubicon right now?

Wick: I just spent about half the day revamping the first boss battle, which was too easy and boring -- it was just an enemy with an armoured front and a lot of health. There’s now three of them that you have to fight at the same time while in orbit around a black hole. It’s crazy how long something can take, how large an effect it can have locally, but how small it is in terms of the whole to-do list. One thing at a time...

I also finally, finally, finally figured out a use for a cuttlefish graphic I drew a year ago and am in love with.


Rubicon will launch this year for $9.99 on Windows, Mac and Linux. Right now you can pre-order it on Cheerful Ghost using the Humble Store Widget. Currently, the game will be distributed through The Humble Store & Desura. We will be running a Steam Greenlight campaign in the coming months and if we are accepted everyone that pre-orders the game through Cheerful Ghost using the Humble Widget will get a Steam copy.

www.starshiprubicon.com

Good audio fidelity is a really important part of how I enjoy music and video games. So important that this year I bought a new pair of Sennheisers to replace my starter pair. When I buy a pair of headphones they must do a few things.

1. Be over the ear and provide an amount of natural noise cancelation. I don't care for the headphones that contain active noise cancelation frequency technology as it kind of hurts my ears. I prefer a solid pair of over the ear headphones that naturally muffle the outside noise.


2. Sound great


3. Look pretty good


4. Feel comfortable over the ear for prolonged use


5. I'd rather not spend a zillion dollars

That all said, each pair i've got as been a bit better than the last and I think my next pair might be a set of sub $200 intro studio quality headphones. All that to say, I enjoy a bit richer sound from music and video games. As someone that has spent a minor amount of times perusing the world of audiophiles I have at least heard that many audio professionals think the Beats by Dre line of equipment is simply not worth the price. I heard a few songs on a pair in store and whereas I didn't prefer the sound to my Sennheisers I didn't think it was as bad as some claim.

Recently I saw a really great video by YouTube tech personality Marques Brownlee called "The Truth About Beats by Dre!" Not only is it interesting but Brownlee paints a really fair picture of what goes into making a good pair of headphones and how things turn out to be as expensive as they are in the store.

Been posting a flurry of things about some of the games I saw this year at PAX 2014. This isn't about any game specifically, but a place to dump all the pictures I took. They didn't all turn out as works of art, but they do highlight some of the cooler things I saw. One thing the pictures don't capture is how insane and crowded PAX Prime is. The crowds being the prime reason why I can really only handle the event for one day.

That said, it was fun attending and there really isn't anything quite like it. Click through my imgur album below and also realize the order of photos is reversed.

http://imgur.com/a/CdsO2

Risk of Rain is a great indie side scrolling rogue-like that features some really amazing visuals and gameplay. Saturday at PAX Prime my friends in the Portland Indie game community wanted to play a new version of the game and I went with them. They were showing off a build of the game they have yet to release featuring a new character, the Chef. The Chef is a Bender-esque robot that features a special ability that shoots out a bunch of cleavers in every direction. It looks like a cool addition to the game and everyone that played it seemed to really enjoy it.

I talked to some of the Risk of Rain developers about possible Linux and Mac ports as well as supporting the game in full gamepad mode(currently you need to have a mouse beside you to play it on your couch). Apparently my wildest dreams are coming true in that the huge update they were showing off at PAX would not only contain a Linux & Mac port but also full gamepad support. Risk of Rain is written in Game Maker and they decided to port it to the latest version. Apparently this allowed them to enhance the game and make it run a bit faster and bring these new features to the game.

I attended PAX Prime this year on Saturday and perused a ton of new Indie games. One game that caught my attention was Super Meat Boy Forever. I was alerted to it by Travis and saw it at the Indie Megabooth. I watched a few people play it and immediately realized how great this game will be. When I first heard that Team Meat was working on a possible mobile Meat Boy game I didn't think it would work. After watching Super Meat Boy Forever and playing it, I can say that unless they change the game from what I played to make it worse, this game will be great.

In a world of really lame endless runners, Super Meat Boy Forever propels the genre forward by creating richer gameplay. Meat Boy runs forward and you can do a few things by tapping. Tapping on the right hand side of the screen causes Meat Boy to jump and tapping on the left causes him to crouch. Whereas I didn't see anyone use the crouch, I can imagine it coming in useful at certain points. If Meat Boy comes in contact with a wall he automagically starts walking the other direction. If you tap the jump button after he jumps into a walk it causes a wall jump in the opposite direction. These really simple controls make for a really rich platformer that felt like a proper Meat Boy game.

Where as it wasn't me playing the game, I snapped the above YouTube footage at PAX and it shows off a bit of the gameplay. Super Meat Boy Forever isn't an endless runner but it features randomly generated levels and will ship with an endless mode to it. That said, according to Team Meat, Super Meat Boy Forever will feature a full story, 6 levels and double the boss fights of the original. But don't take my word for it, you can read the announcement yourself.

http://supermeatboy.com/158/Announcing_Super_Meat_Boy_Forever_/#b

What's included in patch 2.1.0? In short: Seasons, Greater Rifts, Leaderboards, The Cesspools, Treasure Rooms & balancing. Oh and...

"An additional Stash Tab is now available for all players with Reaper of Souls."

Awesome.

Read about all of the features of the Diablo III 2.1.0

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/15487814/patch-210-now-live-8-26-2014

Blizzard seems to really be enhancing the game for hardcore Diablo players to give them even more content than before. With the changes, are you planning on heading back to Sanctuary? As a special bonus to help get players back this week, Blizzard mentioned that..

"To celebrate the arrival of this major content update, all players who log into Diablo III this week on Windows or Mac will not only receive a +100% bonus to Gold Find, but all Treasure Goblin spawns in the game have been doubled! (As with our previous buff, please note that the Gold Find bonus will stack multiplicatively with existing bonuses including those provided by items and Paragon points.)"

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/15487813

GOG.com just launched an interesting new feature: DRM free films. Starting with a few movies like "Indie Game: The Movie", "Minecraft: The Story of Mojang", "Gamer Age" & "The Startup Kids." If you head over to GOG right now you can download two films for free "TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard" and "The Art of Playing."

Movies, coupled with Linux support and the upcoming GOG Galaxy, GOG is really becoming a first class digital game service. I hope the DRM free films movement takes off and we see more great content come to it.

http://www.gog.com/movies