Gaming Week! - Indie Titles

  Hey guys!  We're gonna go a bit gaming heavy this week.  I'm going to have a second Tail's Tale in here at some point, but for now, games!

  Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a massive gamer.  I've been playing since I was old enough to hold a controller.  I started on the NES, and eventually became one of the PC Gaming master race.  The entire reason I got into computers to begin with was so I could play Unreal Tournament, and it's been a steady progression since then.

  While I certainly enjoy some of the bigger titles, such as Call of Duty, Command and Conquer, and Team Fortress, I've always had a special love for indie titles.  I've always felt that because of how small the teams that make them are, they are always more willing to risk failure for the sake of innovation.

  Now, I don't mean innovation for the sake of innovation.  We've seen enough of that with Nintendo's special control schemes and forced Kinect support.  Innovating for the sake of being able to say, "We innovated!" is disingenuous.  That's coming up with an idea and looking for some way to force the game to use it.

  The innovation I'm talking about is more organic than that.  It's having a game play element, and coming up with an interesting and original way of implementing it.  One of the best, most recent examples I can think of is in Godus, from 22 Cans, Peter Molyneux's development studio.

  Godus is a game in the vein of Populus and Black and White.  It places you in the role of a God, watching over the land and it's people, yet giving you no direct control over those people.  And that's all fine and dandy, and not really what we're talking about.  What we are talking about is the landscape.

  The game gives you the ability to terraform the world, raising, lowering and dragging around terrain however you see fit.  The result is a massive, and very dynamic world for you to populate with your worshipers.  Now, most games with a dynamic world like this do it in one of two ways.  Either with 'voxels', or volumetric pixels, such as Minecraft, or with a transformable mesh.

  Both methods have their pros and cons.  With Voxels, you get a very modifiable world, but it's very blocky, lacking a lot of the polish we are accustomed to in this age of gaming.  With the mesh, you get a much smoother landscape, but often run into issues with things like structures or caves, since what you're dealing with is essentially a piece of paper.

  Godus chose to do something a bit different, that I can't recall having seen before.  The world is made up of layers.  I would guess that each layer is about a meter thick.  You can remove layers, add layers, or drag around the boundaries, transforming the world however you desire.  It's something completely new, and I love it.

  This is the type of things we see from indie games.  From the floating islands and RTS game play of Castle Story, to the triple pane rhythm game styling of Sequence, indie studios simply push further to make their game play interesting.

  And, with the advance of services such as Kickstarter and Steam's Early Access, opportunities for these small studios to deliver excellence are only growing in number.  I can think of a half dozen different methods right off the top of my head, and I'm certain that there are more beyond that.  And that's just on PC.

  Of course, using something like Kickstarter to launch your game comes with it's own set of issues.  And we'll talk about that tomorrow!  See you then!