Category: Indie

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This racing game in space is made by an Indie developer and can be played in the browser.

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The idea is to stay on the road with your car. Drive off it and you are wasted. While driving it counts how many miles you have been driving for. You steer with your mouse by moving it over the screen in the right directions. Further away from the car with the mouse cursor means faster movement, closer by your car it will slow down.

The car will never stop, so it needs to drive on all the time. The driving game called Hotline is accompanied by funky bassy music, which changes (and slows down) when you drive off the road.

To play this game, you will need to use a browser that supports HTML 5 as it has been programmed for this.

Every now and then the road and all graphics of space start to blink and you easily drive off the road if you don’t watch it carefully. This is probably done to add some extra difficulty.

Rezoner has made everything himself, graphics, music composed using special software and his keyboard and the programming on HTML 5 Canvas using Javascript.

Recently I heard that Chrome, made by Google, will soon stop support for Flash. This means that if you create games for in the browser, you are best off by creating them in the all-integrated HTML 5. That’s exactly what Rezoner here has done.

Beautiful graphics, fantasticly smooth gameplay, a simple game but rather addicting gameplay, either because of the music or because you want to get more miles scored!

Check it out:
http://rezoner.net/labs/hotlinetrail/ (HTML 5)

Game on!

Steven

(My highscore sofar?: 80,5miles)

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Today I was browsing the internet and by my surprise I came across this interesting looking game called CrossCode.

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Currently you can play their tech demo but they plan to make a full fledged game out of this and I can safely say I was pleasantly surprised.

Normally I don’t give web-based games much thought, since they are fun for a few minutes, but this really caught my attention.

Cross Code puts you in the role of a blue haired girl who can summon energy balls and throw them at anything she wants. You have to jump across platforms, activate switches, destroy robots and use your brain to solve the many puzzles. The atmosphere in the game is fantastic! The game looks like a classic 2D platformer from the 90s era. That what got me surprised was the level of detail, the platforming, the physics and the music – everything is well put together.

Currently you can play only a tech demo, so don’t expect the game to be long, but nonetheless has it all the elements that make a platformer really fun.

The game is programmed in Javascript using the HTML 5 canvas. The game will work on any platform and browser that supports HTML5 and if everything goes well they will make also a WiiU version.

Radical Fish Games are the developers behind this amazing browser based game.

So why not check it out and show your support? I for one can’t wait for this amazing game to be finished.

Game on

The Game mistress

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For this article I had to create a new category on our website. I believe I have written about several indie games and I am sure there is lots of it coming in the future, so a missing category was born: Indie. Today I take a look at an oldy, basicly it’s a retro by now. “On a rainy day” was made during a school project by Shalin Shodnan in 2005 together with a team of 3 others. It’s a typical experimental (art) gameplay game.

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In “on a rainy day” the player has to protect paper boats crossing over water from the left of the screen to the right of the screen by protecting them from the rain. In the middle of the screen is the beginning of a tree growing. This tree exists of branches in the form of arms with hands. Each hand can hold on to another arm with hand or an umbrella.

Making the branches longer, you can protect more of the total area where the boats have to float past. Each hand holding another hand will split in two directions, making it more directional. Also the more branches added, the heavier the branch becomes and will hang more over to the other side.

An already equipped umbrella can be made undone by right clicking the umbrella. Then you can grab another arm with hand or a new umbrella.
When a certain amount of white boats have reached the other side, a new set of hands and umbrella’s is being released from the sky and dropped into the water ready for the taking.

There are red boats among the white ones that can either go really slow or really fast. These boats are bonus boats and reward you with a lot of arms with hands and umbrella’s at once as a thank you for a safe journey.

To add to the experience, a catchy jazzy tune plays in the background and the rain ofcourse makes its own noise, there’s even a different between the noise of rain on the water or rain on the umbrella. So it’s amazing how even on a simple game like this one, these details have been included as well.

For a game so simple, yet so much fun and created in just 10 days in OpenGL and C++ it is simply amazing!

What I didn’t figure out (but for that I am Steven and not The Game Mistress) was the actual goal of the game, apart from bringing boats to the other side. The actual goal is to reach the top of the screen. I didn’t figure that out until I read the postmortem document on Shalin Shodnan’s own website. And now that I was uploading screenshots after writing my article I figured I had also not read this instruction as the first line of the instructions screen. Ahem!

If you feel like you want to relax a bit and also play this funny game, you can take a look at the Experimental Gameplay Project Community and download it from there.
http://experimentalgameplay.com/blog/games/ under Original EGP 1.0 Games (bottom of the page)

There are 49 other games from that same 2005 project. Perhaps I will review one of those aswell.

Game on!

Steven