Your Source for News and Reviews of Oklahoma's Games
Are you looking for a fun new way to shoot the breeze with your friends? Something that doesn’t take too much of your time or require long boring tutorials while still retaining all the fun possible? Then you should give BitBout by Okay Benji a try.
BitBout was made during itch.io’s 64×64 Jam. That means, the games had to be playable with only a viewing area of 64×64 pixels. BitBout is based on a prototype developed by Benji Kay and expanded on with the help of artist Adam Bing.
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Last time I wrote about The Curse of the Crescent Isle, I had only played a bit of it at Super! BitCon. I wasn’t very good at playing it at the time, but thanks to a free copy of the game given to me by Adam Mowery, I have had the time to get better at it.
First up, this game has some really great graphics. It is a massive improvement over its original release on XBLIG. The art and animations are very well done and the sprites and environments meld seamlessly together. If this were the late 90s you would be forgiven if you mistook the game for an official SNES game. The art style is consistent and very nice to look at.
Leave a CommentLast time we left Totally Awesome Games, they had ended their campaign to fund Duel of Heroes unsuccessfully. That was more than a year ago. Since then, we haven’t heard much.
Just a few weeks ago, they launched a Facebook page launching one of their latest games, Hipster Animal Flip. HAF is a mobile game that has the potential to eat much of your time.
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Winter Stories Studio is a young up and coming game development studio here in Oklahoma. They have already created and released two games for mobile devices. They are currently working on their third game as you read this. I had recently met one of the game developers behind this studio and decided to take a closer look at one of their games.
Pull! is a skeet shooting game that is available for Android devices. It comes in two versions, a free ad supported version, which is the one I played, and an ad-free version for $0.99. Both version are the same except for the ads. The ads in the free version are minimal and not really intrusive. So don’t worry about that.
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Every once in a while, I find a game from a game developer that I did not know about before. Often I find these guys through sites like Twitter and Facebook because those in the Oklahoma game development community find and share them. So I have come to love those tools for the power they have in bringing fresh games into my sights.
One recent game developer I found is F5 Games. These game developers, based in Tulsa, have released a handful of iPhone and Android games over the last year. So I took a look at the games and found myself playing a lot of Blox Blast. Blox Blast was released in October 2013, and is available for free on both the iPhone and Android app stores.
For those familiar with puzzle matching games, you will be able to figure out this game quite easily. The goal is to build up your score by building blocks of at least 2×2 to clear them. You do this by sliding rows and columns around the board. When you create a block, it flashes, gives you points and clears out. Then more blocks fall in its place. Think of it like playing a Rubik’s Cube but as matching puzzle game.
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Game Developer Josh Maggard is no stranger to game jams. As of this last Ludum Dare, he has participated in four of them. We wrote about his last one, Time War, last year after the jam ended. That game was pretty fun, but brutally hard, at least for me. For his latest entry, Josh has held true to the fun part while keeping the brutal difficulty toned down a bit.
His latest Ludum Dare game is called Space driller. The theme for the jam was “under the surface” and he held true to that theme quite well. Space Driller stars a space miner who had been separated from his team and lost in a massive system of caves and tunnels. Armed with only his trusty drill, this miner must find the path out of the tunnel and back to freedom.
It was made over a 72 hour period with Josh acting as game designer and programmer and working with two others, Dan Konves, artist and designer, and Tyler Collins, music and sound effects. This small team of developers created a great looking and sounding game. The music and sound effects really pulled you into this dark and lonely cave while the visuals brought up levels of nostalgia for adventure platforming game of old. As many of the Ludum Dare commenters have stated, this game’s roots in Metroidvania style games are firmly planted and growing well.
Leave a CommentAs promised, From Soy Sauce has launch US based purchasing for Spheroid. In the latest, and according to the video, the last video update of…
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Back in November, we wrote about the ending of Spheroid’s crowdfunding campaign and what From Soy Sauce plans to do to finish the game. They promised to complete the game and posted regular updates as well. So it is pretty exciting to see that the game has finally been released, at least for Japanese gamers at the moment.
In a video update, From Soy Sauce shows off the trailer for the completed game and provides a link to where you can buy Spheroid. They are promising an English link soon.
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Continuing on their quest to make 12 games in 12 months, Divine Knight Gaming released the second game in the series. For February, they released Graveyard Defense, a simple actiony game taking place in a graveyard.
The game plays with the player, portrayed by a paladin type soldier, standing among four graves from which endless waves of undead spawn. The player must then use the arrow keys on their keyboard to battle them. Eventually the player will be overwhelmed by the monsters and they will die.
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It’s always possible for any gamer to find their flow, that inner state that lulls them into a meditative-like trance as they play. But this is often a side-product they discover inside the hurricane of gameplay, displays, and control functions rather than it being an intentional creation of the game’s design. Yet instead of having the player discover or carve out a meditative state within the game, programmer and game developer Kevin Harris encourages and facilitates one by designed intent.
The browser based game, Saga, Crushed was his recent entry for this past January’s Global Game Jam and Candy Jam. As part of the 2014 Global Game Jam’s theme of “we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are”, it was created from beginning to end across three days and inside the span of 48 hours. Meanwhile, as part of Candy Jam it was entered among a larger game development community protest against the considered abusive trademark practices recently performed by the game development company King.
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