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Xbox LIVE Indie Games - The November 2010 Thread

D

Deleted member 1235

Unconfirmed Member
Joshery said:
Forward from October thread (thanks toythatkills):

As we've done with our past two games (Dreams of Witchtown, and Zombie Sniper HD) we want to throw some love to the best indie game player community around here on NeoGAF. Here are some free tokens for Elite Pinball HD which released yesterday 11/4/2010:

Q4Q6T-8Y9MK-R9HRT-28DTG-WJDG8
MPPYX-XY27M-DDHK7-VR7JX-WF2KY
DTQCW-HYMX6-RKWY6-FVD84-T9JX3
BWB46-BQYK9-TRQBK-MRQBJ-CBRDT
B9642-FWJMV-XT2XH-GFVYC-B8DHJ

Link to purchase: http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Elite-Pinball-HD/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d802585506c8

As you appear to be a developer, are you familiar why these games are simply not available to europe AT ALL?

God it's mind numbingly stupid that microsoft does this.

I would have given you 80 of my points. sorry dude.
 
catfish said:
As you appear to be a developer, are you familiar why these games are simply not available to europe AT ALL?

God it's mind numbingly stupid that microsoft does this.

I would have given you 80 of my points. sorry dude.

They are available in Europe, but only in a few countries.

Full list of Indie Game supported regions: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States.

If you were to make a gamertag for one of those regions and bought import MS points from there, it should work. Not ideal, but workable.
 
They are available in Europe, just set up a UK gamertag.

You can use the Microsoft points you buy in whatever country you live in on said UK gamertag as well, to allow you to buy the games.

EDIT: I lose!
 
Just noticed that when you scroll up to Games and Demos, it highlights Indie Games and then goes back to the start of the list. Thought that was a glitch but it did it again when I went back. That's kinda cool, unless it is a glitch and will be fixed soon.

Tempura of the Dead is brilliant. More later when I've had time to get better, but it looks and sounds awesome, and is really funny. Also, the president is Lupin. You have to shoot zombies and juggle their heads to save their souls. Yeah, more later.

ECHOES+ had a price cut to 80pts, I think. Get it.
 
Right, The TEMPURA of the DEAD. You play as either President Obama Tompson who looks remarkably like (a black) Lupin at times, or a samurai who looks like a cliché samurai type. Tompson has a gun and can attack from a distance, but his attacks are weak. It's also harder to juggle zombie heads. Yeah, juggle zombie heads. The samurai uses his sword which is stronger and easier to juggle with, but can only attack at close range, clearly. It's a sword. You can switch between the two at any time by pressing Y.

You have to save the zombies' souls, or they'll just keep on a-coming. You do this by detaching the head from the body, and then juggling it a few times. This is explained to hilarious effect in the opening cut-scene. If you manage it, you'll go into Tempura Feaver mode, where you only need to hit every head once to save it. Miss a head though, and TF mode stops. The more souls you save, the higher a counter gets which lets you buy items from a shop later on.

It plays brilliantly, and the characters are different enough that they both have their advantages. Tompson can't jump as high, etc. It looks amazing, go see the screenshots on the dashboard, and just look how 8-bit it is. You know what that means, right? Fucking awesome chiptunes. It sounds wonderful.

The map screen implies that there are 24 levels to fight your way through which is loads, I haven't even beaten the first one yet because I keep doing silly things.

One of the easiest buys ever.
 

sciplore

Member
Tempura of the Dead is out now? Fuck yea anyone doing a OT for it? Game that awesome deserves its own 12 post thread :lol.
 

sciplore

Member
No history, just think the game kicks ass and deserves its own little spotlight.

Yea my avatar is it, what the style is great :lol.

If one is not put up this evening I might make one.
 
sciplore said:
No history, just think the game kicks ass and deserves its own little spotlight.
I hadn't even heard of it before today! Get that |OT| made!

In other news, does anyone have a bit of free time and want to work with me on a thread for towards the end of November? By which I mean, I've got some ideas but you can do most of the work :)

Indies knowledge a must, natch!
 
I've been playing quite a bit of Tempura of the Dead.

Some thoughts.

-The jumping totally needs work. By that I mean there are times where the input won't register because possibly another input is being read at the time. So I shoot/slash something and then go to jump there's a chance I won't jump at all. This is great for falling into pits and other bad things.
-The timing on the sword strikes needs to be loosened up a bit. It'll make the Samurai a lot easier to use.
-After getting 10 combo hits Tempura Fever is triggered which releases zombie-head souls in one hit. It's cool and all but kind of loses its appeal somewhat as I like hitting the heads multiple times in a row. Maybe Fever could drop the number of hits required by half or allow you keep juggling after the soul has been released..I dunno exactly what I'd do but hmm.
-I'd add another second to the invincibility window after taking a hit. It gives a bit more room to get away.
-Some more music tracks.

Still it's pretty damn good.
 
catfish said:
God it's mind numbingly stupid that microsoft does this.

Like I have said before, if MS could take your money they would. There is something in those countries that they can't sell in related to infrastructure, importation, legalities, or taxation, or something that is preventing them from taking your money.

They want yor money, they want it desperately, do not underestimate how badly they want your cash.
 

jgkspsx

Member
toythatkills said:
This one, comes with the Mad Catz Portable Drum Kit for Rock Band.

20090104020700qS6m.jpg
Ha! I never thought of using that for classic gameplay, but that's pretty cool :lol
 

soldat7

Member
Warm Machine said:
Like I have said before, if MS could take your money they would. There is something in those countries that they can't sell in related to infrastructure, importation, legalities, or taxation, or something that is preventing them from taking your money.

They want yor money, they want it desperately, do not underestimate how badly they want your cash.

Well, they did bury XBLIG in a difficult to find spot. I swear, Microsoft is a company run by monkeys.
 
soldat7 said:
Well, they did bury XBLIG in a difficult to find spot. I swear, Microsoft is a company run by monkeys.

It could have been pressure from big publishers to do that. If indies get the same exposure as XBLA or regular games for free when it costs regular publisher 6 figures for the same treatment it doesn't bode well for the paying partners. Honestly, there are few enough indie games that deserve the retail space that other games get. The non stop barrage of junk ware on the service isn't helping the developers who are interested in making indie games a quality destination.

MS does a massive amount of good just they get picked on to death. The fact that XNA and indie exists at all is incredible and somewhat unprecidented in the console game industry.
 

jambo

Member
toythatkills said:
This one, comes with the Mad Catz Portable Drum Kit for Rock Band.

20090104020700qS6m.jpg
I ordered 2 of those drum sets just for the controllers haha.

I don't even have Rock Band on 360 :lol
 
Snake Jam: poor. It takes the basic mechanics of Snake, eat stuff to get longer, then removes all the threat (crashing into walls/your tail). Then. It. Runs. So. Jerkily. It's. Really. Hard. To. Follow. Then it adds opponents which you can apparently eat but if you touch them it's completely random as to whether you eat them, they eat you, or nothing happens at all. It's not dependent on length as you'd expect it to be. Then it makes the whole thing a bit ugly. Then instead of really being in control, there's some weird physics at play so you have to kind of fling your snake from place to place. Basically, it's unplayable.
 

Ventron

Member
2h49u1d.jpg


If anyone here cares about Bonded Realities, the RPG I'm making; I've finished the last of the battle scenarios (yay) and will now move on to the cutscenes and populating the maps with NPCs, followed by a crapload of playtesting.

If you really care about it, my Twitter is here and my dev blog is here.

If you don't care, well... radiangames has another game in review and should come out shortly. It's called Fireball and has you travelling around a field (surprise surprise) but this time you activate the bombs floating on the field to blow up the enemies that follow you. Not much else captured my attention in the Peer Review section, but there are some niceties undergoing casual Playtesting: Cthulhu Saves the World (sequel to Breath of Death), Break Limit (arcade shooter which will incorporate split paths), Epic Dungeon (severely overdone gore was offputting to me, but was a good retro-styled Zelda/RPG)
 
toythatkills said:
Iredia: Atram's Secret is really, really awesome. The first thing you notice is that it looks really great. The second thing you notice is that when you press jump, you jump about half a second later. Normally this is enough to kill a game but Iredia: Atram's Secret is strong enough that it doesn't matter, and there's not really much in the way of precision platforming so you've got time to get used to it and you'll rarely die. It's not really about dying - there are no enemies.

You want to take a flute to your new-born sister, but she's born deaf, so you can't play it for her and she'll never be able to play it herself. Besides, a cat grabs it and runs away with it. The rest of the game is spent chasing after your flute and, erm, learning about ears.

It's an educational game, see, and you get little bits of information about how ears work and stuff as you play through the levels. Then, at the end of every level, you get a small test to see if you've been paying attention. It's really quite excellent.

In the first level you learn about parts of the ear, then you learn about audiograms which can measure the level of hearing of a person. In this level you can fine-tune your hearing so you only hear certain sounds, and can jump on them to reach new places. In the third level you learn about hearing aids and have to find hearing aids to give to frogs to pass. I stopped there, so there's more to come too!

The ultimate goal is to get your flute back and, I guess, reassure yourself that your baby sister will still get some joy from it. Which is fucking lovely, really.

Brilliant game.
Oh man, just finished this. There's only one more level after the frog one but it's about sign language. Little guys are using it and you have to work out from that which way to go, and stuff, it's amazing.

I think this is one of the loveliest games I've ever played.
 

SapientWolf

Trucker Sexologist
Warm Machine said:
Seems like RadianGames Fireball has passed Peer Review and will be available tomorrow. Someone, make an OT!
Make an OT with what? I haven't even seen a screenshot of the game yet. What is it about?

Also, how can this guy make so many high quality releases so fast? Does he eat or sleep? Is he some kind of robot?
 

Nekobo

Member
I have 800 points that I want to spend on indie games. What combination of games should I get? I'm willing to try any genre aside from those massage/fart/dating games.

BTW, that Cthulu game looks great.
 
Nekobo said:
I have 800 points that I want to spend on indie games. What combination of games should I get? I'm willing to try any genre aside from those massage/fart/dating games.
Those are the best ones!

Ahem.

Save 240 points for Cthulhu, and get Breath of Death for 80 points right now.

Apple Jack and Hypership Out of Control are absolute must buys for 80 points apiece.

Echoes+ just dropped to 80 points, and you want Leave Home if that's still 80 points.

Then Pocoro aaaaand radiangames Fluid.

Covers a whole ton of genres.
 
Nekobo said:
I have 800 points that I want to spend on indie games. What combination of games should I get? I'm willing to try any genre aside from those massage/fart/dating games.

BTW, that Cthulu game looks great.

Try all of these, you're bound to find 800 points you're willing to spend:

Arkedo Series 03 Pixel
Breath of Death VII
Decimation X
Echoes+
Gravitron360
Halfbrick Echoes
Hypership out of Control
I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES
Johnny Platform
Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess
Motorheat
Pixel Boarder
PLATFORMANCE
Protect Me Knight
radiangames Anything
Shellblast HD
Shoot 1UP
Soulcaster
Trino
Weapon of Choice

Could name more but figured I'd keep it reasonable!
 

sciplore

Member
toythatkills said:
I hadn't even heard of it before today! Get that |OT| made!

In other news, does anyone have a bit of free time and want to work with me on a thread for towards the end of November? By which I mean, I've got some ideas but you can do most of the work :)

Indies knowledge a must, natch!

Its done now. Quickie of a one but I hope it brings some attention to the game.

Cthulhu looks like it will own.
 

Feep

Banned
Good LORD, developing a game takes fucking forever.

I'm a couple months away from the release of Sequence. I'll start to put out from proper promotional materials soon, I guess, but here's a recent video: Sequence Gameplay

Rhythm/RPG hybrid, etc. etc.

Any suggestions/comments before I start locking code down?
 

djtiesto

is beloved, despite what anyone might say
toythatkills said:
They turn up as 2 for £30 in HMV quite often.

West is an odd game. It's a turn-based RPG that doesn't reveal much of itself in the trial so I'm not really sure whether I can recommend it or not. It seems pretty nice though. Writing is nice, world is pretty quaint, and the situation just before the end of the trial is really funny in a shouldn't-be-funny kind of way. No, what's odd is how it looks. It looks like it has the assets from about five different games, or something. The characters are 16-bit, the barrels and flowers are 8-bit, the mountains and the trees and the text are really quite sharp. It just looks really weird.

I really like how you can visit the shop in town to buy the game though, that made me smile.

I'd like to give another recommendation to West. It was made by the youngest brother of a close friend of mine from college who developed this game. I really liked the dialogue, especially for an amateur RPG (those usually suffer from terrible writing). It's clear the game was inspired by Earthbound, especially with this aspect. The assets seem to be a lot of stuff taken from RPG Maker, and the monsters were drawn up by the developer's friend. I bought it for $1 and have been very happy with it.

PepsimanVsJoe said:
Haha I just had to throw $1 in for West.
I believe it uses RPG Maker. Which explains all of the random graphics.

Hypership out of control is sweet.

Pretty sure that West was programmed completely in XNA, instead of ported from RPG Maker... just many of the graphics were taking from the RTP.

Holy shit at that Cthulu game, LOOOOOVE the PS4-inspired cinemas.
 
Panic Attack is from the devs of Jump 'n' Bounce from a few months back, with music from 8-bit weapon and kind of, next-gen feeling. Next-gen compared to what Jump 'n' Bounce felt like. So it's sharper, zoomed in, and there are all sorts of traps and cannons and trampolines and special powerups and stuff. The basic premise is that you're a bouncy ball and you just, well, bounce through 2D levels. Jump 'n' Bounce was brilliant, and its simplicity was a big part of that, this tries to do too much and it's not a lot of fun.

igPool is a basic-as-you-like Pool game. The angles are horrible and you can't move the camera round. There's no controller dead-zone so it's a nightmare to line up shots and the camera makes doing that impossible anyway, it's really difficult to judge a shot. It's only a dollar but you can probably get Codemaster's snooker game for that by now, and it's better.

Fast Food is a peculiar little game where you work in a fast food restaurant. I thought we were supposed to aim away from such things in our lives. It's confusing to start with, and when you get the hang of it it's really slow to keep track of. You have to just... fulfill orders. There are loads of bays and you have to choose the right item from each one for each order, you have three orders on the go at once. Like I say, to keep track of it you have to be really slow and careful and it's a pretty dull way to play the game.

Game 35 is a stupid platform game where nearly every level requires you to just hold right and it plays itself. Where that's not the case, you're the victim of trial and error gameplay with invisible traps and platforms everywhere. Poor.

Furball has really funny sound effects but that's about it. It's so weird to play, it's like if the guy that created the control scheme for Resident Evil made a twin stick. You press up to go forward and left/right to rotate, and it doesn't make any sense at all when it's all mapped to the same stick like that. No enemies, it's multiplayer only, but not a very fun multiplayer experience.

Skully. Because November 11th is the perfect time to release your pointless Halloween toy.

Finger Twist-Up is literally, Twister for your fingers. You end up pressing loads of controller buttons until you can press no more. There's not a great deal of point to it, to be honest.

In Finish you have to direct a black dot to a blue dot really fucking slowly using the analogue stick. It's kind of like Soul with everything (including the fun) removed.

Chaos Shift is a not-very-good space shooter which has quite good in game graphics but a quite horrendously drawn/fonted story sequence. Weird. You travel forwards on rails and keep getting shot and shot until you die because you can't avoid the billions of asteroids and invisible bullets that are shot at you. You can shoot too, but it's not particularly effective, you'll still die.
 

Intruder_qc

Neo Member
Been a long time I didn't come to NeoGAF,

Woow it seems I've miss quite a few interesting thread such as this one :D .

This is really great to see a dedicated thread for some nice Xbox Live Indie Games coverage. A big thanks to toythatkills for taking the time to post and make reviews.
 
So here is the deal. Microsoft have engaged developers on the creator forums about what we would like to see in the next revision of Indie Games. Aside from the expected requests for Leaderboards and Kinect support, Achievements seem to be the hot topic.

By NO means is this an announcement that Achievements will happen for Indie Games.

Developers seem to be in 2 camps on what determines how much Achievements and Gamerscore a game can award.

Camp 1: All Indie Games have the same Gamerscore (20) and Achievements regardless of price.

Camp 2: Indie Games receive Achievements and Gamerscore based on price. As a potential example:

400pt games can award 10 Achievements and 100 Gamerscore.
240pt games can award 8 Achievements and 60 Gamerscore.
80pt games can award 6 Achievemements and 20 Gamerscore.

Another potential caveat is whether or not games should have to be submitted for approval to use achievements ( quality control ) or if it should be the wild west ( all games get to no matter what with peer review guidelines for quality control ).

From what I could gather on the unofficial MS employee statements on the thread I think the biggest concern is making sure Indie Games do not devalue Achievements or Gamerscore in any way (Think, press start get 20 gamerscore ).

I'm curious of what your point of view on this subject is or any other ideas you would like to see implemented for Indie Games so I can pass the word along. Now seems to be the time to do so.

Edit: Some clarification on the Price = Score issue. If this were to happen, price changes after release would not affect the Achievement/Gamerscore amount.
 

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
Between Camp 1 and Camp 2, Camp 1 obviously. Also, the number of achievements a game can give shouldn't be tied to the amount of gamerscore a game can give; I'd much rather games with 12 achievements for 20 gamerscore than games with 2 achievements for 20 gamerscore, for example.

The best solution is simply to segregate the marketplace into set of games/developers who are allowed to use achievements, and those who aren't. Microsoft is functionally doing that on WP7. If Microsoft doesn't want to use their own time, pluck 5-10 active testers/approvers from the community and give that group authority over approving achievement submitters. That's still better than nothing.
 

Princess Skittles

Prince's's 'Skittle's
barkers crest said:
I'm curious of what your point of view on this subject is or any other ideas you would like to see implemented for Indie Games so I can pass the word along. Now seems to be the time to do so.
I would love to see it and I would love to see games I love (PROTECT ME KNIGHT) updated to include them!

I don't think it's fair to say price = score. Firstly, game prices can be changed. Secondly, you can rent a bad children's game for a few bucks and get a crisp 1000 in a few hours. I think a good idea is that ALL indie games get 10/100 but to have maybe a SMALL approval process (within the community, perhaps, if possible), so that there are NOT several "press start" achievements out there.
 

SapientWolf

Trucker Sexologist
barkers crest said:
So here is the deal. Microsoft have engaged developers on the creator forums about what we would like to see in the next revision of Indie Games. Aside from the expected requests for Leaderboards and Kinect support, Achievements seem to be the hot topic.
If people need achievement points to be motivated to buy a game then something is very, very wrong. A developer even made a lecture about the subject. I guess MS might as well add them to all their game related store content since they helped to create the problem in the first place. But they may be destroying people's intrinsic motivation to play video games, and if indie game sales go up after achievements are added then that only lends evidence to that theory.
 

Trumpets

Member
^ ^
Thats pretty much my view exactly. I've heard:

"I'd buy some of those Indie games if they had achievments"

in various discussion threads and it chills my blood. What did these idiots do for fun before the Xbox 360 came out?
 

Princess Skittles

Prince's's 'Skittle's
Ah, two replies before anti-achievement rhetoric hit, new record or too slow?

If somebody buys a game for achievements, what skin is it off your back? I guarantee that most people don't purchase their games based on this and for the ones that do.. so what? Achievements add an extra value to games for a lot of people and if they add nothing for you.. so what? Your ability to enjoy a game or not has not had to change because of them.
 

SapientWolf

Trucker Sexologist
Trumpets said:
^ ^
Thats pretty much my view exactly. I've heard:

"I'd buy some of those Indie games if they had achievments"

in various discussion threads and it chills my blood. What did these idiots do for fun before the Xbox 360 came out?
They probably played video games, like everyone else here. It's not completely their fault. MS just set up a situation where people expect to be compensated for their play time with extrinsic rewards (in this case, achievement points). So now playing games is sort of like work for some people and they expect to be paid for it. People don't like to work for free.

Exploiting the brain's reward system can have some potentially disastrous unintended consequences. There is a lot of interesting research going on about this subject and I suggest that people see it for themselves.
 

Dave Long

Banned
So... if you haven't played RadianGames Fluid, you need to fix that today. It's a brilliant piece of work IMO. Understated excellence with a very unique gameplay hook. It's Pac-Man where the dots attack! ...After you've eaten them of course. :)
 

GDJustin

stuck my tongue deep inside Atlus' cookies
Indie games need achievements, but they need to be regulated as heavily as MS can get away with. Otherwise there WILL be "buy achievement points!" indie games, and people WILL buy them.

Edit: If you haven't already, read Radian's extremely detailed and transparent sales blog post:

http://radiangames.com/?p=385

Cliffnotes: He's sold 20,000 games, and earned $15,600, in six months.

Def. eye-opening. He's one of the most successful XBL Indie devs, and it still isn't enough to earn a living. But on the positive side, A) $15K is still a very significant chunk of change, proving there is money to be made. B) His games are going to have long tails. If he released his final few games in December, and then stopped and got a normal job, he would continue to make a couple thousand bucks a month from residual sales.

Still, this proves that indie games are no iOS app store, yet.
 
For me, the best achievement system on Indies would be 12 achievements for no GamerScore. There'd be no point selling games to whore GS, but Indie Games would appear on people's GamerCards as "played" and there'd still be fun to be had getting the game maxed out. I'm not sure if it'd add much appeal to the "I'd play it if it had achievements" crowd though so could be pointless. See what I did there?

The other alternative is just to ensure that achievements require skill to unlock them, which is something common sense can probably root out in peer-review. I don't mean intense skill, or anything, just not "press start."

Though of course, retail games have done that before.

This would mean that some items would have be allowed to ship without achievements, because there's no real skill element in "Massage your balls with your controller you filthy sex-pest 2010."

I don't think they should differ depending on price though, 50GS per indie is pretty fair, for me.

Still no Fireball!
 
toythatkills said:
For me, the best achievement system on Indies would be 12 achievements for no GamerScore. There'd be no point selling games to whore GS, but Indie Games would appear on people's GamerCards as "played" and there'd still be fun to be had getting the game maxed out. I'm not sure if it'd add much appeal to the "I'd play it if it had achievements" crowd though so could be pointless. See what I did there?

The best possible solution.
 

Slermy

Member
toythatkills said:
For me, the best achievement system on Indies would be 12 achievements for no GamerScore. There'd be no point selling games to whore GS, but Indie Games would appear on people's GamerCards as "played" and there'd still be fun to be had getting the game maxed out. I'm not sure if it'd add much appeal to the "I'd play it if it had achievements" crowd though so could be pointless. See what I did there?

That's a really good idea actually.
 
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