Dutch developer Ronimo Games announced on its Kickstarter page that Starstrom, the crowdfunded expansion to its 2D platformer Awesomenauts, will kick off later this week. Ronimo says it's putting the finishing touches on a new character, Ted McPain, and that if all goes well players should see be able to see him in the game this Thursday.

The new update will also add the first batch of custom settings and a deathmatch mode. The rest of Starstorm's content should roll-out by the end of 2014.

McPain, who premium backers have been beta testing for the past couple of weeks, will be the first five new characters added in the expansion. Only two others listed on the Kickstarter page: Sentry X-58, a tank class, robot character, and Skee, an assassin class "techno shaman."

The Starstorm expansion will also add a spectator mode, global chat, twin-stick controller support, new music, a new map and a whole mess of new skins for existing characters.

Ronimo launched its Kickstarter campaign back in August. It was incredibly successful, hitting its goal of $125,000 in just a few days, and eventually netting the developer more than double that amount with $345,835 in total.

You can read our find our full (and favorable) review of Awesomenauts, here.

Humble Jumbo Bundle. That's quite a mouthful, and if you say it ten times fast it will summon both Beetlejuice and Candyman and open a portal to the underworld. So, y'know, it's probably best to avoid that. However, it's also the name of the Humble Bundle's latest pay-what-you-want sale, which this time discounts Sanctum 2, Magicka with two bits of DLC, and Natural Selection 2. Beat the average and you'll also get Orcs Must Die 2, Garry's Mod and Serious Sam 3: BFE throw in too. If your bank account wasn't summarily emptied during the course of the Steam sale, it might be worth a look.

That average, at the time of writing, stands at $4.10, so you won't have to fork out much of your pay packet/poker winnings/pocket money to get your hands on those six games. The charities receiving some or all or none of your money this time are Watsi and Child's Play, and there will of course be more games added to the deal over time.

The Humble Jumbo Bundle ends in a little over 13 days.

People prepare for the night of ghosts and goblins in different ways. Some go trick-or-treating, while others get so drunk they start believing they are their costume. Only a select few lock themselves away to craft free Halloween updates for their games, and it turns out Terraria’s developers happen belong in the latter group.

Terraria’s “Halloween event” update fills your biome with Halloween-themed pets, costume paintings, gear, and friendly NPCs to sell you those items. Here’s hoping they don’t use your hard-earned cash to egg the impenetrable fortress you spent hours refurbishing. Slain monsters will also drop goodie bags containing “fun surprises” that hopefully won’t include mini bottles of toothpaste or, ugh, pencils. People who give those away on Halloween are the true monsters.

There’s also a “Pumpkin Moon Event” that can be triggered in hard mode. Developer Redigit was light on the details, but made the thing sound like a survival mode where you stave off waves of enemies. The more waves you survive, the better the spoils. The Halloween event lasts until Nov. 10, probably to let you recover from whatever candy coma you fall into.

There are also a bunch of non-Halloween themed bug fixes and balances. I found the most adorable one was “Mice can no longer spawn in hell.” That’s just my personal pick. Feel free to check out the full list and make your own decisions. Or, you could just tinker around while munching on your sugary-dessert of choice—preferably in a soundproof chamber where no doorbell can reach you.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent developer Frictional Games recently revealed that The Fullbright Company’s indie title, Gone Home, first saw life through the Amnesia engine. And if you're interested in the prototype, you can try it right now.

Frictional Games co-founder Thomas Grip notes in a company blog post that he denies all requests to use the HPL2 engine in a commercial game, as there’s no documentation for the engine and Frictional Games simply doesn’t have the time to support the engine. Instead, Grip would suggest using Unity or UDK (Unreal Development Kit). Steve Gaynor, who helped craft the haunting tale that is Gone Home, asked Grip whether his team could use the engine for what would become Gone Home, but received the same answer.

Fullbright ended up following Grip’s advice and used Unity to shape Gone Home—but not before building the first prototype with the HPL2 engine anyway. After all, Grip only denied requests to license the engine for commercial products.

Grip and Gaynor reconnected after Gone Home’s launch, with Grip asking if Gaynor still had the “Amnesia version” of Gone Home tucked away in his computer. Gaynor just so happened to have a copy, and now that copy is available to you.

Grip said Gaynor requested the HPL2 license way back in January of last year, and speculates that the Fullbright Company must have been utilizing the HPL2 engine before asking Grip if the final version of Gone Home could use that license. Basically, this means the Amnesia prototype is a very early version of what Gone Home would eventually become.

To navigate Gone Home’s earliest, creakiest walls, just download the prototype and extract the file into Amnesia: The Dark Descent’s “custom_stories” directory. If you see something called “Test Game” after selecting “Custom Stories” on Amnesia’s main menu, you’re good to go. At least the Gone Home prototype doesn’t have invincible flesh monsters roaming the halls…right?

After two freaky live action trailers, Frictional have finally unveiled the first in-game footage from their upcoming sci-fi horror SOMA. Judging from the trailer, it looks a bit 'Amnesia in space', and you'll play as a man who thinks it is a good idea to jam a weird metal device into the decapitated head of a corpse. Based purely on that performance, I'm not confident in his long term chance for survival.



Beyond that small sampler, details are few, although the game's website does reveal some basic info as to what's going on:

"The radio has gone silent on PATHOS-2. As isolation bears down on the staff of the remote research facility, strange things are happening.

"Machines are taking on human traits and alien constructions have started to interfere with routine. The world around them is turning into a nightmare.

"The only way out is to do something unimaginable."

Don't expect to find out much more for a while. SOMA is due out on PC and PS4, just not until 2015.

It's been two years since Dungeon Defenders' quartet of child heroes saved the color-saturated world of Etheria with a mixture of tower defense and action RPG hacking, slashing and shooting. Since 2011, the Squire, Apprentice, Monk and Huntress have all grown into taller, lankier teenagers. Dungeon Defenders 2's tower defense fusion has grown up with them.

I donned the Apprentice's floppy wizard hat for a preview of Dungeon Defenders 2 with Trendy Entertainment's lead content designer Daniel Haddad and marketing director Philip Asher. The build we played represented only four months of work for Trendy, so it was completely focused on "core mechanics": Building towers and killing a whole bunch of armored orcs and skittering goblins. That focus came with a frank admission from Asher: the action RPG/tower defense combo didn't entirely work in the first game, and they want to do better.

In the first Dungeon Defenders, tower defense was fun. The combat was playable, if a bit mindless. But the two didn't gel at all. The camera would pull up into an awkward overhead perspective when you built towers, which also had to be selected from an equally awkward series of radial pop-up menus (though keyboard shortcuts did help). Aside from building, upgrading, and repairing, there was no interaction between players and towers.



A new trait system is part of Trendy's solution to that separation. In Dungeon Defenders 2, towers, hero equipment, and abilities can be assigned traits--freezing damage, for example--that affect enemies. A new Apprentice tower shoots flames that spread from enemy to enemy; if someone douses those enemies with oil, they'll take much more damage. Frozen enemies can be shattered. The Apprentice can also launch a tornado spell that knocks enemies into the air, where they're bombarded by devastating shots from anti-air towers that would normally ignore them.

Before I tried out the new tower/ability combinations, I spent a few minutes running around our preview map, a small village with multiple entrances, admiring the sequel's new look. Dungeon Defenders 2 is gorgeous. The first game's charmingly garish bloom and heavy black outlines are gone, and the new color palette is more pastel. Other than The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, I can't think of a game that looks more like an honest-to-god cartoon.

Dungeon Defenders 2 feels good, too. Asher said that the developer put a ton of work into improving basic combat mechanics for the sequel, and it shows. For example, in the first game, the young Squire swung his sword back and forth with each click of a mouse button, but there was no finesse or weight to his attacks. The same back-forth animation looped forever as he ran through mobs of enemies dishing out damage without much feedback. Trendy nicknamed it the lawnmower effect.



There's no lawnmowing in Dungeon Defenders 2. The teenaged Squire and Monk now perform attack combos with a series of animations for sword/staff swings. Trendy wants melee combat to be more third-person brawler, less landscaping. The animation improvements extend to the other characters as well; when I held down the right mouse button to charge up the Apprentice's magic shot, he held his staff behind him and then snapped it forward to unleash the blast.

The strategic build phase--planning out tower placement, collecting resources from chests scattered throughout the map, fortifying defenses--remains mostly unchanged. However, Trendy split the first game's currency, mana, into two resources: One for casting hero abilities, and one for constructing, repairing, and upgrading towers.

And here's a big change: There's no longer a limit to the number of towers you can build in a map. According to Asher, the first game's build limit marginalized the strategic choice between building more towers and upgrading them to be more powerful. That will be a common choice in the sequel. Because using abilities is now a big focus of combat, and there are no build limits, both resources feel more valuable.



On top of making combat deeper, Trendy's introducing varied objectives and more opportunities for strategy into the tower defense framework. In the map we played, enemies came through a large set of gates in the middle of the map, while smaller gates let in more enemies from the sides. Where there were once generic Eternia crystals to defend, there are now main objectives and sub-objectives. On this map, the two sub-objectives were locks that opened up more gates for enemies to flow through. During the final round, we made the tactical decision to sell our defenses near the sub-objectives and pull them back to the main gate, which we had to defend at any cost.

Some of Trendy's small improvements do a lot to smooth out their tower defense/action RPG formula. The camera never leaves its behind-the-back perspective, even when placing towers. Building towers mid-combat no longer locks you helplessly in place, as heroes can still move and attack within a small radius as a tower is being built or repaired. Flying enemies now use AI to choose a target instead of beelining for a predetermined Eternia crystal.

Ultimately, the most encouraging thing about Dungeon Defenders 2 is how candidly Trendy's devs talked about the first game's problems. And there were a lot of problems, though they didn't prevent the game from being fun or addicting--according to Steam, I played 112 hours of it. DLC releases were geared towards higher difficulty levels, so players who were away from the game for a few weeks could come back and find themselves hopelessly behind. Loot scaling was so steep, only grinding for hours on the highest difficulties produced the best gear.

Every issue I could think of Asher admitted to, or even brought up first. Trendy Entertainment has gone through some adolescent growing pains of its own over the past year; when the developer first announced Dungeon Defenders 2 back in March, it was confusingly divided into a cooperative tower defense like the original, to be released at some point in the future, and a MOBA, which went into beta in the spring. The two would share characters and, supposedly, some form of progression.



But the MOBA was a dud, and Asher admitted that the studio grew so quickly after Dungeon Defenders' success, they ended up chasing the MOBA genre's popularity and making a game no one in the studio really wanted to make. So they scrapped it--all of it, with the exception of their new teenage hero character designs--and started over.

From what I played, I can't say how Dungeon Defenders 2 will improve upon the original's loot mechanics or character progression, or how well Trendy will vary its stages with creative objectives. Those are the elements that will make Dungeon Defenders 2 a 200-hour addiction instead of another 20-hour tower defense game.

Trendy is at least saying all the right things. Traits applied to weapons will affect how attacks animate and injure enemies. An ability hotbar at the bottom of the screen is the only hint of MOBA design in the cooperative mode, and each character will supposedly have multiple abilities to fill out that bar--there could be some very cool tower/attack combinations if they deliver on this front. Lead content designer Daniel Haddad talked about a metagame that would organize the community into taking on challenges together to push the Dungeon Defenders 2 story forward. Campaign missions will not be selected via a boring menu, this time around.



There's still one big wildcard left: How Trendy will implement F2P monetization into their game. Asher was adamant that the core gameplay would be there even if you didn't spend a dime. The good news is that Trendy plans to launch Dungeon Defenders 2 in open beta in the first quarter of 2014 and let fans influence the F2P structure. There will definitely be heroes beyond the core four, but how many, and how much will they cost? Until the beta launches it's too soon to say.

One thing's for sure: Dungeon Defenders 2 will still come packing a challenge. Haddad casually mentioned that the build we were playing was easier than the final game, since all of our objectives returned to full health between waves. We still lost on the last wave, to the final three enemies, who hammered our main gate into submission before we could deliver the killing blows. I left the demo thinking about how we could've set up our defenses more efficiently. Next time, I'll be ready.

Here's a second video for Amnesia dev Frictional's next project, which might well be a game called SOMA. Then again, it might not be, with the studio not yet having confirmed what this series of hints are leading to. What we do know, from years of pop culture, is that taunting robots is almost always a terrible idea. Maybe this five minutes live action teaser will be the exception to that rule.



Not so much, then.

Ethically unsound and psychologically damaging experiments with technology would appear to be the order of the day. Knowing Frictional, everything will be kept within the bounds of sanity, and sense and safety will hold steady. No wait, not that, the other thing.

You can poke around the SOMA website here, not that it will clarify things any.

Listen, Terraria fans. I don't want to rush you, but that giant patch you received a few days ago? You might not have the eternity to enjoy it that you previously assumed. Terraria's creator, Andrew 'Redigit' Spinks, has revealed that he's working on a sequel to the side-scrolling craft-'em-up, and despite some core similarities to the first game, he's teasing "infinite worlds" to be explored.

"I’m super excited about starting Terraria 2," Spinks told RPS. "It’s a ways out, but it’s gonna have a lot in common with the original. It’s gonna be quite different as well. I really want to expand on the whole Terraria universe.

"There’s a lot of stuff I’m locked into with Terraria. The way loot works, the way character progression works. In Terraria 2, I really want to have infinite worlds so you’re not just stuck to one world. You can travel anywhere. I want more biome diversity in that, too. There’s a lot of stuff ."

Not that development on Terraria: The First has finished just yet. While Spinks isn't planning anything on the scale of 1.2, he does want to finish the endgame progression within the next couple of months, as well as work on a possible Halloween update.

You can read the full interview over at RPS.

It's been over five years since the release of the first Audiosurf, and in that time, I have managed to retain my throne as Elite Champion of Half Man Half Biscuit's Took Problem Chimp To Ideal Home Show. Sure, I appear to be the only one to have played it on the game's highest difficulty mode, but that hardly matters. With the release of Audiosurf 2, I feel we should spiritually declare a lockdown of the original's leaderboards, thus crowning me undefeated.

That release is due later today when the game will appear on Steam Early Access, as confirmed by creator Dylan Fitterer.

As with its predecessor, Audiosurf 2 will generate its levels from the bumpin' and grindin' of your music collection. Along with the return of various classic modes, this release will also include wakeboarding, in which you must anticipate each track as you're pulled along by two boats. Other modes will be added at a later date, both officially and through the Steam Workshop support.

When it goes live, Audiosurf 2 will be available through Steam.

The sun is brighter! The sky is smoother! The werewolf form has been buffed! These are just three of the changes you'll find when you next log into Terraria. The full change list for the update, which has been in development for over nine months, is huge and covers nearly every part of the game. Want new hairstyles? You've got them. Want to be able to paint any solid tile or item? You can do that. Want to be asked if you want to use UPnP to automatically port-forward when hosting multiplayer? That's strange, but you will be. There are other, more dramatic changes too.

Bug Fixes


You can no longer craft items or money by placing items in the trash.
You can no longer sell your gold to NPC's
Music box/chest duping no longer works
Bunnies/Goldfish spawned from statues no longer drop money during a Bloodmoon
Equipping items to the social slot in German no longer crashes the game
The game will no longer create a random password during multiplayer world generation
You can now reforge in all languages
Active blocks will no longer become inactive with a chest on them
Fixed a bug that would cause a suitable house to be unsuitable
Fixed a lot of bugs that were not listed


Mechanics and Gameplay


Enemies now have a health bar
There is now a map, mini map, and overlay that only shows tiles the brightest they have ever been
The map can be toggled using tab, m, or through the map icons
“M” has been remapped for the map feature
“J” is now the default button for mana use
There is now an extended crafting menu that will show everything you can craft
Some items now stack to 999
Character slots have been increased to 1,000
World slots have been increased to 1,000
The starting female cloths have been modified
There are several new hairstyles
Character creation has been remodeled
Chest sizes have been doubled
Your inventory space has been increased by 10
You no longer need to jump to ascend single blocks
The hammer is now used for creating slopes, halftiles, and breaking walls only
The axe is now only used for chopping down trees and giant mushrooms
Pickaxes will now remove blocks, placeable objects, and items such as Life Crystals and chests
You can now paint any solid tile or item
Dye slots have been added
You will now start with 10 mana
You can now craft early game magic robes and staves
Bricks, wood, stone and glass all now blend together
Mana Crystals only require 5 fallen stars to craft, down from 10
If water touches a halftile it will create a waterfall
Your world has a chance to get alternative ore as a replacement for copper, iron, silver, and gold
Your world has a chance to have a replacement for the Corruption
Your world has a chance to get alternative ores as a replacement for Cobalt, Mythril, and Adamantite
Your world has a rare chance to have a pyramid or living tree spawn during world generation each containing their own loot table
There is a new hardmode jungle temple
There are now beehives that can be found in the jungle
There are now several new backgrounds and tree variations your world has a chance to generate
Water will now change color based on the biome you are in and depth underground
Ropes are now found early game and can be used to craft rope coils for traversing the world
Chains can now be placed and used as a rope mechanism
Mushroom grass/seeds can now grow and spread above ground
There are now 3 colors for wires
Actuators can be used to make any solid tile active and inactive
There is 1 new liquid type that can be found in the Jungle
There are several new fountains that will change the color of water when they are place nearby
Pearlstone bricks no longer spread hallow
Rain and blizzards have been added
There is a new snow biome with unique treasures and items for normal and hardmode
Enemies no longer trigger underground pressure plates
There are new pressure plates that can only be triggered by certain things such as the player, enemies, or both
Clowns will no longer blow up tiles
There are several new buffs and debuffs
There are now mini Capture the Gem addition to the game. You can craft large gems that draw a gem icon above the player holding the gem and if the player is killed the gem will be dropped next to their corpse
There are 2 new hardmode events
Werewolf form has been buffed and can take place every night
Broken armor debuff only lasts 2 minutes, down from 5
You now use a pickaxe to remove armor from a mannequin
Players no longer take double damage in pvp
Items of the same type will now stack when next to each other
When using a gravitation potion your world will invert rather than your character
You can no longer become invincible when touching fire blocks
Increased speed at which you can buy stacks of things


Graphical Changes


The sun is now brighter
Midnight is now darker
The sky has a smooth gradient
There are several items that have had graphical upgrades such as gems, colored torches, minishark, muramasa, aqua scepter,
starfury, ect..
There are now stalagmites, icecicles, moss, plants, rocks, and other "piles" added to enhance the environment
There are several new mini caves that can be found with unique backgrounds
Each biome will now have chests and pots with unique graphics
The dungeon now has 3 unique textures/colors and furniture
Hell houses have been remodeled
Floating islands have been remodeled
Each biome will now have unique textures and wood types:
Corruption: Ebonwood
Jungle: Rich Mahogany
Crimson: Shadewood
Hallow: Pearlwood
Each brick now has its own unique texture
Each brick wall now has its own unique texture
Torches are now animated and can be placed on walls
Common enemies such as demon eyes, skeletons, and zombies have all been given graphical variations
There are several new tombstones
All objects in the game that sparkle will now sparkle with a corresponding color


Puppy Break


Puppies


Recipes/Items


In total there are over 1,000 new items
There are 10 new ores
There are 4 new wood types
There are 31 new brick types
You can now imbue melee weapons
There are several new arrow and bullet types
There are several new crafting stations
There are several new wands used for crafting new bricks and brick walls
You can now craft bricks, walls, and furniture out of several new materials:
Slime, Bone, Mushroom, Living wood, Flesh, Silt, and many more!
You can now craft Jester Arrows
There are 12 new wing types
There are several new vanity sets
There are a lot of new rare drops added to enemies
You can now craft stained glass
There is an item in hardmode that allows you to change biomes
There is an item in hardmode that allows you to increase your max health
There are 29 new tinker combinations
Several new items have been added to the game that are used for crafting dyes
Starfury now acts as a melee weapon and has had its damaged increased
Aqua Scepter has been redesigned and does slightly more damage for less mana
Water bolt has been redesigned and does slightly more damage
Vilethorn does more damage and uses less mana
Magic Daggers have been buffed
All of the old classic armors can be found as rare drops and have the same stats as their current counterparts and count towards set bonuses
Items that were called dyes previously for crafting have been changed to thread
Chests now have larger loot tables
You can now make picks instead of drills and axes instead of chainsaws in late game tiers
Increased the drop rate of souls
There are over 50 paintings that can be collected randomly throughout the world
Jungle armor no longer requires gems
The amount of meteorite required for crafting has been decreased
Meteorite armor has more defense and does more damage
Silt and slush can be extracted into useful materials, items, and money
Each boss has a rare chance to drop a placeable boss trophy
Hooks can now be crafted out of gems
Depth meter is no longer craftable
Stars can now be crafted with bottles to make a new light source
Floating island chests no longer require a key
Gems and bars can be placed
Items made from hellstone now require less hellstone


NPCs


There are 8 new friendly npcs
There are 4 new bosses
There are over 100 new enemies
Friendly npcs will sell different items depending on certain conditions such as time of day or biome they are living in
Hardmode bosses have a chance to spawn on their own to help players progress through the game
Current hardmode bosses now do slightly less damage and have had their health decreased
There is a rare spawn mini boss that can be found during blizzards in the above ground ice biome
There are over 15 new pets that can be found in chests and dropped rarely off enemies
Early hardmode enemies now do less damage and have less health/defense.
Skeletron can now be summoned and has a small loot table


Music


There are 15 new tracks for the game, 3 of which are from the console version of the game
Day theme 2 will loop into day theme 1 to add variation above ground
Desert, ocean, glowing mushrooms, dungeon, and space all have their own tracks now
Ice biome has an above and below ground track


Performance/Miscellaneous


The game now only loads assets when needed, reducing the amount of RAM used
Optimized tile data to reduce RAM usage
There game will now ask you if you want to use UPnP to automatically port-forward when hosting multiplayer


Terraria 1.2 is out now.