FTL: Faster Than Light, last year’s breakout hit from two-person studio Subset Games, will receive a free update that adds new ship systems, weapons, events and environments. Called FTL: Advanced Edition, the update will be timed to coincide with an iPad edition of the game set for release in 2014.



The update will also include new music by composer Ben Prunty. Mind control systems will force enemies to sabotage their own ships, and new sectors and events have been written by FTL writer Tom Jubert and Wasteland 2 scribe Chris Avellone. New weapons and effects will be available to stun and freeze enemy crews, and overcharging weapons will unleash higher numbers of volleys. With a game as finely tuned as FTL was, it will be interesting watching the new content expand our horizons without being unbalanced.

The closest I’ve ever come to playing Firefly: The Game was while I was obsessed with FTL last year, so I’ve got a soft spot for the game. Plus, it's notable as one of the earliest Kickstarter success stories that went on to big acclaim. After more than a year since release, Subset could easily have added this content as paid DLC, so releasing it to fans for free is a classy move.

You can never have too much of a good thing, and a good thing is donating to charity while getting new games. DRM-free gaming store GOG is holding a bundle sale where you can pick up three games for a $5 donation to the World Wildlife Fund, Gaming for Good, or Worldbuilders.

You must pick at least three games from a selection of 10, including FTL, Incredipede, and Botanicula. Each additional game will cost you roughly $2.30 more, or you can get all 10 games for a donation just under $17.

The charity of your choice will receive 100% of the proceeds, and all of the games are DRM-free. Go check out the donation page and chip in a bit for a great deal on games.

The Curious Expedition is a roguelike exploration game with an unbearably interesting hook: take your pith-helmeted hero into a violent, randomly generated jungle and meet new tribes, fight lizard men, find ancient ruins, and return a famous explorer. By taking the classic roguelike above-ground and into unknown continents, Curious Expedition might be able to plant a stake in a crowded genre in the tradition of FTL.

“Roguelikes are story generators, where the author is not the game developer, but where the story is written by the attempt of players to deal with the emergent behavior of simulated systems slowly spinning out of control,” says programmer Riad Djemili. Djemili and artist Johannes Kristmann are developing curious Expedition independently. “In our game these systems represent the delicate psyche of your party members and their interaction with an incomprehensible world.”



After equipping your expedition and making choices reminiscent of Oregon Trail (Did I pack enough water? Should we have hired extra soldiers? I brought way too many bullets), your group makes its way into the randomly generated wilderness toward a long-lost ruin like El Dorado or Atlantis. Though reaching the ruin is your ultimate goal, along the way you’ll have opportunities to meet and trade with natives and, as befitting explorers in the age of early colonialism, leave a trail of destruction behind you. Using a magic wand that summons a spring of fresh water in the desert is a no-brainer, for example, but Djemili warns that the spring might turn into a new river, flowing across the countryside and washing out villages until it empties into an ocean. If enough natives are displaced, the resulting tensions could bring a war crashing down on your fragile expedition.

Inspired by the stories of Darwin and Dr. Livingstone, the team has also added a dash of Steampunk and Lovecraftian horror. Nikola Tesla explores the wilderness armed with his Tesla gun, a powerful electrical weapon that can be recharged by harassing electric eels. Explorers must also carefully manage their sanity, as low sanity causes morale problems and “can lead to all kinds of mischief like paranoia, hallucinations, claustrophobia or spontaneous tentacle growth,” according to Kristmann.



Different heroic explorers have different skills. Darwin the naturalist catalogs wildlife while Huizinga the anthropologist befriends natives and learns their cultural rites. In addition to using different skills, some of the explorers are less equipped to undertake the journey at all. Playing as an unprepared city-dweller with no survival skills introduces an organic higher difficulty setting to the game.



The team’s plans for Curious Expedition are remarkably ambitious, and I hope they aren’t overpromising or setting themselves up for creeping feature lists. If it goes as planned, the premise of Sigmund Freud embarking on a quest to loot the treasures of El Dorado is so compelling that I can’t wait to see more about it. A playable alpha for Curious Expedition is planned for next summer, with the full release to follow late in 2014.

The Humble organisers aren't afraid of side-projects, but now that they've had their fill of stand-up comics and corporate overlords, they're returning back to the very source of their humility. The ninth Humble Indie Bundle has just gone live, and, in a move that shouldn't surprise anyone, it stars Polytron's gorgeous platformer Fez. You'll also find FTL, Mark of the Ninja, Trine 2, Brutal Legend and Eets Munchies.



Here's the basic breakdown:


Trine 2: The Complete Story
Mark of the Ninja
Eets Munchies (beta)
Brütal Legend*


*You're right, pedantic indie fan, Brütal Legend on consoles was published by EA. But Double Fine self-published for the PC version, so let's just go with it.

In addition to that, beating the average gets you Fez and FTL: Faster Than Light. The bundle also straight up admits that more games will be added soon, presumably because they've pulled that trick so often that it's no longer a surprise. If you beat the average at any point, you're guaranteed to get the added games as soon as they're revealed.

Also: pay-what-you-want, charity, contribution sliders, Steam keys, soundtracks. Look, there have been nine of these at this point, so you know what to expect. Details, as always, are available straight from the Humble store.

(And, since you're probably wondering: Eets Munchies is a "reimagining" of Klei Entertainment's first game, Eets. Look upon its trailer, and remember that this is the same studio that went on to make Shank.)

You can't play games all the time. Eventually your hands will degrade into coarse lumpy bone sacks, unable to perform rocket-jumps or micro small army men. At some point, you're going to need a rest. Luckily, in the downtime, you can still think about games, and listen to the music from games, and create plasticine dioramas of your favourite moments in games. I mean, I guess you could do something else entirely, but that wouldn't neatly lead into the news that the Game Music Bundle 5 is available, and contains some great indie soundtracks.

There's a two-tiered pricing system, with a purchase of $1 or more securing you these albums:


Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine by Austin Wintory
FTL: Faster Than Light by Ben Prunty
Fez by Disasterpeace
Gunpoint by John Robert Matz, Ryan Ike, Francisco Cerda
Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded by Austin Wintory
World of Goo by Kyle Gabler


Then, for $10 or more, you can grab a further 13 soundtracks:


FZ: Side F
FZ: Side Z
Monaco: The Gentleman's Private Collection
The Forge
Hero of Many
Marble Time
Super Panda Adventures
Anodyne Remix Album
Frog Fractions
Little Inferno
Anodyne
Me and My Dinosaur 2
Drox Operative


Frog Fractions soundtrack? Weird.

The standard bundle of six albums is almost completely excellent. The bigger bundle? Wildly more eclectic, but definitely worth a look, not least for the two excellent Fez remix albums.

The Game Music Bundle 5 will run until the 27th August.

Indie gaming has gotten kind of huge over the past few years, and the internet's beginning to bulge at the seams with all the indieness going on lately. Indie Game: The Movie—whose special edition is being released next week—last year documented the lives of four indie developers as they put together their little-budget, big-name concepts. What of the thousands of other indie developers out there, though? A pair of filmmakers are seeking to answer that question with their newly revealed Kickstarter campaign for GameLoading: Rise of the Indies, a documentary that seeks to zoom out and look at the entire indie scene globally.

Studio Bento's already traveled the world in their quest to quiz ostensibly every indie developer ever, and a heap of interview footage has already been shot of game development greats such as Chris Avellone and Antichamber's Alexander Bruce; the Kickstarter campaign seeks to raise the funds for the team to travel even further, penetrating such mystical places as Romania and Belgium. Lester Francois of Studio Bento says that the film will be of special interest to PC gamers.

"When we started the film, I was surprised at how many indie developers are sticking to making games for PC," Francois tells PC Gamer. "It's great meeting developers not concerned with the iOS gold rush and content doing their own thing. We're very excited to be interviewing some of these PC developers, including the guys behind FTL and Kentucky Route Zero."

Pledging $15 will get you a digital download of the film, and there are also tiers including two indie games bundles. I've seen some of Studio Bento's footage so far, it's already looking really special. I'm especially eager to hear from the guys behind my latest favorite indie game, Kentucky Route Zero—to check out the full list of interviewees, check out GameLoading's website.

Ben Prunty, the composer of the soundtrack for FTL: Faster Than Light, has published a “guided tour” of the motifs and themes that show up throughout the game’s 29 tracks. FTL is a remarkable game for a lot of reasons, including what is hands down one of the best recent musical scores around.

“he FTL soundtrack is very self-referential,” Prunty writes. “Lots of sounds, melodies and chords show up multiple times throughout.” Pulling up Prunty’s bandcamp page lets you follow along with his references, even if you haven’t purchased a copy.



“I actually wrote this melody a few years before,” Prunty writes about “The MilkyWay Melody,” a fast, twinkling theme that shows up in several places in the game. “I was challenging myself to write and produce a new piece of music every week for three months... hen I wrote the melody I was actually envisioning some kind of old DOS space game. When the opportunity came up to write for FTL, it made perfect sense to fit it in.”

The thing I love about analysis like this is that it makes perfect sense when someone points it out to you, but it never occurred to me while playing the game. There’s a reason that Mantis space always creeps me out, and it wasn’t until now that I realized it was Prunty’s devilish minor chords.



FTL was one of the earliest big Kickstarter success stories, was of our short-form game of the year winner in 2012, and helped launch the resurgence of indie roguelikes that seem to be everywhere these days.

Check out Prunty’s full writeup of the soundtrack and follow along on his bandcamp page. If you haven’t checked out FTL, it happens to be featured on the Steam Summer Sale right this instant.

Being a captain in FTL: Faster Than Light is a nerve-wracking experience. Hostile aliens could teleport onto your ship at a moments notice, an asteroid could take out life support, and you're constantly put in horrible situations with no clear solution. The responsibility is simply too great, but luckily a pair of fellow space-goers are working on a Garry's Mod gamemode that lets you demote yourself to the role of a single crewmember.

The mod, called Final Frontier, is a 3D representation of the cruel—but rewarding—roguelike we thoroughly enjoyed last year. Where your ships systems were easy to control from your tactical view, everything in Final Frontier must be managed by human players. Firing weapons, teleporting players, and unlocking doors requires a quick mind and quicker hands at the correct console.

The developers hosted a Q&A to elaborate on what their FTL-inspired mod entails:

“This game is (heavily (blatantly)) inspired by FTL, a game we all enjoyed playing but felt would be improved with multiplayer,” one of the developers wrote. “Unlike FTL, you control a single crewmember in first-person perspective, and must manually perform the tasks that FTL characters carried out by standing at their posts mashing keyboards. How well you perform your job is entirely dependent on the skill of the player at that task.”

The two modders say they’re only “prototyping the project in Garry’s Mod,” and that they’re only testing it internally, but plan to set up a public server once the mod’s main features are finished. I suppose I could take this time to look for a top-tier crew that’ll fight and die for me without question. Any takers?

Thanks, Rock, Paper Shotgun

Just as promised, Steam Trading Cards is now live. The virtual cards can be earned by playing participating games on Steam, trading with other users, or buying on the Steam Marketplace. Complete a set to create a badge, earn rewards and XP, and level up. The user with the highest Steam level at the end of the year gets to high five Gabe Newell while announcing Half-Life 3. In space.

In other true facts, I'm already hearing from users playing the Steam marketplace to profit off the cards' initial popularity. One user I spoke to has been buying low and selling high to pad his Steam wallet, even creating scarcity by buying up low-value cards in quantity. I'll keep an eye on marketplace prices as more users start trading the collectibles.

I was hoping to find a good deal on a 1952 Mickey Mantle card, but unfortunately, baseball isn't a participating game. You can see which of the games you own are participating here.

This year's GDC has been the source of many interesting industry tidbits. But forget them for now, because it also hosted two award shows last night. Shiny, slightly crass and easily digestible in a handy list format - we've got all the winners from the Independent Games Festival Awards and Game Developers Choice Awards right here. Did Hotline Miami's masked protagonist beat the living snot out of the FTL crew for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize? Did Incredipede's creepy-crawly monstrosities scare away the other Visual Art nominees? Did any game not called Journey win a GDC Award? Read on to find out.

We'll start with the IGF Awards, primarily because its the one that wasn't dominated by a PS3-exclusive game about plodding through a desert.

Independent Games Festival Awards

Seumas McNally Grand Prize

Hotline Miami (Dennaton Games)
FTL: Faster Than Light (Subset Games)
Cart Life (Richard Hofmeier)
Little Inferno (Tomorrow Corporation)
Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer)


Excellence in Visual Art

Incredipede (Northway Games and Thomas Shahan)
Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer)
Guacalamelee! (Drinkbox Studios)
Loves in a Dangerous Spacetime (Asteroid Base)
Year Walk (Simogo)


Excellence in Narrative

Thirty Flights of Loving (Blendo Games)
Cart Life (Richard Hofmeier)
Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer)
Dys4ia (Auntie Pixelante)
Gone Home (The Fullbright Company)


Technical Excellence

StarForge (CodeHatch)
Perspective (DigiPen Widdershins)
Little Inferno (Tomorrow Corporation)
Intrusion 2 (Aleksey Abramenko)
LiquidSketch (Tobias Neukom)


Excellence In Design

Samurai Gunn (Beau Blyth)
FTL: Faster Than Light (Subset Games)
Starseed Pilgrim (Droqen & Ryan Roth)
Super Hexagon (Terry Cavanagh)
Super Space (David Scamehorn and Alexander Baard/DigiPen)


Excellence In Audio

Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer)
Bad Hotel (Lucky Frame)
140 (Jeppe Carlsen)
Hotline Miami (Dennaton Games)
Pixeljunk 4AM (Q-Games)


Best Student Game

ATUM (NHTV IGAD)
Back to Bed (Danish Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment)
Blackwell's Asylum (Danish Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment)
Farsh (NHTV IGAD)
Knights of Pen & Paper (IESB - Instituto de Ensino Superior de Brasilia & UnB - Universidade de Brasilia)
the mindfulxp volume (Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center)
Pulse (Vancouver Film School)
Zineth (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)


Nuovo Award

Cart Life (Richard Hofmeier)
Spaceteam (Henry Smith)
Dys4ia (Auntie Pixelante)
Bientot l'ete (Tale of Tales)
7 Grand Steps (Mousechief)
MirrorMoon (SantaRagione + BloodyMonkey)
VESPER.5 (Michael Brough)
Little Inferno (Tomorrow Corporation)


Audience Award
FTL: Faster Than Light (Subset Games)

Thoughts? Firstly, congratulations to Zineth, deserved winner of Best Student Game. It's great, and you should play it. More obviously, well done to Richard Hofmeier for the runaway success of Cart Life. I'm sure many will be surprised by just how well it's done, especially among such a strong list of contenders for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. If you're currently thinking "Cart What now?" let Christopher Livingston's Sim-plicity column on the game fill you in.

Elsewhere in the list, I'm surprised to see Little Inferno getting a Technical Excellence award (it had nice fire, I guess), unsurprised to see FTL nab the Audience Award, and marginally disappointed to see Hotline Miami go back to its DeLorean with nothing. Although, hey, it's still got a chance at a Games Developer Choice Award! Haha, no, just kidding. Journey won everything.

Game Developers Choice Awards

Game of the Year

Dishonored (Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks)
The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)
Mass Effect 3 (BioWare/Electronic Arts)
XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Firaxis Games/2K Games)
Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)


Innovation Award

Mark of the Ninja (Klei Entertainment/Microsoft Studios)
Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)
FTL: Faster Than Light (Subset Games)
The Unfinished Swan (Giant Sparrow/Sony Computer Entertainment)
ZombiU (Ubisoft Montpellier/Ubisoft)


Best Audio

Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)
Hotline Miami (Dennaton Games/Devolver Digital)
Sound Shapes (Queasy Games/Sony Computer Entertainment)
Assassin's Creed III (Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft)
Halo 4 (343 Industries/Microsoft Studios)


Best Debut

Humble Hearts (Dust: An Elysian Tail)
Polytron Corporation (Fez)
Giant Sparrow (The Unfinished Swan)
Subset Games (FTL: Faster Than Light)
Fireproof Games (The Room )


Best Downloadable Game

The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)
Spelunky (Derek Yu/Andy Hull)
Trials: Evolution (RedLynx/Microsoft Studios)
Mark Of The Ninja (Klei Entertainment/Microsoft Studios)
Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)


Best Game Design

Dishonored (Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks)
Mark Of The Ninja (Klei Entertainment/Microsoft Studios)
Spelunky (Derek Yu/Andy Hull)
Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)
XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Firaxis Games/2K Games)


Best Handheld/Mobile Game

Gravity Rush (SCE Japan Studio/Sony Computer Entertainment)
Hero Academy (Robot Entertainment)
Sound Shapes (Queasy Games/Sony Computer Entertainment)
The Room (Fireproof Games)
Kid Icarus: Uprising (Sora/Nintendo)


Best Narrative

Spec Ops: The Line (Yager Entertainment/2K Games)
Mass Effect 3 (BioWare/Electronic Arts)
Dishonored (Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks)
The Walking Dead (Telltale Games)
Virtue's Last Reward (Chunsoft/Aksys Games)


Best Technology

Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft)
PlanetSide 2 (Sony Online Entertainment)
Halo 4 (343 Industries/Microsoft Studios)
Call of Duty: Black Ops II (Treyarch/Activision)
Assassin's Creed III (Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft)


Best Visual Arts

Borderlands 2 (Gearbox Software/2K Games)
Journey (Thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment)
Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft)
Dishonored (Arkane Studios/Bethesda Softworks)
Halo 4 (343 Industries/Microsoft Studios)


Ambassador Award
Chris Melissinos, curator of The Smithsonian's The Art of Video Games exhibit

Pioneer Award
Spacewar creator Steve Russell

Audience Award
Dishonored

Lifetime Achievement Award
BioWare founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk

Conclusion: award show judges really love Journey.