Adam had a play of Dark Matter back in July, and found himself rather taken with it. At the time it was Kickstartering itself, asking for £50,000. It fell dramatically short of that goal, but since then a publishing deal with Iceberg Interactive seems to have got things finished for Dutch devs, InterWave Studios. The Metroid-meets-horror side-scroller is due out on Steam in the next couple of weeks.
This week, on a very special episode of As The Greenlight Turns, social intrigue >rules the spotlight. Remember Race The Sun? It’s an excellent blink-and-you’re-wall-pizza racer in its own right, but it also recently catapulted its way into prominence due to its trouble getting on Steam, abysmal initial sales, and a subsequent, er, sale its developers organized for others suffering from their same plight. Well, all that stuff worked! Kind of hilariously quickly, given that the sale only started yesterday. Race The Sun has been greenlit. Other standouts this time around include Thief/Dishonored-inspired roguelike wonder Eldritch, Kickstarter darling Hyper Light Drifter, and PULSAR: Lost Colony.
Steam is so big that making some noise that you’re not on there is actually a half-decent way to get your game noticed. That’s the theory* of the Not On Steam Sale, at any rate. A group of indie developers with games not on Valve’s gaming monolith, who’ve had to deal with people saying “I’ll buy it on Steam”, are having a sale. 40+ indies will be cutting prices by 25% or more for the next seven days, including Inescapable, Sky Nations, and Tower of Guns. (more…)
Is Xi3′s Piston a Steam Box? Isn’t it? That’s a bit unclear right now. While Xi3 is specifically avoiding using that label, it points out that SteamOS will run on any living room machine. Thusly: “SteamOS should be able to run on Piston Consoles (PCs) as well, but we’ll have to wait until SteamOS is available to confirm this.” So, with that all (sorta) cleared up, how’s the ol’ outer space grapefruit looking? Well, the short version is “decently potent,” but all that computational mecha-muscle comes at a fairly hefty price. When the tiny marvel launches in November, it’ll run you $999. And that’s just the entry level model.
You probably haven’t heard, but Valve’s officially going forward with its plan to launch its own Steam-centric OS, living room hardware, and a crazy, touch-pad-based controller to back it all up. I know, right? It’s weird that no one has been talking about it incessantly. But while Valve preaches openness and hackability, it’s downplayed an ugly reality of the situation: smaller developers still face a multitude of struggles in the treacherous green jungles of its ecosystem. SteamOS and various Steam Boxes, however, stand to bring brilliantly inventive indie games to an audience that doesn’t even have a clue that they exist, so I got in touch with developers behind Gone Home, Race The Sun, Eldritch, Mark of the Ninja, Incredipede, Project Eternity, and more for their thoughts on SteamOS, who it’s even for, Valve’s rocky relationship with indies, and what it’ll take for Steam to actually be an “open” platform.>
It’s no Monkey Tennis but Size Five’s Gun Monkeys has found its fans. It’s a procedurally generated, physics-based 1 vs 1 deathmatch game and, being a multiplayer sort of thing, it is hungry for new players. To entice fresh monkey-handlers, Size Five are allowing people to play for free this weekend, on Steam, and reducing the price of the game by 50% during that time. That makes the price £1.99 and that’s for two copies of the game so you can pass one along to a friend. And then kill their monkeys. I haven’t played it yet but I may jump in this weekend. Video below.
Nvidia‘s history of Linux support has been – to put it very, very lightly – rocky at best, but apparently that’s all about to change. The hardware manufacturer is now throwing its considerable weight behind both SteamOS and Linux as a whole, even going so far as to promise it’ll release documentation on its GPUs to the Linux community so as to help ease compatibility issues. Meanwhile, the meaner, greener side of the graphicsability wars boasts of engineers “embedded at Valve” to hammer SteamOS into rip-roaring, console-busting shape. Which, I suppose, makes sense, given that AMD is supplying innards for both Microsoft and> Sony.
Following the SteamOS announcement on Monday, time has been ticking away, as it has a tendency to do, and we now find ourselves on the farside of Valve’s second announcement. It’s a Steam-powered Box! A group of them, to be more precise. And, boy, am I glad it is, because I wrote this pre-jump section of the post an hour ago, having spent the day polishing my crystal ball. If, like Brad Pitt, you want to know what’s in the frickin’ box, join me below for a brief tour.
IndieGameStand is done being just another flimsy roadside DealShack, only handing out whatever games it happens to have on-hand at the time. Now it’s hoping to make a giant leap into the big leagues, and it’s planning to blend up elements of Steam, GOG, and its own dev-friendly, pay-what-you-want heritage in order to do so. Steam, especially, is in its crosshairs, given that Greenlight – while improving – is still giving many smaller developers enough trouble that they can barely bite back tears as they lie to their emaciated, gently whimpering piggy banks. “Tomorrow,” they quaver. “I promise.” In an ideal world, IndieGameStand would like to change that.
Maia really does sound insanely marvelous, doesn’t it? It’s got all the complexity of a whirring, churning management simulation paired with the more down-to-earth-space personal side of something like The Sims or even Dwarf Fortress. The game’s planet is a harsh, unwelcoming place, but it greeted Adam with a brain-warming embrace. He quickly fell in love, and – via the ropey spinal strands of our official hivemind apparatus – so did the rest of RPS. But when can you pluck your own bendy straw into Maia’s thick systemic stew? Well, you’ve still got a bit of a wait ahead of you, but December’s not that> far off.
