Firefly Online is clearly counting on the cancelled sci-fi show’s fanbase to carry it, and has revealed it’s hoping to lure them in by reuniting the core cast to voice virtual versions of their characters. Which will probably work. But it’s a tricky balance to strike: this will make more fans interested, but also raises development costs of a game based on a show that wasn’t popular enough to avoid cancellation. The game beneath the nostalgia will need to be good enough.

A few snaps of gameplay are in a new trailer. Come see.

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The concept is thus: take two game makers, one artist and one programmer, and challenge them to make a game in 48 hours. Film the process and release the result as a bundle including the documentary and the resulting game. It’s called Super Game Jam, the first episode was released two months ago, and episodes two and three just launched simultaneously late last week. That’s the news, but there are trailers and witterings below.

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What do you do when your released games unexpectedly make all the money in the world? Use some of it to create prototypes of other games, I guess. Facepunch Studios, makers of Garry’s Mod and Rust, are beginning to write about different projects they’ve been developing. The first is Riftlight, an arcade shooter with “light-RPG” elements like levelling and skill trees. Over on the Facepunch blog, designer Adam Woolridge has concept art, early in-game footage and other details, some of which I’ve picked out below.

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IL-2 Sturmovik blew me away at Gamescom last year. With only a couple of weeks until I fly out to Cologne again, I’m enthusiastic about the prospect of another unexpected champion of gaming emerging from a cloudbank and peppering me with excitement. A year has passed since I took to the skies and development has continued at a steady rate. New planes are appearing and the modelling of existing ones is improving, but it’s the dynamic campaign I’m most excited to see. Glorious great maps. Two new videos below.

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I would quite like to see more cheating soon. Not that nasty awful cheating, the one that ruins multiplayer games for everyone but the cheater, but the idea of cheating. Double Fine’s Hack ‘n’ Slash is built around cheating with a memory editor, and now Screencheat demands players peek at each other’s screens in splitscreen.

Screencheat’s a competitive multiplayer first-person shooter with splitscreen for up to four players. Except. All players are invisible, so you’ll need to look at everyone else’s portion of the screen and analyse their view to figure out where they are. (So you can shoot them dead, obv.)

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If there’s one genre that isn’t struggling for female lead characters, it’s the adventure game. A billion grimy murder mysteries with a tough female cop have come out over the last decade (almost all of them dreadful). In complete contrast to those grim, glum affairs is the potential of Jenny LeClue, a bright, animated and distinctive Kickstarter pitch from animator Joe Russ. Promising to explore themes such as family, loss, and identity, and already showing off some seriously excellent animation, it too is a murder mystery. Just without the grime.

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What to call a action platformer with platforms that go mostly unused? That is the question of the hour. Fenix Rage makes absolutely no bones about being a demon-hard 2D jump-around-and-get-frustrated ‘em up. The blurred fellow above is main character and hedgehog lookalike Fenix, out for revenge after his village is destroyed leaving only two survivors – him and a stranger. He seems quite capable of flight, double jumps and air-dashes, hence my quandry. The small brown square he’s heading towards is a collectible cookie, apparently. I have no idea why he wants them, but I’m sympathetic towards it as a cause.

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Sundays are for returning from an extended absence to find that you’ve read little of the best games writing from the past week. Can we scrape it together anyway? Yes, with teamwork we can.

• I haven’t had a chance to read this lengthy Brendan Vance article yet, but reader A Person On The Internet (and many others) assure me its excellent. Person writes: “It explores a myriad of topics including Steam, Spelunky, Social Media, the meaning of ‘content’ and much more besides.” Works for me. Especially since it appears the article argues that Spelunky is better than the bible.

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It’s Comic-Con International 2014, and you know what that means. It’s time for grand announcements about new intellectual properties, gossip about beloved cult TV series, and a truckload of thematically appropriate bargains. (And anecdotes about questionable behaviour, but those appear to be inexorably tied to the convention experience. Sigh.>)

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Due to an internal mix-up, there was external confusion about the deadline for applications for the RPS junior writer position. To make sure everyone gets a chance to get their applications in, we’re extending the deadline to 23.59 UK time on Monday 28th July. You’ve got until midnight Monday night. If you already sent your application in after 3pm Friday, don’t worry, we’ve got it (and of course the very many that arrived before!). The original instructions for the job position are repeated below.

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