There's no question that Yasumi Matsuno has become one of the most prominent names in the genre of RPG tactics games at large, with his past work designing such iconic titles as Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story. So when Matsuno teamed up with renowned mobile publisher Playdek for a brand new game experience, well you can bet your sweet tactics that gamers were more than a little excited!In fact, the overwhelming fan response that followed the announcement of Matsuno and Pladek's first game together, Unsung Story, has prompted the team to turn to Kickstarter today for additional crowdfunding support, with the primary goal being to raise the $600,000 needed to bring the game to PC and Mac platforms in 2015."In addition , Playdek and Matsuno have also established some stretch goals beyond the initial $600,000, which would allow them to bring the game to even more platforms like the PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS. Other stretch goals hope to expand the creative design team to include composer Hitoshi Sakimoto and translators Alexander Smith and Joseph Reeder.Unsung Story takes players into the breathtaking fantasy realm of Rasfalia, which is teeming with just as many wizards and creatures as it is with hidden secrets to uncover and forgotten legends to learn. While the game is currently set for release at some point in 2015, the new Kickstarter campaign has just gone live today, which you can view and donate to by clicking right over here.
After last Fall's successful Kickstarter campaign, there has been a bit of buzz surrounding SeaCliff Interactive's Super Roman Conquest. The game caught the eyes of gamers by introducing them to Ancient Rome in a three-dimensional, 2D environment. What that means for players is that while the graphics depict, flat, pixelated soldiers, the player has the ability to rotate through multiple fields of battle. With the scroll of the mouse wheel, players can instantly shift from a line of archers, besieging city walls in the foreground, and zoom to the marching centurions, heading into battle in the background.In the pre-Alpha build that I played (which is currently available to the public on Super Roman Conquest's IndieDB page), I led an assault into a traitorous city and claimed it for the glory of Rome. Even though SeaCliff Interactive made it very clear that the demo is still pre-Alpha, Super Roman Conquest played out great. The controls took a bit to adjust to, but by the end of the two quick-and-painless tutorials, I was comfortable enough to handle the one level included in the demo. "
In a postmortem post on IndieDB, Scraps developer Bill Borman provided some insight into what he experienced while establishing, and eventually succeeding at getting his gamefunded through Kickstarter. The interesting thing to note, as Borman points out in the post himself: he was just a relatively unknown games creator, handling everything himself."Yes, there was a lot of work involved and yes, there was still a fair amount of luck involved as well," Borman beings the postmortem by saying. "I made an attempt to build up a community for Scraps right from the start. People often ask whether giving so much away so early creates a risk of the idea being stolen. The risk of obscurity is much worse.""Borman outlined a number of things that he accomplished before launching the Kickstarter campaign, which he feels contributed to the campaign's success. He worked to improve his social media presence by creating a Twitter account and revising his pre-existing Facebook page. He also started development threads on sites like TIGSource and the Unity forums, while also maintaining a presence on IndieDB and Reddit. Borman also cross-posted updates to Scrap's page on Steam Greenlight Concepts.
The winners for the 28th Ludum Dare game jam and competition were announced earlier in the week. Held from December 13th to the 16th, Ludum Dare 28 tasked developers with creating a game around the theme "You Only Get One". Over two-thousand games were entered into both the competition and the game jam. Developers partaking in the competition had only 48 hours to develop their game and could only work alone. Participants in the jam were allowed to group up, given an extra 24 hours, and could use outside assets, within their final game.The winner of Best Overall Game for the competition was awarded to One Take by Daniël Haazen. In One Take players, must film a sequence for a movie in just one take. After winning, Haazen has announced that he will be developing a post-compo version.As for the game jam, the Best Overall winner is Titan Souls, by Mark Foster, David Fenn, and Andrew Gleeson. In Titan Souls, players must use just one arrow to slay four mighty titans.
Another CES in Las Vegas has come and gone, and I have opted to skip the festivities. Maybe it's because the one year I did CES in Vegas it was so crowded that I had to wait three hours for a monorail (there were no taxis), and even longer for blackjack table. Maybe it's that after staring 10,000 versions of the same flat screen TV, my mind turns to jelly. Or maybe I'm a homebody.Thankfully, the rest of tech press don't mind consumer product overload. Here are five cool game trends or products to come out of CES this year. On the whole, 2014 could be a good year for games.
Here's a question for all you deal hunters out there: how long does it usually take from the time you see a great new gaming sale pop up on the internet to the time you hit that enticing "purchase" button? Are you more of an impulse buyer who immediately picks up something the second you see it? Or are you a bit more cautious, and prefer to mull it over for a bit before deciding one way or another?Well I'll tell you what: I've always considered myself to fall under the latter category, as the type of person who would wait to the last possible second before scooping up the hottest new gaming deal. But that was until this week, that is, when so many amazing new deals and indie gaming bundles began cropping up online and forced me to blindly spend all of my money before I even had a second to realize what I was doing. But that's okay, because the new games I got made it so, so worth it."And so if there are any other deals going on this weekend that I may have missed due to my lightning-fast online purchases, be sure to point them out for everyone down in the replies!
Disruptor Beam got a pretty nice present from Facebook just before the holidays. It came in the form of Facebook's games team naming Game of Thrones Ascent a staff pick as one of the top games to debut on the social network in 2013.Though Game of Thrones Ascent isn't just a Facebook game since it's playable through more than one site (and will be headed to mobile, which we'll get to in a bit), the nod was still a significant one. For starters, it served as a validation that high quality games can succeed on the network even at a time when the total number of people is down from its peak a few years ago.It also helped reinforce the idea that Disruptor Beam is doing things right when it comes to its story-driven, highly social take on Westeros. Ideally, it serves as a way for hardcore Game of Thrones fans to be able to interact with their favorite fantasy world, an attractive way for core gamers to get compelling gameplay in bite-sized chunks, and as a "gateway drug" for people who know the IP but have yet to dive into the books or the HBO television series.That's a tall order, but as Disruptor Beam CEO Jon Radoff told Gamezebo in a recent phone conversation, the game does indeed seem to be reaching all three audiences.
Video games are so hot right now. Specifically, games with digital cards that fight each other and multiplayer online battle arenas.MMOs are quite popular as well I hear (at least developers continue to think so), and turn-based strategy games like XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Fire Emblem: Awakening proved that when people say they want more games in that glorious genre, they don't actually mean more shooters.These genres can't possibly have anything in common, you say. They're all such very unique snowflakes. You'd be wrong, of course. What they have in common is war: the eternal war of the Warhammer franchise from Games Workshop, to be exact.