Not since I first discovered Civ2 has a game made me late for so many things.

Eufloria offers two of the same addictive qualities as the Civilization series, both the empire-spreading and the need to play just a few more minutes until the next mini-milestone. Eufloria simplifies the unit selection and improvement add-ons of the real-time strategy genre, presenting mystical space lifeforms in a surprisingly vibrant universe. You play not as a general or political leader, but as a collection of seedlings, and your goal is to grow, and spread, take over neighboring asteroids, and make the growers proud.

The game’s artwork is reminiscent of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s pen and ink drawings for The Little Prince, while the game as a whole brings to mind Madeleine L’Engle’s Sporos in A Wind In The Door, right down to the Greek roots in the game’s title. (I knew my degree in classics would pay off eventually)

Gameplay: This is an elegant, simplified RTS game. Gameplay is intuitive, with simple, clear menus. You can easily check at your planet’s stats as you play, if you’re into that, but the focus is not on watching the numbers change, but on the gentle spread of seedling colonies and algorythm jungles across the galaxy. Your units don’t gain experience or power-ups from successful combat, but you can build battle trees and a deathray flower after a few levels.

The basic, mouse-driven controls would lend themselves well to a touchscreen, too, and I have to wonder if there’s a Eufloria iPhone app in the future.

There’s a odd bit of pathing, though, where seedlings assigned to move will go through hostile territory to their destination, if it’s shorter than going around through safe space. Brave of them, but I’d rather they didn’t run off and get themselves killed.

I would also have liked the ability to set a rally point for all my seedlings. In more populated galaxies, it can become a bit tedious to organize seedling deployment. But, again, this isn’t a game about rushing towards a goal.

Along those lines, play could be improved with an option to continue playing the level after completing the mission goal. I found myself playing more to grow a thriving seedling empire in Eufloria’s lovely universe than to score points or take over new planets as fast as possible, and I would have liked to continue colonizing each planet and watching my trees grow instead of jumping to the next level. 8.5/10

Graphics: Eufloria presents an elegantly simple universe of asteroids and seedlings, and then uses tiny variations and random elements to create a new universe each time.

Each asteroid offers seedlings grown on it a unique combination of energy, strength, and speed. Stats lawyers can build an army of seedlings on steroids, but more importantly, these factors slightly change the visual style of the trees and seedlings grown on the planet (for example, faster seedlings grow with bigger wings), adding more options for your unique Eufloria universe.

You’re never squinting to determine what kind of tree you’ve planted, or differenciating between friendlies and hostiles is never hard, but each tree is unique, and each seedling takes a slightly different path to orbit, quickly making a starting gameboard of Microsoft Paint circles into a delicate, dynamic universe.

Zoom in to watch realtime battles between opposing seedling empires. This isn’t just watching a red healthbar or watching numbers go up and down. You can watch your seedlings fly across the galaxy to dive-bomb the evil grey menace, or throw themselves at enemy trees, hurtling down the Dyson tree’s root to the center of the planet to clear the planet for colonization.

Although most of the game has a gorgeous, organic feel, story information appears as clumsy white text on a black background. I know this seems to be an indie game constant, whether it’s a cut corner or a stylistic choice, and I would rather have a stunning game with amateurish text, but the high-school MySpace look is still jarring in what’s otherwise such a visually appealing game.

Sound: My usual complaint with videogame soundtracks is that they quickly become repetitive. But even after playing for an extended period, Eufloria’s soundtrack was still pleasant music.

Lasting Appeal: Like the best real-time strategy games, it’s hard not to get sucked in for just one more turn, or one more scenario, even after successfully completing the challenge. Eufloria is a game you won’t be able to shut it off easily. Could there be a clearer indication of a good game?

This video only shows one player, but new video(s) will probably be recorded this weekend with more players.

http://www.stolpskottstudios.com

GAME DESCRIPTION
Top Down Cooperative 3D Shooter for 1-4 Local Players.
Featuring realistic line of sight and challenging Ai,
it gives you a good mix of tactics and hectic shooting.
The game includes 5 maps with good replay value, 12 unique enemies, 6 weapons and 4 difficulties.
Did I mention the virtually unlimited bullet holes feature?

Mike: 6
When I visited Labyrinthica’s website, the screens
immediately reminded me of the Legend of Zelda. Ultimately, the game is a more generic hack and slash game. The hand drawn cutscenes and in-game
characters look nice, but the dungeons themselves are sparse and boring looking. I realize they’re randomly generated, but there could’ve been more done to spiffy them up. The gameplay is solid, but the game could’ve been better if it followed more in Zelda’s footsteps. The game has a good core, but could use some more play testing to make it less repetitive and more polished.

Erika: 8
Labyrinthica’s relatively simple concept masks
complex and elaborate gameplay full of items,
monsters and the occasional, albeit clever, boss battles. The game is easy to get into despite the absence of instructions; in fact, this makes for an interesting experience trying to figure out Lima’s attacks. Consisting of thirty levels and fun gameplay, this action game is well worth $9.95. Labryinthica may not have taken any risks, but it’s still a solid indie title worth checking out.

Sam: 5
Labyrinthica is a hack and slash action game, where you run around and melee enemies in randomly
generated mazes, killing a certain number of enemies to advance to the next maze. The mazes are
graphically repetitive (just trees, grass, and enemies) with little variety. There’s a leveling system, but I didn’t feel like my character advanced any. The combat is shallow, just circles foes and click to attack. If you want a better hack and slash experience, get
Torchlight. If you want a Rouge-like game, download
Nethack or Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. There’s not much original or new here, other games have done the same things better.

The IGF saw a great group of games, but only one could win the $20,000 Grand Prize and that game was none other than Andy Schatz’s Monaco. Monaco also grabbed the excellence in design award. Monaco is a 4 player stealth co-op game from Pocketwatch Games.

Other winners included:

Nuovo Award: Tuning by Cactus

Excellence in Visual Art and Technical Excellence: Limbo by PlayDead

Best Mobile Game:  Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor by Tiger Style

Excellence in Audio: Closure by Closure Team

Student Showcase Winner: Continuity

Audience Award: Heroes of Nerwerth by S2 Games

D2D Vision Award: Max and the Magic Marker by Press Play

The reindeer fall ill, forcing Santa to strap on a jetpack and deliver the presents solo. Tilting the iPhone or iPod Touch left and right steers Santa, while touch buttons fire his thrusters and drop presents into sparkling chimneys. The game is technically sound, and the visuals are nice (aside from too much repetition and one terrifying elf), but the game gets old really quick. Plus, the challenge is almost nonexistent, with little replay value; you’ll figure out how to do a perfect game your third time through.

Now comes my ax to grind. I’ve played too many iPhone games that had little to no music or sound design, and Rocket Santa is no exception. The title has no music and sound effects that would make a Commodore 64 sound like the London Symphony Orchestra. An iPod is designed to be capable of producing excellent sound quality. Not incorporating that feature into game design is inexcusable.

Rocket Santa only costs a buck, and it might have been worth it at Christmas as a festive diversion. More replay value would help too. If you’re jonesing for a Santa Claus game for iPhone, play A Christmas Santa instead.

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Erika: 7

The story begins with our young hero, Anka, whose goal is to free his mother from a crime she did not commit and find his missing father. In between this story, players are asked to solve brainteasers in order to progress through the game. Simple enough, but what this adventure-puzzle game lacks is focus. The need to repeatedly visit people and locations in order to gain certain items throughout the game adds to more frustrations. Despite there being some good ideas, Anka takes a lot of missteps in gameplay. You’re better off simply playing the demo.

Sam: 5
Anka is an adventure game. You control a young boy doing everyday chores, like finding the door handle that you tore off and threw on the roof, or finding the 40 eggs you hid in and around the house. These Basic tasks require mini-games. Want to read a recipe? Solve a crossword puzzle. The other tasks are more like traditional adventure game puzzles. They involve a lot of pixel hunting and combining unlikely objects. Trying to fix a hole in a boat? Use a frog, a broken bottle of honey, and bees. The puzzles range from obvious to illogical. However, the environments are detailed, and none of the items are too hidden.

Peter: 3
Anka is a point-and-click puzzler with well-drawn, anime-style characters and various minigames. The first thing I had to do was search the pixels for 40 eggs, which was frustrating and boring. Then I did a tile puzzle and a word search. While the art is well-executed, neither it nor the puzzles offer anything new or challenging. It seems like the target audience is children who can’t handle simple game mechanics, and I guess there is some appeal in that.

Stew: 8
In spite of myself, I liked Anka. A sickly sweet tale of a chipper lad occupying an equally honey toned world, it’s the sort of game that would usually make me puke. That said, at its core Anka is less about some brat’s “adventures” and more about playing mini-games and solving puzzles. The mini-games especially impressed me. While none are especially groundbreaking or complex, they are all fun and well done. I could actually imagine several being sold as standalone products and to its credit, Anka has them all under one roof, available for play whenever you like. In short, Anka is an attractive package for casual gamers, if you can get past the Care Bears sentimentality.

My name’s Radek, and I’m part of Incubator Games, a small development studio from Toronto, Canada. We were all previously leads at Capybara Games working on such projects as the original Critter Crunch and HoMM: Clash of Heroes, but decided to strike out on our own. We are currently in the process of giving one of our games — Tribes of Mexica — a bit of a visual makeover, and we were wondering if you could help us with getting some public feedback?

The URL to the post about the art-style change can be found here: http://www.incubatorgames.com/index.php/20100222/tribes-mexica-makeover/

Of course it’s a bit of an unusual request, so we’d understand if the material wasn’t quite in line with what indiegamemag.com usually publishes. Regardless, we’d appreciate your own opinions, and we look forward to (hopefully) bugging you guys about our projects in the future.

Thanks in advance.

Guild Software announces upcoming multi-platform MMO middleware solution: The NAOS Engine.

MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN, March 6th 2010. Award-winning independent game developer Guild Software, Inc has announced the upcoming launch of a new MMO middleware product: the NAOS Engine. Developed to power their long-running, continuously-upgraded retail MMORPG, Vendetta Online, this engine provides a complete and multi-platform solution, with native client build targets for Windows, Mac and Linux. The highly scalable distributed game server uses lightweight Erlang threading to provide persistent handling of hundreds of thousands of individual NPCs and other game elements, with seamless management as they transition across running/non-running boundaries in the game universe. A well-proven update/patch server and client are also included, the server allowing optimized binary patching and user queues for rate limiting and overflow. The update client supports redundant failover to multiple patch server clusters, and includes automated client crash reporting, with fetching and submission of auto-generated tracebacks via HTTP to a proprietary bug tracking system. Finally, a completely custom Lua/FastCGI-based web content management system, with proven billing, messageboard, mailing list and administrative features, rounds out the server solution, creating a nearly-complete package for the prospective MMO developer. All server software can be run on either FreeBSD or Linux, and works well with existing RDBMS solutions such as MySQL or Oracle, as well as DBMS such as Mnesia. Beyond the use of a database for persistency, an integrated RDF triple-store is in development to more elegantly enable applications such as advanced AI,
simulated-economics, and monitoring tasks.

The NAOS Engine will be available either as a complete licensed source package, or individual components may be licensed separately at a reduced cost. The product is expected to launch in the year, and will be followed by the NAOS Platform, a cloud-based MMO development solution which also includes scalable hosting, with sliding pricing based on usage and revenue, to help startup MMO developers focus purely on their games. For more information, or to contact Guild Software, please see: http://www.guildsoftware.com/naos

About Guild Software, Inc
Guild Software is an award-winning independent game developer based in Milwaukee, WI. Founded in 1998, the company has continually pursed the cutting edge in large-scale multiplayer environments. Developing a completely proprietary MMO engine from scratch, these efforts culminated in the 2002 public alpha debut and 2004 multi-platform retail launch of Vendetta Online(tm). A relatively early entry into the Space MMO genre, the title remains one of the few with a completely realtime, “twitch” combat model. Vendetta Online later broke ground with the launch of the Player Contribution Corps, a mechanic by which the player community may directly contribute content for use in the production game, via web-based mission development and other tools. Guild Software continues to expand upon Vendetta Online, using the title to further both the game and the NAOS Engine on which it is based, striving towards the next generation in unbounded, evolving worlds.

This is the old Blitz Cletus Clay trailer, the game created completely from clay using stop motion animation. This is the version that Anthony Flack was originally working on before the HD version went into production.

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