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  • Mattias Gerdt, Music For IGF Nominee Cobalt: Part 1 [Interview]

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  • Mattias Gerdt, Music For IGF Nominee Cobalt: Part 1 [Interview]

    Oxeye Game Studio’s action platformer Cobalt has received honorable mentions in the technical and visual arts categories for the 2011 Independent Games Festival. It is also a finalist for excellence in sound design. IGF’s judges had this to say about Cobalt: “The soundscape in Oxeye’s Cobalt was also praised for “giving it the amount of [...]

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  • DIYGamer.com State of the Site + Updates

    Hello friends, fellow readers and indie game lovers. You may have noticed a distinct lack of content and updates from yours truly these past few months. Truth of the matter is that we’ve struggled to gain traction in a world dominated by up-to-the-minute news from mega blogs like Kotaku.com, Joystiq.com and, yes, even IndieGames.com/blog (for [...]


  • utgarden The same game jam that brought us Whale of Noise and Pigeon Racing (and indeed Deltoid Onions) has inspired Edmund and My First Skydiving Academy creator Paul “Farmergnome” Greasley to contrive a side-scrolling survival-based take on Animal Crossing. At least, that was his stated goal. The end result is a highly original cross between Lost in Blue and Metroid. Sort of, not really.

    You take the role of a middle-aged farmer whose house has collapsed. You collect your tools and you set out into the wilderness to gather much-needed supplies while your stamina drops from the cold. You chop and gather wood to burn and restore your stamina. You kill rabbits for meat. You chip at rocks to find, er, cookies and bullets. Never mind; you gather bits and pieces to help you rebuild your house, and to expand your range thereby to find more stuff, thereby to get hardier and further expand your range.

    The controls are a little loose and wonky, and the mapping isn’t immediately obvious. The game uses WASD and the mouse. Right-click to use items — your pickaxe, your hatchet. Left-click to rummage around the scenery. You can pick stuff up and drag it around the environment, or plop it into your inventory for later. Most items have several uses, both practical and conceptual. Jumping is very imprecise, but at least you can hook your feet into nearly any crack and quickly jump again for further height.

    The tutorial/advisory/narrative text is rarely all that helpful. Usually it just does the “What a horrible night to have a curse” routine, to tell you how quickly the outside world will drain your reserves. Sometimes it tries to tell you how to use stuff, or to progress. That can be a little perplexing.

    To start you off easily, look at the top of the screen and find your inventory. go click on that box you’ve got there, with the [A] on it. That’s your axe. (Why it’s not just a picture of an axe, who knows.) Now your fellow is equipped and ready to chop wood. Toodle off one way or the other until you find a tree, and right-click it a few times until it turns into a bundle of firewood. Left-click that bundle, and drag it to your inventory. Now return to your hovel and drag the firewood into the fireplace. (It looks kind of like a TV set.) Presto; you’ve got a place and means to restore your stamina. Next if you explore to your left you’ll find a box with a [P] on it. That’s your pickaxe. Drag it into your inventory, and click it to equip it. Now you can break rocks and find all kinds of crazy nonsense.

    That should pretty well put you on your way. Now all you have to do is drag around your tiles and rebuild your house. Mind, you can put tiles on top of each other — so watch out that you’re using everything available to you.

    You can download Under the Garden here.

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    • imaginationac 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand
      I played this last week. It definitely has a nice atmosphere about it, and I love exploration type games. Plus the ability to mod sounds nice, though I have not tried that out.

      Technically, the wait between screens is a bit long. That's about my only complaint for what is hopefully just the beginning of what these guys are working on.
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