The good people at Carpe Fulgur sent me a review copy of the PC indie RPG, Recettear, and I must say that I’m in love. 1 part Action/RPG dungeon-crawler, 1 part shop-sim, all parts adorable. Expect a full review sometime next week.
So we probably won’t do this, but I thought we’d get some more outside opinions, out of curiousity and to help us make a decision – should we license out the Breath of Death VII code for other developers to make their own RPGs?
Pros:
Helps developers who want to make RPGs but aren’t the best programmers.
We could see some cool games from other developers out of this.
Alternate source of income for us to help pay the bills between game releases.
XBLIG might become THE place for RPGs on home consoles.
Cons:
We could have an RPGMaker effect where lots of crummy RPGs get released.
RPGs on XBLIG might all start to feel the same if they’re based on the same engine.
Extra work – I’d have to go through and add documentation to explain how the engine works.
Some people might waste their money, not realizing how hard an RPG is to make, even with an engine in-place (there are no user friendly editors with our system- it’s all code editing).
If we did decide to do this, the code license would probably cost a few hundred dollars ($300 sounds about right to me), but again, nothing is set in stone and there’s a very good chance we won’t do this at all.
It would be easy to miss since it was only on the New Releases for a day or two due to a sudden rush of new games, but Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess just came out on XBox Live Indie Games for 240 MS points ($2 cheaper than the PSP version). It’s simple (not much more complicated than jumping up and not missing platforms), but it’s fun and has rather nice production for an indie game.
You can download it here.
Just saw this via twitter – a rather well-written post-mortem of Dysnomia. Quite interesting from both a programming aspect and a business aspect. You can read it here.
And if you haven’t played it yet, I highly recommend giving Dysnomia a try. It’s a high quality Aliens-esque shooter similar to Alien Breed. Well worth the $3. And to be honest, I’ve enjoyed it much more than the official Alien Breed remake on XBLA that came out last year.
Some more Cthulhu Saves the World media for you.
First, we have some screenshots of the first town in the game. Townsfolk haven’t been added yet, but this ought to give you a nice idea of the kind of visual improvement we’ve made since our last game.
Next, we have some animated GIFs of 2 of our main characters – Cthulhu himself and the lovely Umi.
Finally, we have some additional songs from the game. We’re planning on releasing the entire soundtrack for free when the game comes out, but in the meantime, we hope you enjoy the music from two of the dungeon types - Caves & Shrines.
“I have never heard you laugh so hard at a movie that did not involve Joel and the bots.” – my wife
Here are some screenshots of various parts of the world map in Cthulhu Saves the World for your viewing pleasure.
We’ll have some new area screenshots out later this week (maybe today), but in the meantime, here are some new battle screenshots from Cthulhu Saves the World.
