Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Redshirt is a game about being the person who is doomed from the very moment they put their uniform on. Taking place on a space station with a crew who spend a great deal of their lives on the social network, Spacebook, it asks the player to navigate a possible quagmire of relationships and workload while trying to earn the promotions that might keep them alive. Earlier this week, I spoke to the game’s lone developer, Mitu Khandaker, and discussed dynamic personality generation, incorporating social issues into games and ranting at GDC.

Then I threatened to burn games to the ground.

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I’ve spent most of my adult life waiting for a worthy successor to Jagged Alliance 2 so when Full Control announced that they had secured the rights to the license, I was eager to find out how true the new game would be to the original two. Heading to Kickstarter next week, where it will have a target of $350,000, Jagged Alliance: Flashback is a prequel that will explore the forming of mercenary organisation A.I.M. and cold war tensions. I spoke to CEO Thomas Hentschel Lund and team-mate Andreas to find out if old mercenary favourites will be back, why Kickstarter and the community matter, and the difficulties involved in resuscitating a franchise.

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Worlds of Magic could be as authentic a successor to Master of Magic as any game released in the last couple of decades. That’s a sobering reminder that the Microprose’s classic strategy game is almost twenty years old. I wanted to know how close Wastelands’ game will be to the game that chiefly inspired it, and how the D20 combat system and seven planes of reality might change the experience, so I spoke to lead designer Aaron Ethridge and producer Leszek Lisowski and secured some answers. We also discussed the addition of artist George Edward Purdy, who worked on Master of Magic, and agreed that recreating the second world war isn’t quite the same as making randomised worlds full of skeletons and wyrms.

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Battle Worlds: Kronos has almost reached its $120,000 Kickstarter goal with more than a month to spare. It’s the kind of game that is ideally suited to the crowdfunding platform – a turn-based strategy game that references the likes of Battle Isle, simultaneously exciting people like me, and causing publishers to purse their lips and tighten their purses. I spoke with Jan Theysen, co-founder and Creative Director of KING Art, to learn more about the company’s approach to crowdfunding, Battle Worlds history and the game itself.

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It’s about five to seven on a Wednesday night and I meant to call my mum about an hour ago to tell her that I am a failure of a woman because I am twenty seven and sleeping on a beanbag in a loft, but instead what I did was look in the back of the fridge for dinner, which turns out to be a giant pot of Tesco’s Finest pea soup with ham in. I dump the pot of soup on a table and then have a slight heart in mouth moment – I can’t call my mum or eat soup I am interviewing Rhianna Pratchett and she is the Lara Croft of writing Tomb Raiders.
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As well as pointing my tragically non-robotic eyes at robot futuresports / strategy game Frozen Endzone last week, I also had a long natter with Mode 7 founders Ian Hardingham and Paul Taylor about their follow-up to the splendid Frozen Synapse. Read on for its origin story, how it’s not really like American Football, their roguelike-like plans for the game’s singleplayer mode, inevitable comparisons to Blood Bowl and Speedball, and Luigi fanfic.
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Since we first glimpsed Dead State back in 2010, it has gone through a successful Kickstarter and is now well on the way down the road to completion. We talked to project lead Brian Mitsoda about the important of writing, the value of Kickstarter, and pinball.
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There’s going to be a second major Civilization V expansion. It’s called Brave New World, it introduces 9 new Civs, the concepts of tourism, ideologies, international trade routes and archaeology, and basically it sounds like it’s pretty huge on an under-the-hood front. I had a big chat with Firaxis lead programmer Ed Beach and senior producer Dennis Shirk on what’s in there, why, how it works and why we’ll be forming impressive in-game art collections.

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Rejoice, heretics. There’s going to be a brand new, turn-based and faithful PC adaptation of legendary Games Workshop boardgame Space Hulk, and I am really very excited about this. So I had a good old chat with Thomas Hentschel Lund, boss of Full Control, the studio behind this sci-fi strategy game of man versus alien in desperate battle. Inside: the first (and excellent) in-game screenshots, details on how it works, what’s been tweaked, if it’s as brutal as the source material, whether PC or iOS is the lead platform, whether it nods to the old EA first-person games, and how the whole thing happened due to one very happy accident involving a fire pit.

(You can click on the first two screenshots in this post for fancy HD versions, by the way).
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I’ve been playing the Arma 3 alpha! I know. But before we get to that, let’s see what project lead Joris-Jan van ‘t Land has to say about the state of the project, and the plans for this early release of the madly anticipated sandbox soldier sim. Read on for victory!
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Few failed Kickstarters have filled us with much sadness, but one that did was the incredible-looking gravity-bending physics and construction, MaK. Craig talked the the team behind it, Verge Game Studio, and asked them about what lies ahead for a project after a failure to the secure the funds they needed, and what their success on Greenlight means for the fate of the game as a whole.
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