A Song Of High & Higher: Game Of Glens

My first glance at Crackdown 2 dev Ruffian's attempt to Go Indie had me muttering 'oh great an Angry Birds clone, just what this wretched planet needs.' Then I looked closer and instead rubbed my chin while muttering "huh, World of Goo as an RTS. They could be onto something with that."

I didn't mutter either of those things. I stared dumbly at the pitch video for Game of Glens for a couple of minutes, then silently opened a CMS window and began writing a complete fabrication of how I'd spent the preceding moments. I don't know why I lie.

Ruffian are a Scottish outfit who've been tethered the callous Xbox train for a fair while and are now seeking to strike out on their own, with a little help from Square Enix's slightly bewildering Collective initiative. Basically the plan is to help them out with crowdfunding when they come to it, and potentially even allow the use of Squeenix IP if desired. All that depends on enough people declaring that they would back a crowdfund for this (or any other Collective game). It's like Greenlight but with as-yet unclear consequences, then.

It's a neat little concept, World of Goo all mushed with Age of Empires, so gathering resources is necessary in order to build big weird towers, while trying to defend your constructs against enemy onslaughts (and vice-versa). In this latter, an Angry Birds/Crush The Castle catapult-flinging element is indeed present, but I would be curious to see how that extrapolates to a more free-form war rather than the usual fixed puzzles. And, if I'm honest, it helps that they namecheck ancient projectile warfare game Scorched Earth as an inspiration, for that was a game that made me.

They are claiming that it's much more strategic than its apparent kinship with phoney catapult games suggests, but we shall see. It is a PC game rather than a phone game, which bodes well for potential complexity.

Whether it'll see the light of day depends on this Collective business, of course.