DevLog Watch: Thief Story & Irkalla

Mondays are a great day for giving a little love to new, in-development indie projects. There's fast becoming no better place to find those projects than TIGSource's DevLog forum, where developers regularly post screenshots, GIFs and audio samples from their upcoming projects. By my eye, the games most in demand of some attention currently are Thief Story, a cutesy, Nintendo-ish, top-down game about stealing stuff, and Irkalla, a side-scrolling shooter with fabulous pixel art.

More info and GIFs below.

Thief Story

Thief Story is about a character named Sparrow, who advances over the course of the game from robbing houses to pulling off bank heists. You need to sneak past guards and residents, use gizmos to overcome security systems like laser traps, and so on. You reveal the laser traps by throwing smoke, like so:

The devlog only gives some sense of what it'll be like to play, but perhaps this is the most intriguing bit:

Right now, the exploration is set up a lot like Super Mario World. Where you unlock new areas/split paths as you go along. There is an entire town to roam though! There will be parks, shops, banks, an art museum, and some other locations to check out.

There's a a mailing list over at the game's still non-existant site, but I don't know how often it's updated. Until we know more about the game, I suggest putting Calum Bowen's theme music on repeat:

Irkalla

Despite its foreboding colour palette, Irkalla is somehow no less cute than Thief Story. It's inspired by the likes of Alien, but there's comedy in its pixel art. From the devlog:

It will be an intensive tactic arcade shooter game with demons, mages, spells, mechs and hight tech weapons. We would like to tell a deep story focussing on adventure/exploration Metroidvania-style , but for now we are going to keep it simple and just focus on a funny gameplay, heavy atmosphere and stylized pixel art.

Which sounds like the right way to approach making a videogame. Check out these GIFs.

As with Thief Story, there's a bunch more Irkalla GIFs and screenshots over on the Irkalla devlog thread on the TIGSource forums. I've reached out to the devs of both games to try to get some more info.

If you're an indie game maker devlogging the creation of your own game, drop me a mail and maybe this could be a regular thing.