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Today's collection of independent game links include some friendly advice about getting your game on Steam, an article about developing RPGs, and a look at the very successful community support that Wolfire Games is providing to their fans. (image source)

Indievision: How to approach Steam
"The Valve guys will see hundreds of games a day all from hopeful developers who are keen to get their game published. There is no easy way to make sure your game is ahead of the queue. There are however, some fundamental things to get right."

Play This Thing: Xong
"Xong is an odd and idiosyncratic munge of a Rogue-like, a level-based puzzle game, and an Arkanoid clone. It's Rogue-like, in that it's an ASCII graphics game with procedurally-generated levels, but the actual gameplay is puzzle solving with Breakout-like aspects."

World of Banov: The Problem with RPGs
"Making an RPG is hard and not to be attempted by the inexperienced. In terms of game making RPGs pose way more obstacles than any other genre of video game. So as a cautionary tale I'm going to talk about what I've learned about making RPGs and some of the pitfalls in designing them."

DIYgamer: IGF Submission Picks - Flywrench and About a Blob
"For this week's column, I played through an incredibly difficult masterpiece in Flywrench and for the second time chose a platformer, About a Blob, which I didn't get to play but was attracted to its style."

Oxeye Game Studio: Secret Gifts – Video Leaked
"A secret source deep within the Oxeye team gave me a MiniDV tape of a heavily damaged video. I was able to retrieve some pictures and share them with you. This is what I was able to recover."

Wolfire Games Blog: Oh no, more Meebo
"Our live chat widget proved its worth again during the preorder pack promotion. At times I seemed like I was giving support to ten people at once. A lot of good can come from maintaining a live chat but since productive conversations are boring, I humbly submit to you, another smattering of silliness."

Wolfire Games Blog: John's development environment
"Last month, we put a call out on the blog asking for community questions to answer. The most popular question was if we could do a video tour of our development studio." Continue reading

A record number (306) of entries to the Main Competition is, not surprisingly, followed by a record number of entries to the student competition. This year there were 193 games submitted by students to the IGF! I haven’t heard of many of the entries before, but they sound interesting – I’m seeing a lot of ideas and themes that are very rarely touched upon in gaming.

The IGF front page reminds us that previous student winners include Narbacular Drop (which became Portal), The Misadventures Of P.B. Winterbottom, The Blob, and Jenova Chen’s Cloud. Fine company to be with, indeed. Congratulations to all the student entrants! Continue reading

Proun is a 3D racing game from Joost, one of the co-founders of Ronimo Games (The Blob, Swords & Soldiers). Currently in production and scheduled to be released as freeware sometime before early 2010. Continue reading

After receiving favorable reviews for its gorgeous PSN puzzler Critter Crunch and early praise for upcoming DS strategy/puzzle hybrid Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes, indie studio Capy (or Capybara Games) is trying its hand on the popular zombie genre, according to a government funding document dug up by sister site GamerBytes.

The project description doesn't reveal a platform (presumably on a handheld or a digital download service) or an expected release date for Zombie Tactics, but it has some useful details:

"Zombie Tactics brings a mixture of strategy gameplay elements into the horror genre, dropping players into the heart of a devastating zombie apocalypse with nothing but their wits to get them out alive. As players fend for themselves, they will search for other survivors to add to their team, scavenge for weapons and supplies, and fight their way to freedom through an array of city settings."

This document was posted last February, so if Zombie Tactics is still alive (or un-alive, hur hur), Capy has already had a significant chunk of time to work on it. Another interesting interactive game in the same listing of funding recipients: DrinkBox Studios's About A Blob, a game following "an innocent little creature that grows and grows until it defeats mankind and consumes the planet."

At first glance, Osmos looks like another one of those 'organism vs organism' eat-em-ups. Dodge anything bigger than you, consume everything smaller, grow in size, repeat. It's a tried and tested formula of late - yet a formula which is in need of some serious alterations to keep it fresh.

Hemisphere Games have attempted to take this idea to a new level, and as a result Osmos is not just the pinnacle of organism simulation play - it's also a fantastic action game and a damn good puzzler to boot.

The basics first: You follow a tiny living cell which must navigate an equally miniscule world by sacrificing itself bit by bit in an attempt to propel its matter around. Other such beings are dotted around the level and colliding with anything smaller than yourself will absorb them into your cell, resulting in your blob growing in size. Finding the balance between sacrifice vs absorption is essential and perfecting this will eventually see you through. Continue reading

Q8IS Mobile In has announced the release of Blob Dash for the iPhone/iPod Touch. The evil lord Lord Gaggletron has used his mind control crystals to control the innocent race of blobs called the Obo. Players have to lead the blob through a series of obstacles and the blobs are not known for their intelligence. [...] Continue reading