Indie Spotlight: FTL

You all remember that game “Oregon Trail,” right? You get a family, you try to travel all the way across America to the promised land of Oregon, all the while trying to ration food and making sure that nobody died from dysentery. “FTL” is like that but with space pirates and giant space spiders. A Kickstarter game that was released in September of this year, I thought it would be a perfect choice for our first Indie Spotlight.

“FTL” is not a realistic looking game, nor is it a game that touts revolutionary gameplay. It has a simple idea, with simple graphics, that is absolutely fun. You pick a ship, name it and your crew then fly off to try and warn your fleet of the impending danger that is following you through the 8 space sectors in which you have to travel. Each map, randomly generated for every game that’s started, randomizes encounters available to you. Your ship might jump to a sector that is directly next to a sun and have to worry about solar flares lighting some of your cabins on fire. It might jump into a nebula that can play havoc with your sensors, making it difficult to tell if your ship is damaged during a fight. Whatever the case may be, there’s always something happening in “FTL.”

Battle encounters happen in real time, but they’re not fast twitch style fights and it’s even possible to pause everything while it’s happening. This helps since repairs may need to be made during the fight, and boarding parties might force you to rethink who is manning which station on the ship. At the end, the rewards are ammo, fuel, drone parts and scrap metal.

Scrap metal can be used to upgrade your ship. These upgrades can go into shields, getting more and more levels which make it harder for enemies to actually damage the hull integrity. Engine upgrades make it more difficult for enemies to hit you, and can even be used to evade encounters altogether or successfully navigate asteroid fields. More weapon power levels allow for more weapons to be active on a vessel during an encounter. Each system can be upgraded like this and they all have their benefits to surviving the dangerous trip.

Types of crew members help as well. Throughout the journey, it’s possible to get different species to join your crew from the various ones found throughout the sectors of space. Slugs have mental abilities that can show where enemies are on a ship and can help defuse situations with other aliens you might encounter. Engi, organic and artificial beings, are immune to certain sicknesses and might be able to help hack into artificial intelligences. There are more aliens, but you get the picture.

The reason I wanted to talk about “FTL” is because of how simply brilliant the game is. Not that it is so obviously brilliant, I mean that its simplicity makes it brilliant. It isn’t graphically intensive, its focus is not the visual but the easy to pick up and put down gameplay. “FTL” is great if you have some time to kill and you don’t want to get involved in something so deep that you’ll need half an hour to save, complete a quest and then quit. However, should you get into a groove of it, the game can capture a player for hours at a time, pushing them to try multiple playthroughs and to search for ways to unlock all of the ships available in the game.

There is enough meat to “FTL” to satisfy someone looking for a good game to play, but it also has such a light and casual feel to it that anyone looking to play a game can really turn it on and enjoy for a little while. Kudos to  Subset Games for making such a fun little game. You can get it now on Steam should you desire, so check it out. This is a great example of a little indie game that did well. Take some notes from it and try to utilize that to your advantage.

Hotline Miami review

Okay, so I really didn’t know what to expect from this game only having the trailer and people’s tweets to go off of, but I’ll show you the trailer and let you make your own assumptions and draw your own ideas about it, then we’ll to the review.

If that wasn’t enough to make your head tilt to the side in a sort of "Whaaaaat?" gesture, then you’re a better person than I. However, I spent the $10 on Steam and downloaded the game. It’s amazing. You can quote me on that. It. Is. Amazing.

While it may not look like much, the game is a cleverly constructed piece of top-down shooting and crazy story. You may not understand it right away, but it is just enough to keep you from going, “Is this game just killing people randomly?” If it was, there would honestly be no real lasting appeal or motivation to continue playing after you got tired of it the first time.

Fortunately for us, the game has an eerie sort of Stanley Kubrick/QuentinTarantino thing going on that is both disconcerting and incredibly hypnotic. The music is just the right kind of late 80s lazy with a creepy indie vibe to it that makes you cringe but also entranced. Honestly, the game is a cross between one of their movies and “Super Meat Boy.”

This game is not for the faint of heart.

The game expects you to die and even encourages you not to give up. I found myself not frustrated or angry when I got killed, but motivated to do better and to keep trying. It does a wonderful job of teaching you that none of the situations in the game are impossible, only that they require a solid bit of thinking.

You’re able to shoot, stab, cleave, throw, punch and crush people to death. But be warned, every shot and hit is a one-shot-kill, even to you so there’s no stand-offs and there’s no way to charge into a room guns blazing without feeling like you’ll get mowed down yourself. You have to be smart in how you tackle certain situations.

Luckily, you’re able to move the screen a bit to see what’s ahead, if only a little. But the biggest help are the masks. The main character, a nameless man who is killing all of these people at the behest of mysterious voicemails on his phone, goes to each job with a rubber-animal mask on his head.

You can unlock new masks that have different powers. Some make throwing weapons automatically lethal, others make it so that dogs don’t attack you or display certain secrets spread throughout the missions.

It’s not an overly complex game, and there’s not a lot to talk about because you truly have to experience it for yourself. It’s worth the $10 and it has a lot of replayability because at the end of each level your score is tallied and calculated off of your combinations and creativity of kills. That, and the secrets and unlockable masks are fun to get.

Yeah, this is a pretty accurate description of the game in a single frame.

This game could have been done wrong in so many ways, but it’s so good that I’m thankful to find an indie game that shows the ability to remake an old type of gameplay and make it fresh and innovative. If you haven’t played it yet, you really should. It’s only just been released, so there will be bugs, but if you have the patience and the will, you’ll really have fun with “Hotline Miami.” It's a 10/10 throwback to crazy arcade games with an interesting story to keep you going.

A chat with Co-Optimus founder Nick Puleo

We got the chance to talk to Nick Puleo, owner and managing editor of Co-Optimus.com, at E3 2012 about his new game, "SCHAR: Blu Shield Alliance," and he offered some advice to aspiring game developers.