Gamescom '13: The hottest prospects from the Big Indie Pitch
History in the making
Every so often, Pocket Gamer likes to host pitching sessions where indie developers get four minutes each to try and sell their games to members of the press.
The latest of these Big Indie Pitches took place last week in Cologne after a long day of schmoozing and scoffing free pastries at GDCE.
A panel of judges from the games press and I saw 30 games over the course of a couple of hours in speed date-style pitches, hurriedly scribbling notes while the organisers stalked up and down the aisle with a bell to hurry the developers along and a man dressed as Sonic The Hedgehog (guess who co-sponsored the event) intermittently showed up to distract everybody.
Here are the best and most promising games of the selection we saw. This means they're the games you'll all be talking about in a few months' time. Just remember that you heard about them here first.
The hottest prospects from the Big Indie Pitch CologneSwap Quest
By Rebusmind
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Swap Quest is an inventive little puzzle-RPG in which you have to flee vertically from a cloud of deadly gas by rearranging the tiles that make up the landscape.
Each of these tiles contains a section of path. The idea is to arrange them so that you can keep progressing upwards while also collecting power-ups and items, and getting into automatic turn-based fights with monsters.
There are treasure chests that you can tap to open and various other bits of scenery with which you can interact. The scenery purportedly changes after every level, by the way. The gameplay varies slightly depending on whether you choose to play as a prince or a princess, and you can obtain various abilities to use during game, allowing you to customise your character.
The developer hasn't decided on a payment model yet, but he says Swap Quest will "probably" be a paid app with no IAPs.
99 Bricks: Wizard Academy
By Weirdbeard
99 Bricks is already out as a Flash game.
This all-new iOS version, however, is much more sophisticated and feature packed than its web-based counterpart.
The gameplay is basically a mixture of Tetris and Tower Bloxx.
If Tower Bloxx is too obscure a reference for you, imagine a version of Tetris in which the Tetronimos formed a tower rather than filling a well, and were subject to gravity.
There's more to it than that, of course.
You can acquire numerous potions, skills, and spells to improve the stability of your tower and fend off attacks. Plus, there's a photo-sharing facility so that you can show off your tower.
It should be out in October.
Sky Arena
By Hammerlabs
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The developer of Sky Arena described it as "freemium StarFox". It's difficult to imagine a more antagonistic formulation for die-hard traditionalists, but it's actually quite good. As advertised, it looks very like StarFox, with basic polygonal graphics adorned by neat little touches like lens flares.
The main selling point of Sky Arena is that it's a multiplayer game. On Ouya, that means split-screen multiplayer. On iOS, though, it means playing remotely against your friends. The controls are responsive and well calibrated, if tricky to master. I struggled to pilot my craft without crashing into every geographical feature possible.
However, I am inept at the best of times, and I only played it for a few seconds. You can download a demo of Sky Arena now, and the full release should be available in a couple of months.
Fiete Memo
By Ahoii
This was everybody's favourite. There's already a Fiete game on the App Store (pictured), and it probably won't appeal to you because it's a children's edutainment app. But if you have children and you want them to be educated, then you should buy it. And when this next one comes out, you should buy it, too.
Fiete Memo is a gorgeous, slick, professional crayon-illustrated twist on Pelmanism - or Pairs, if you prefer - in which the pairs in question form sums and other mathematical phenomena. For example, you might be asked to pair '4' with '3+1'.
It looks stunning, it's nicely made, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Fiete on TV in a few years' time.
Zuki's Quest
By Tinytouchtales
Zuki's Quest is like VVVVVV and Lazy Raiders, in that you can change the direction in which gravity pulls but you can't actually move yourself. The game centres on a series of puzzles in which you try to navigate your way out of stages by hurling yourself and the level furniture against the correct surfaces in the right order.
It contains 72 stages across three temples, the second and third of which will be IAPs. I can confirm that new mechanics are introduced during the game and that it does get tricky pretty quickly. During the pitch, I rattled through the first couple of stages and then decided to try something further down the list. "I don't know if it's a good idea to skip ahead," the dev said.
As he watched me ricocheting around the stage, falling onto spikes, and getting crushed beneath a giant stone, he assured me that he's currently working on the difficulty curve. Zuki's Quest will be available in mid-October.
Trolls vs Vikings
By Megapop
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If you like Plants vs Zombies, you'll probably like this. That's because they are, to say the very least, quite similar. In fact, Trolls vs Vikings is likely to be dismissed as a clone by many when it comes out in December. That would be a shame, however, because it's actually quite a bit more involved than PopCap's TD classic.
The game will contain a seasons-spanning Story mode as well as "movable towers, set pieces, strategic resource gathering, and a dynamic in-game tile system". Even more intriguingly, it will feature real-time and asynchronous multiplayer.
But the similarities are unmissable, and not just in terms of the basic gameplay. It also has the same slapstick sense of humour as Plants vs Zombies 2, and it shares that game's fairly divisive payment model. Yes, Trolls vs Vikings is going to be freemium.
Createrria
By Incuvo
The intention of Createrria's dev is for its game to be for smartphone what LittleBigPlanet was for home consoles and handhelds - a casual game built around creation as much as consumption.
The difference is that it isn't limited to platforming. Sure, you can make a platformer if you like, but you can also make an Angry Birds-style catapult physics game, or a Peggle-style game about making an object ricochet randomly between nodes.
Making levels looks pretty straightforward. And once you've made one, you can upload it to the game's server so that other users can play and rate it.
Whether this serves as a deterrent or an incitement to create penis-shaped structures will be very much a matter of personal preference.
Bloo Kid 2
By Winterworks
Bloo Kid 2 is, as you may have guessed, a sequel. We didn't review the original game - a vaguely Wonder Boy-like pixel-art platformer - but I can report that it has quite a high user rating on iOS and Google Play, for what that's worth.
Winterworks cites Super Mario World and Sonic as influences, which seems about right. Each level contains a range of goals - some time based, some based on how many items you collect - and each of the three worlds has a boss at the end.
And that's about all there is to say. Bloo Kid 2 is simply a solid-looking retro platformer. It will be ad-funded, with an IAP to remove the ads, when it comes out on iOS and Android later this year.
Crisis of Saturn
By Touchlabs
The developer of Crisis of Saturn says that the game is based on Journey. It certainly shares elements of that game's tone and style, but I couldn't see much overlap otherwise. You play as a strange creature exploring a map by extending and retracting a pair of sails in order to be borne along by currents that are made visible by particles.
Whenever you collide with something, your sails shrink, with the predictable effect of reducing your mobility. There are also artefacts to collect.
It looks very pleasant, with tranquil and simplistic graphics and a generally agreeable artsy indie tone. I'm not convinced yet, but it's certainly worth keeping an eye on.
The Dead Flowers Case
By Mando
This pitch didn't even contain a game. Instead, The Dead Flowers Case currently consists of a few pages of concept art.
The Dead Flowers Case will be a crime scene investigation game set in a steampunk universe in which all vegetable life is gone. The case begins when a robot chartered accountant is killed and dead flowers are discovered beside his corpse.
Developer Mando claims the game will offer six to eight hours of gameplay as you examine scenes and interrogate culprits. To help you with all this, you'll have a set of special lenses that allow you to see different things. "We stole this from The Room," Mando said.
Global Zone
By Code Elephant
Global Zone is a slick-looking but rather dour twist on the Katamari games. You play as a glowing ball that drifts around on the ground eating foliage.
Eat enough and you become two balls, then three, and so on. Once you've amassed enough balls, you can destroy obstacles and move onto the next stage.
What makes it interesting is the message about ecological sustainability that it contains. You can bull your way to the end by consuming everything in sight, but the only way to do really well is to leave behind enough vegetation to reproduce and regenerate.
Blues & Bullets
By A Crowd of Monsters
Blues & Bullets is a monochrome adventure game with a high polygon count and an atmospheric art style. The comparison made by developer A Crowd of Monsters was with Heavy Rain, but it also has graphic novel elements, with narrative cues emblazoned in big white letters on walls.
The aim is to scan crime scenes looking for clues and examining objects. It's going to be episodic, with five hour-long chapters.
Jack & Evil
By Evil Mind Entertainment
Jack & Evil is an awkwardly named physics-platformer with an unusual gesture-based control scheme that feels a bit woolly at the moment.
Developer Evil Mind describes its game as "Rayman-meets-Fruit Ninja".
The standout feature of the game is its monochrome art style, which makes it look a little bit like an early Warner Bros. cartoon. If Evil Mind can perfect the control scheme before the game comes out, it should be quite fun.
