After the Humble Indie Bundle 8 ended you might have been left feeling a bit lost. Wondering “Where do I go for another bundle of games at a price I set that gives money to charity, too?”
Plus their soundtracks and a game called Pulse that’s only available for Android.
You’ll have to pay more than the average price (currently $4.69 in United States of Ameribucks) if you want Frozen Synapse and Broken Sword (you do.) Anything over one dollar nets you Steam keys. Linux builds of Broken Sword and Fractal aren’t on Steam yet, hopefully they’ll get there soon.
The long-running series Oddworld is finally coming to Linux at the end of the year in Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty. A redo of the original weird side-scroller, Abe’s Oddysee.
Save the Date by Chris Cornell of Paper Dino Software is a strange game. I just finished playing through it. It’s a visual novel which is a graphical choose your own adventure type of deal if you’ve never played one. Kind of like interactive fiction. Save the Date is different from many of those and to say much more would be to spoil it, so…
All four are also available now through Steam individually and on the ubuntu software center. You’ve got about a week left to order the bundle at any price, but you’ll have to pay more than the average price (at the time of writing is a little under $6 USD) to get these four new games. If you’ve already bought the bundle at more than the average price the new games are on your receipt page or in your account.
If you’re not familiar with Wolfire’s bunny combat simulator, here’s how the developer describes it:
Follow Turner, a rebel bunny rabbit with impressive combat skills in his quest to find those responsible for slaughtering his village. Uncover a far-reaching conspiracy involving the corrupt leaders of the rabbit republic and the wolves of the nearby lands.
We’re going to find out when you check out Secret of the Magic Crystals:
In this game you manage a horse-breeding farm set in a fantasy surrounding. The game enables you to breed legendary horses such as Pegasus, Unicorn, Fire-steed, Ice-steed and Demon-steed. You can buy over 700 objects during the game. Make all kinds of horseshoes as well as lots of magical potions for your horses. If they are exhausted or ill, you are able to cure and look after them. Your horses and colts need lots of care and that’s the way they recover their strengths. You can train your horses on four different fields in five levels of difficulty. You can even breed them in order to have more talented horses. Different horse races help you to gather 25 kinds of cups and you can send your horses to complete 30 exciting missions.
I’m told by a friend’s review that his daughter enjoys this game very much. We won’t judge you if you do, too.
I’m not sure what this has to do with England, or the countryside, but I can assume there is some kind of musical accompaniment in English Country Tune. A puzzle game boasting “Genuine 3D gameplay”
English Country Tune is a luxuriant abstract 3D puzzle game brought to you by increpare, the first commercial project of a developer who’s brought you nearly 200 freeware games to date.
Over the course of more than a hundred levels situated throughout 17 worlds, you’ll become acquainted with a wide variety of very different mechanics, none of them what they first may appear, and which will combine together in challenging ways.
Cardboard Computer released Kentucky Route Zero, an episodic point and click “magical realist adventure game” with the flat shaded art style depicted above in January and have updated with the second act out of five total.
If you’ve ever wanted to cut somebody open without any actual consequences, you can do so now in Shank. Previously only available in the ephemeral Humble Bundle 4, Ryan “teh icculus” Gordon tweeted the news out:
Shank/linux is now on Steam: http://t.co/NM9OuAdWBk …now with SDL2 (rumble support, Big Picture Mode, better fullscreen, etc).
We’d like to start by welcoming all you lovely new Linux users to our game. We are now supplying builds for Linux via steam and as a standalone download from our website. (Free to all users of course). The game should be widely compatible across the various Linux distributions, but please let us know if you have problems by logging bugs in our bug tracker. We have targeted Ubuntu 12.04 (32 bit and 64 bit) as a starting point, and we anticipate wider compatibility in later alphas. Please note that we do require glibc 2.15 or later, which unfortunately means Prison Architect does not currently work on Debian Stable.
The open-source voice chat program, Mumble, has updated to version 1.2.4 and now features the Opus codec:
This new codec will allow Mumble to perform better at even lower bitrates then previously possible. It incorporates technology from Skype’s SILK codec and Xiph.Org’s CELT codec, previously the main codec for Mumble.
Mumble’s announcement post also mentions gaining support from Valve:
We are also happy to see our positional audio technology seeing wider adoption in the gaming world with Valve including support in many of their source engine games. Namely Team Fortress 2, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Counter-Strike: Source and Day of Defeat: Source on all supported platforms including Linux and Mac OS X.
Positional audio allows you to hear your teammates from the position they are in-game without any changes to your Mumble server. On any game server.
Turn-based strategy RPG Expeditions: Conquistador has been released on Steam and sounds pretty sick:
Conquer the New world: In the 16th Century, Spanish explorers and soldiers reached the shores of America. The search for gold, fame, and adventure drove these travelers into a treacherous wilderness where they faced hunger, disease, and dangerous predators. In their wake, the Aztec Empires lay in ruins.
Re-write the history of the Conquistadors: Forge diplomatic alliances with the natives… or crush the savages and bring civilization to the pagan tribes! Create an expedition of individual characters: Choose your followers wisely from over 30 characters, but be careful – they each have their own traits, opinions and moral standards.
Hunt for unimaginable riches and fight intense battles in the unforgiving jungle. In this turn based strategy RPG, a cunning plan is as vital as thoughtful resource management. Expeditions: Conquistador offers a rich storyline separated into two campaigns, challenging players throughout 25+ hours of gameplay. Strategy veterans as well as newbies will find their turn-based El Dorado!
The latest pay-what-you-will Humble Indie Bundle has been released with a few amazing games we haven’t seen before running on Linux. Included in this bunch:
Hotline Miami
Proteus
Little Inferno
Awesomenauts
Capsized
Thomas Was Alone
Dear Esther
Hotline Miami and Dear Esther are two of my all-time favorite games. Unfortunately Dear Esther (review) is only available in a non-native, pretendulated, version as Jeffrey Rosen notes:
The Dear Esther Linux build on your download page was made by CodeWeavers, which means that it is based on a custom-tailored version of Wine (a re-implementation of the Windows API under Linux). While it is not a “genuine native port”, it should run great on Linux machines and is professionally supported. CodeWeavers will promptly address and fix bugs as they are discovered.
During the making of Humble Indie Bundle 8, the version of the Source engine, which Dear Esther is based on, came to Linux natively. This made it possible for us to commission Ryan Gordon to create a fully-native version of Dear Esther, as well.
While I was hoping to be able to announce that we are running the world’s nerdiest taste test, and pit CodeWeavers’ Wine based port versus the native port, the native port is not quite ready yet.
The native port is planned to come soon to Humble Indie Bundle 8 customers (without an ETA) and also, expect a few last minute fixes to CodeWeavers’ version soon.
As one of the first games being developed with Linux support in mind, utilizing Unreal Engine 4, we plan to back port our work back to Epic for future Linux support. Our team plans to provide recent versions of our source code updates to Epic so the Linux Gaming community can benefit through our efforts. This way our revisions can be used by future developers of UE4 to also support Linux. We hope our Linux backers on Kickstarter will appreciate all the consideration we’ve put into our Linux build.
The post also mentions that they’re looking for Linux testers (resume required), so shoot them a note if you have the background and interest!
Genres, systems, hiring, and budgets are all included as factors to consider while creating the next gaming masterpiece. Game Dev Tycoon can be ordered now online; it will also be on Steam later this year.
Project Zomboid has hit version 008b, a new milestone for the zombie apocalypse survival sim currently in alpha testing. 008b brings improved memory usage and other fixes.
Yes, Big Robot is going to make a game featuring robots. It’s called Sir, You Are Being Hunted, and it taps into a rich seam of tweed-loving British science fiction to conjure a sinister reality where artificial gentlemen hunt humans for sport.
[...]
Hunted is set in a recognisably British landscape. Its inhabitants are a mockery of the aristocratic country gent and his ecosystem. Robots that ape tea-drinking, poachers that lurk in reed-beds, and red-eyed hounds that patrol the moor: these are the things you will be dealing with as you fight for survival. The game gathers up elements of my favourite things: exploration, AI interaction, survival, robots, hot drinks, and blends them into a rich pixelly pulp. (A “British indie S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” might have been something we said in the design meetings…)
The developers recently posted a gameplay preview set in a mountain biome:
Rise of the Ravager is an arcade-style shooter with color-based combat mechanics (“Guitar Hero meets Missile Command”) and boss fights as you strive to prevent the end of time.
