Here's my report from
Playcrafting's Winter Play: NYC Game Expo yesterday. Overall, it was a fun event. There was a huge variety of indie games in various states of completeness. Many people were demoing some very early, work in progress stuff. Some of them were games developed during 48 hour game jams, others were still short, buggy messes =).
There were also several more established developers there, including the developers of
Slime-san. They are acting as the publishers of
Spirit Sphere DX a fantasy tennis(ish) game that wasn't really up my alley so I didn't play it.
I'm going to just list a few of my favorites that I either played or watched significant portions of.
NOISZ - $14.99 / on sale for $13.49 [Early Access] (PC/Mac)
NOISZ fuses music game and shoot-em-up elements to create a frantic new experience that demands lightning reflexes, keen sense of rhythm, and judicious decision making!
It's a boss only shmup. Each beat you tap one of two buttons to either shield or shoot. The shield protects you from the white/blue projectiles, but the black/red attacks are always damaging.
When I first saw it I was expecting something like Ikaruga, but the concept actually reminds me more of something like Dub Wars. Each boss's attacks are tailor made to sync up with music in cool ways. My one criticism was that the player's own shots use the same black and red color scheme as the enemy's attacks. Since your shot is a instant fire laser though, this isn't a big deal in practice.
Avaria VS - $15
Kickstarter/ $20 at release (PC/Mac)
In AVARIA vs, choose a party of 3 heroes to battle against an opponent's party. During battle, opposing players choose their actions simultaneously and then witness the mayhem of their decisions.
A competitive 1v1 strategy game with a style that evokes a classic 3D Final Fantasy aesthetic. As the battle progresses, your characters naturally level up as they take actions. The big strategic decisions here are when and how much of the early game to spend powering yourself up vs. dealing damage to your opponent. There are also opportunities to prevail by predicting your opponent's actions, as you can use shields of various kinds (damage reducing or reflecting) on specific characters. So if you can predict who will be attacked you can counter accordingly. I was impressed by the graphics and polish for something still in the kickstarter process, and the abilities seem pretty fleshed out as well.
Just One Boss - Free. (Pico-8 / browser)
A grid-based action / avoidance game for the Pico-8.
The game starts off pretty simple. The real joy here is watching Ayla's gorgeous pixel art animations introduce each new wrinkle into the game play. Each new trick of the magician's is animated with style and personality. I didn't actually get to play this one at the expo, but I'm definitely going to try it out when it's released.
Edit - It's out now and is short and fun. Pretty tough, too, but there are checkpoints so you don't need to restart if you die. Click the link above to play in your browser, or find it at
https://brid.gs/games/ . There's even a hard mode that unlocks once you beat the game. Hard mode is brutal, though, and I gave up.
