My First Indie..

The first indie game I encountered was Legend of the Red Dragon, A BBS game where you built a character, fought against monsters and left your character when you logged off at the mercy of the next person that played the game because he or she could choose to duel you to gain some experience and reputation. What a great game LORD was and still is. It was basically the best you could do in those days to provide a multiplayer experience despite the fact that you weren't physically there to control your character. And the game inspired a lot of indies to go onward and create some pretty great concepts. This was just the first stop for this developer, who went on to create the fun little RPG Dink Smallwood, but LORD showed what could be possible with a little bit of cleverness, some stats and a bunch of well written dialogue trees.

Seth Robinson may have been the first indie I respected even before I knew what the hell an indie was. He made me waste almost as much time as I did on commercial games like Nintendo games, Ultima and SSI's wonderful AD&D Gold Box games. That's a pretty amazing feat if you consider that this diversion required dialing some stranger's phone number, logging on and... looking at text and menus. So hat's off to you, Seth Robinson for giving me the inspiration to look beyond retail shelves for fun and for keeping the faith... Check out all his latest creations at www.rtsoft.com . And now onto this week's picks - oddly enough Seth and those pesky Gold Box games make an appearance in this week's list.. sort of..

Sixty Seconds With...

Echoes is a great little arcade shooter that feels like a cross between Geometry Wars and Asteroids. The action is fast paced, the controls are as smooth as silk and the visuals are chaos as you shoot hundreds of objects, collect power-ups and try to stay alive as the difficulty is dramatically ramps up to keep you guessing. It's a great little game that deserves some praise and your attention. Check it out and find out what all the fuss is about.

Want to build your own indie game? Then you might want to check out Novashell , a high-level 2D game maker that handles the behind-the-scenes work allowing you to create games using pathfinding, dialog, persistent dynamically sized maps with construction & deconstruction, save anywhere features , and more that is geared towards adventure and RPG games creation. It's also built to allow easy sharing of games you make and modding of them. The engine supports Windows, OS X and Linux - and is free to use and distribute. Check it out - it's from the fellow behind Legend of the Red Dragon and Dink Smallwood.

I was once an AD&D Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures fanatic, so it is pretty easy for me to enthusiastically recommend this open-sourced clone called Dungeon Craft . Dungeon Craft is an effort to develop an RPG and editor that mimics SSI's Gold Box title, allowing you to create graphical tactical RPG adventures from scratch. The engine is pretty robust and looks great even by today's standards, so it is perfect for anyone looking to create the perfect RPG.

The engine allows you to build dungeons and towns, link them together, create encounters and initiate battles using the myriad of assets, tools and scripts within the program. Check it out at the link above.

Armada Online is an interesting attempt to bring the Dreamcast classic Armada online to PC players. Currently in alpha, this game lets you pick a race, a captain, and battle it out in the vastness of space against other players. I'm not really sure how viable this game is, but it's an interesting idea that many players are enjoying even in its currently early development stage.