The Quixotic Engineer

Only ten months after promising that they were “coming soon”, the folks of No Fun Games (Kira, Renaud and myself) have finally finished porting our one-button real-time strategy game Pax Britannica to OSX and Linux. You can check them out at our fancy new website, or download them directly here:

Mac Download / Linux Download

Unfortunately, the OSX version of the game is currently lacking gamepad support due to a platform-specific issue with GLFW. We’ll be sure to release an updated version of the game if that’s ever patched!

I’m tremendously grateful for all the positive feedback we’ve received about Pax Britannica. In particular, this video review by Joe Larson and his son Andrew reminded me why I started making video games in the first place. (UPDATE: The video is no longer available.)

Minecraft was my gateway drug. It seduced my imagination with grand ideas: setting foot in a dangerous new world, gathering provisions from the wilderness, erecting meagre shelter and surviving on your cunning and creativity. Regrettably, these concepts quickly wane once you learn a handful of commonsense safety rituals. Late-game Minecraft becomes a different game entirely, one largely centred on erecting impressive macrostructures or testing the limits of redstone torch circuits. This minor letdown gave me a taste for “harder stuff”, which led me to the seemingly impenetrable pioneer simulator Dwarf Fortress.

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Back in late April, the No Fun Games gang (Renaud Bédard, Kira Boom, and I) took the train down to Toronto to participate in TOJam. Over three days, we hacked together a silly game called Tea Time Quarrel. Since then we’ve had the opportunity to present the game publicly at TOJam Arcade and the Mount Royal Game Society. However, we never got around to officially releasing it… until now!

Download Tea Time Quarrel (Windows)

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If you pay attention to video game news, you’ve probably heard a lot of buzz these last few weeks about an indie game called Minecraft. Ever since it caught the attention of gaming tastemakers Rock, Paper, Shotgun and Penny Arcade, my online social circle has been completely twitterpated. In fact, it has become so extraordinarily popular that the developers have made it temporarily free-to-play in order to prevent overloading their servers.

Minecraft is a peculiar game that’s difficult to classify. Its pedigree certainly includes the world-building of Dwarf Fortress, the procedural dungeon crawling of Rogue, and the undirected creativity of LEGO. While it’s marvellously simple and intuitive, Minecraft is not an easy game to learn. In its current alpha release, it has nothing in the way of guidance or tutorials. It’s nearly impossible to figure out what to do on your own, making it necessary to follow an external FAQ.

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Indie Gaming Gallery is a semi-regular feature where I attempt to support independent game development by highlighting some outstanding titles that you should definitely check out.

Ancient Trader [XBLIG]

It requires a bit of searching, but you can occasionally find a real gem in the unfortunate ghetto of Xbox Live Indie Games. Ancient Trader is a simple turn-based strategy game that’s aesthetically inspired by old world cartography and cryptozoology. Players compete to be the first to track down three artifacts and defeat the powerful Ancient Guardian.

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