Anchel Labena - Videogames Producer

Alright, this comes a little bit late, but better late than never, right?

The thing is, I’ve already been helping out with the launch of TWO games on Steam Greenlight, the platform through which indie game developers can show their upcoming games and have them voted by the Steam community to be sold on their store (it’s not that easy to get your game up there if you’re an indie dev). The first one was BetaDwarf’s FORCED, which by the way succeeded in a great Kickstarter campaign recently, reaching over $60,000 in pledges by fans.

But recently I helped out fellow developer Nicklas Nygren with the Steam Greenlight campaign for his new game Knytt Underground, which got released a few weeks ago on PS3 and Playstation Vita.

And what did I do? Well, I created this little interview video, of course! Recorded at the IT University of Copenhagen (gotta love the views from those glass boxes) for the game’s publisher, Ripstone, the video is shown right on the front page of the Greenlight page for the game (Go on now! Vote for it!)

http://youtu.be/_pV_bSsVDW0

If you still haven’t seen anything of the game, suffice to say that it’s possibly Nicklas’ best work yet. Visually striking, with tons of rooms to explore, lots of characters to talk (with dialogues to laugh a lot about), secrets hidden literally EVERYWHERE (watch out for a hint in the video interview!) and some great challenges, this is one heck of a game to go through.

But I won’t spoil anymore of it for you. I seriously recommend you check the videos on the Steam page and give the game a try for yourself!

Funny that it took me seeing Simon Cutajar’s blog post about the last Exile Game Jam to realize I should probably update my blog with it as well…

But here it is nonetheless: Coin Knights is the last game I’ve worked on since Super Screaming Skull Bros 2, this time along with Simon Cutajar, inspired by the arcade cabinet made by the RedGrim boys. All done, as usual per game jam standards, in under 48 hours.

But whereas the previous game was a 2 player co-op experience, Coin Knights is a 4 player competitive game where each one of these brightly colored and blocky knights will have to collect the highest amount of coins possible before the time runs out.

Simple enough, but there’s a bit more to it. The central theme, given by the Exile Game Jam restrictions, was uncertainty, and we addedgreedto that (one of the themes that were also commented at Exile). Players will have to fight each other to collect the treasure chests, get the coins inside (which can appear randomly in groups of 10, 20, 30, 50 or 100 coins) and bring them back to the castle. Players can hold up to 4 treasures at the same time. The catch is that the contents of the chests are unknown to the player until opened, and if the player is too greedy he might stumble upon a bomb. And a bomb will, simply enough, make him lose all the coins he has collected.

So players will have to decide whether to keep collecting coins or bring what they have so far to their castles so as not to risk losing it all.

Oh, and players can push each other away by using their shields. Or steal the contents of a chest before they are collected by a player.

Unluckily for us the game was not finished on time thanks to an untimely bug caused by the randomly spawning treasure chests, which totally crashes the game sometimes before reaching the time limit. Hopefully both Simon and I will be able to further polish the game, fixing bugs and adding a few more power-ups that will make the gameplay more chaotic (personally I also want to increase the size of all the sprites so that the action is bigger and crazier).

Simon and I worked on the design of the game from the very beginning, with him later on focusing on the programming and music side while I made all the graphics and sound effects. For now you can play the current version of Coin Knights here!

Playtesting Coin Knights at Exile Game Jam