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Slender: The Arrival, Blood of the Werewolf hit Steam at a 20% discount
Blood of the Werewolf and Slender: The Arrival are now available on Steam, bringing a batch of Greenlight-approved horror to this week's Halloween festivities. Slender: The Arrival is a reimagining of the first-person indie freeware hit Slender: The Eight Pages, developed by Blue Isle Studios in collaboration with Slender mythos creator Eric "Victor Surge" Knudson. The Arrival expands on the original game's premise with new narrative elements and improved graphics while upping the horror quotient with Oculus Rift support. In the 2D platformer Blood of the Werewolf, players assume the role of a part-time mother and full-time werewolf as she quests to rescue her kidnapped child from a gang of movie-inspired monsters. Blood of the Werewolf, coincidentally, was part of this month's collaborative Not on Steam Sale. As of today, it's not not on Steam. Both games are available for 20 percent off of their regular prices through November 4.
Not on Steam Sale: 35 indie games that aren't on Steam, are on sale
The Not on Steam Sale is both the opposite of a Steam sale and strikingly similar to one: It features more than 35 games, each up to 50 percent off for one week only, but none of these games are available on Steam – yet. Most of the games are on Greenlight, waiting for their chance to enter the Steam market, and some are simply sold independently and want a signal boost. Games on sale include Race the Sun, Blood of the Werewolf, Richard & Alice, Leviathan: The Last Day of the Decade, The Yawhg, 6180 the moon, Tower of Guns, Girls Like Robots, Full Bore, Sokobond, Cute Things Dying Violently, Rose & Time, and The Sea Will Claim Everything. The great thing is that the most expensive games are just $20 normally, with most of them priced much lower, plus they're now up to half off. To be clear: The Not on Steam Sale isn't a bundle. It's a group of indie games discounted on one convenient page, each sold separately. The sale is hosted by Aaron San Filippo, the developer of Race the Sun. Filippo recently wrote a blog post about the difficulties of selling an indie game that isn't on Steam – when he wrote it, Race the Sun was outside of the top 100 on Steam Greenlight and it had sold only 771 copies in its first month. Now, Race the Sun is No. 10 on Greenlight. "The internet is a crazy place," Filippo tells me. "When we published our sales post, we expected the usual indie developer interest, as we developers love to read about sales numbers and such. But everyone picked it up, and we ended up getting more attention than the project had ever had. Our fans became energized, and then a big YouTuber, Daniel Hardcastle, covered the game after lots of people were asking him to play the game, and he loved it."
Call of Duty to Blood of the Werewolf: Nathaniel McClure's indie tale
Nathaniel McClure thought his resume would make it easy to break into the indie game industry. He worked at Activision for years, starting in 2002 with QA and quickly rising to producer on a host of AAA games, including Star Wars Jedi Knight 2, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, and a lineup of Call of Duty games. By 2007, McClure wanted out. "It was 3AM when I woke up on my keyboard at the office," he told me. "I was a few milestones in, working on my fifth Call of Duty title on my fourth straight year of promotion, when it hit me. If I was to keep loving what got me into making games I would have to quit one of the largest and most popular video games in the world, something I dedicated years of my life to." McClure resigned that year, when he was a producer on Modern Warfare. He started his own studio, Epicenter, with the goal of making games that he – and other people, he hoped – would want to play. But indie development came with its own brand of bureaucracy, and dealing with publishers, platforms, funding and legal matters made McClure's journey more complex than he imagined. "I thought my Call of Duty and Wolfenstein credits would land me a dev deal no problem," McClure said. "I was an idiot – it doesn't work that way, and I am grateful that it doesn't." In 2009 – two studios, a handful of unfulfilled publisher promises and a few indie releases later – McClure founded Scientifically Proven. This year he'll finish development on a gothic, eye-catching action platformer, and what might be his favorite game ever: Blood of the Werewolf.
