Daniel-Roth
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The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Astroman
Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We at Joystiq believe no one deserves to starve, and many indie developers are entitled to a fridge full of tasty, fulfilling media coverage, right here. This week, Michael Stearns takes indie interplanetary with Astroman, a space platformer with a classic story and hard lessons on being too hard. What's the coolest aspect of your game? If I have to pick one favorite aspect, it's got to be the map. The game starts out as a straightforward platformer, but after the player recovers his space ship, he'll find himself back in space and the scope of the game becomes apparent. It's a very cool moment, the map isn't really an overworld map like most games have, it's a stylized planetary system and the player steers his ship through it, Asteroids-style. Power-ups that you pick up for your ship are visible on the ship and have a direct effect on where you can get to. The music is another high point for me, it was all composed by our very talented friend Jeff Ball, and he's even put the whole soundtrack online for free at his site, and we don't want people to be shy about checking it out. To me, music is a really important part of the game experience, back in the SNES/Genesis era, I used to turn on games to get my groove on just as much as for any other reason, and Astroman's soundtrack upholds that tradition even better than I expected it to.
