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Twenty developers you don't know, but should
Between consoles, PC, mobile and everything in between, there are so many games released today that it's impossible to keep up with everything that's coming out – and it's even harder to keep up with the studios behind them. Even with a gaming public that's grown accustomed to following big developers like Valve and small studios like Double Fine, countless other studios slide under the radar. In the interest of sifting a signal from the noise, the Joystiq crew has selected 20 developers that deserve your attention. These studios are making games you should play, and their future work should be highly anticipated. This list is by no means exhaustive, and we invite you to share your own favorites in the comments!
Tiny Barbarian DX hits Steam following Greenlight conquest
Astroman developer StarQuail Games has released its Rastan-inspired retro side-scroller Tiny Barbarian DX via Steam, bringing its pint-sized hero to the end of a long journey from freeware experiment to crowdfunded success story. Taking its cues from muscled classics like Golden Axe and the Conan the Barbarian film series, Tiny Barbarian DX pits a miniscule warrior against armies of sword-wielding foes and mythical beasts in between bouts of tricky platforming challenges. Originally released as a freeware game, Tiny Barbarian grew larger in size and scope (if not stature) after a successful Kickstarter campaign, and later won community approval at Steam Greenlight. Tiny Barbarian DX is normally priced at $9.99, but is available for $5.99 at Steam during its launch week. Steam keys are currently being sent to Kickstarter backers.
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.
