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Eat your crew to stay afloat in Sunless Sea, now on Steam
Failbetter Games' dark, top-down nautical exploration and survival game Sunless Sea is now available on Steam Early Access. To celebrate its arrival, the developer is discounting the game by 10 percent ($17.09) until Tuesday, July 8. Sunless Sea, which first arrived in alpha form in mid-June on the Humble store, has players exploring an underground ocean in which every decision made impacts a "non-linear, choice-heavy, personalized experience." In order to survive, captains will need to fight large creatures and make tough decisions, such as eating their dead. The game is set in the same universe as one of the developer's previous game, Fallen London, and draws influences from games like FTL: Faster Than Light, Sid Meier's Pirates and Don't Starve. Sunless Sea earned £100,803 ($161,769) on Kickstarter in October 2013, and uses Failbetter's own narrative-focused StoryNexus engine (which it also used for Fallen London). Random House put the engine to use in April 2013 with the free-to-play Black Crown. [Image: Failbetter Games]
Random House gets interactive with StoryNexus tech and 'Black Crown'
Book publisher Random House is putting Failbetter Games' StoryNexus platform to good use with a free-to-play browser-based narrative project dubbed Black Crown. So far Black Crown has a website, which features a gas mask icon and describes the endeavor as "an infectious new kind of narrative experience." A phrase in latin on the top of the page translates roughly to "now comes truth, God, truth comes now."Whatever it is, Black Crown is scheduled to go live in May, and Random House plans to run it for a full year, first hoping to generate "thousands rather than hundreds" of registered users before launch. The author behind the project remains a mystery until May, and this whole thing might result in a physical book and ebook down the line, Digital Publisher Dan Franklin tells The Bookseller.Failbetter Games is behind such narrative games as Fallen London, and its StoryNexus platform is available in public beta for anyone who wants to create browser-based, interactive stories, right here.
MMObility: The Chromebook 'All In One' project - Ten pseudo-MMOs
So here we are at the second-to-last installment of my Chromebook All-In-One experiment. This will be the last time I give you a list of games that work well on the Samsung Chromebook, but always keep in mind that some of the other Chromebooks, especially the Samsung 5 550, have more power and do not use an ARM-based chip. What does that mean? Well, some services like NetFlix will not work on an ARM-based machine yet. Spacetime Studios' cache of browser-based titles will not work on this Chromebook yet as well. Don't worry, it's coming soon. Imagine the ARM Chromebook as a tablet with a keyboard attached... it's not a normal netbook or notebook. I also wrote up my wife's take on the Chromebook over at my personal blog. Be sure to check that out. She has been the perfect guinea pig as she pushes devices to their limits, and so the Chromebook has been getting heavy use from her and working wonderfully. Next week, my last installment of this series will be a video and article combo that covers the good and bad of the device, along with my final thoughts. Until then, though, click past the cut and enjoy my list of pseudo-MMOs. These are games that don't quite fit into the MMO category but have a multiplayer aspect to them!
GDC10: Our chat with Echo Bazaar's Alexis Kennedy
We caught up with Echo Bazaars's Alexis Kennedy to ask him about the wildly successful Facebook style game. It's hard to describe, easy to pick up and addictive to play. Picture an underground city populated by murderers, spies and all types of shady characters, add in a unique story and Twitter functionality and you wind up with this little gem. "It's more of a single player experience than I'd like." said Alexis, who is the Chief Narrative Officer for the game. "We are always looking at ways to make it more social, we want to give more direct ways to interact with other people. I want to get as much variety in there as possible. But it's finding the right balance of making somebody's experience unique to them without going crazy trying to cater at every possible stage." But how to combat a player feeling as though his or her experience is devalued by seeing the same thing come up in their friend's streams? "The way to deal with that, really, is just to write more content."
