"Coming as soon as you Greenlight this," says the trailer, Cellar Door Games' Rogue Legacy for Windows is a side-scrolling semi-rogue-like action game taking place in a procedurally generated castle. Instead of total permadeath, players pass their knowledge to their offspring, unlocking new abilities and making them stronger and tougher.

[Original Post by Jools Watsham]

There was a specific point in time when Renegade Kid went full bore indie. I prefer to avoid using the term ‘indie’, but the current meaning of the word accurately describes our current status: we stopped relying on publishers for game-development funding and decided to start trying to fend for ourselves financially with the development and publishing of our original games. At least, that’s what indie means to me.

There were two events that happened in 2012 that firmly set our destiny on course. The first was the release of Mutant Mudds in the Nintendo eShop on January 26. Even though we self-funded and self-published this title – putting us in the indie role – we did not expect this to be our new business model going forward. At least, not one hundred percent anyway.

The development of Mutant Mudds was a labor of love. We did it because we felt we had to. We had to quench our thirst to create such a game. We were developing other titles while Mutant Mudds was being created, so it felt like a side project. Even though we dedicated many hours to the development of the game, it almost felt as though we spent no money on it. So, when we published the game it felt like a perfect gamble and allowed us to be able to accept the possibility of no sales because our emotional bank accounts were filled by the completion of the game. We were proud of what we achieved.

[Thomas Steinke wrote this on sister site Gamasutra's free community blogs]

In the last week my article "How to Make it as a Professional Indie Game Developer" or "8 keys to indie success" caused quite a stir.

How to Make it as a Professional Indie Game Developer

I wanted to take some time and address a lot of the comments and questions that people have raised in one concise place for everyone to see.

I had thought about writing that article for a while, but was reluctant to do so. Not because I thought it would be highly controversial but because I thought it was too boring. To me this represented a set of abstract commonsense business ideas that weren't really worth talking about in the limited detail that I could in a small article like this.

Matt Thorson (Give Up Robot) and Alec Holowka (Aquaria) have just released an intergalactic beat'em up on Adult Swim called Planet Punch. A wonderful re-imagining of Ludum Dare 23 entry Ra Ra: Extreme Star Boxing, Planet Punch has become a large, single-player game filled with survival, time challenge, and boss stages. Destroying a boss leads to another galaxy to explore and more planets to adorn as gloves for fighting.

Written by Adriaan de Jongh and Bojan Endrovski

A year before Fingle's release, Bojan and I had just finished a game on a big multi-touch table that invited people to play at the same time on the same device. We were showcasing the game at some event and I noticed that when people would accidentally touch each others hands, they would immediately back-off and be like 'ewww, I touched someone's hands!'. This was Fingle's initial inspiration and eventually its common awkward response.

[Leigh Alexander wrote this article originally for sister site Gamasutra]

The portrayal of romance in games has been an open discussion in traditional game design circles, and players and creators alike have longed to see how we can explore the deep and nuanced tonalities of love in interactive entertainment.

Yet while lifelike demos of faces that can really gaze at you provoke buzz and ardor, achieving the expressive, genuine sentiment of courtship, heartbreak, and sex within a medium that likes goal-oriented systems has been an elusive objective.

Trust pure, wild experimentation to emerge from the fringe. Beginning over the past weekend, following up on an idea she credits to friend Eren Russo, writer, visual artist and game maker Madam Luna spearheaded the Pulse-Pounding Heart-Stopping Dating Sim Game Jam, which encouraged game makers and hobbyists from all over the realm of the internet to use whatever tools they could get their hands on to make games about romance.

Play is fundamentally something people do together, and yet there's arguably been a loss of intimacy since multiplayer gaming's gone online and into social media, with interactions offloaded either into an anonymous space or into a hollow network of insistent notifications.

In-person folk games designed for event spaces have caught the interest of so many players and designers in recent years because they engage people with groups and incorporate live, spontaneous moments, but the setup and planning they often require reduces their accessibility -- they're only available to the players who are able to be present at the right time and place.

The Unfinished Swan began its life as a student prototype before it achieved acclaim on the PlayStation network created by Giant Sparrow's 12-person team. It's something of an unusual journey, but creative director Ian Dallas says important takeaways from his education at USC's Interactive Media division helped him flesh out his vision and create a fully-fledged game with a major publisher.

In the game, players explore the mysterious world and its storybook narrative by splashing paint on the environment to reveal the shape and detail in its white landscape. As part of his fellowship, he'd make a new prototype every week for faculty advisor Marc Bolas, and The Unfinished Swan came from there.

"At the time, I was interested in how people move around space," he muses. "That's what ended up segueing into this whole Unfinished Swan... monstrosity."

The prototype debuted at 2008's Sense of Wonder night, and a YouTube video caught Sony's attention. The students signed a publishing deal, somewhat unusual at the time -- iOS, Android and other indie-friendly platforms were less accessible.

"For us, it ended up being a really good decision, because the game we wanted to make was a little bit bigger and lusher, and that's something that really benefited from having a publisher involved," Dallas says. More interested in scope and quality than in financial returns, for him it was a good decision.

The game also came in 400 percent over budget and well behind schedule, he laughs.

[Over the next two days, the blog will share some of the most interesting news found around the internet from GDC 2013 and PAX East 2013. The two conferences occurred back-to-back, spanning March 22 to March 29. Here is the second part of the highlights, starting with the above GDC 2013 time lapse from indie friend and video editor, Kert Gartner.]

Joystiq on 'Home' creator Benjamin Rivers wants to make a psychological dating sim "Like Home, Rivers' next game will likely still be two-dimensional and will focus on psychologically influencing the player in subtle ways, though this time the goal will be to induce emotional attachment to a fictional character, rather than instill terror."

Designer Bennett Foddy of QWOP and GIRP fame counts five major reasons why the free to play model doesn't work well in its current incarnation, but suggests that by being creative with microtransactions, designers have the chance to do better work.

1. They're pay not to play, really. Foddy believes lots of freemium games give players the choice between paying or grinding -- "which suggests you might want to pay money to reduce the amount of time you spend playing the game," he notes. "Not playing the game is the 'luxury option'... [and] ultimately reduces the value players see in the game."

2. There's no level playing field. If some players are playing with different rules and others, you can't meaningfully compare their experiences. "If somebody is buying progress, or advantages from the IAP store, they're just cheating," Foddy says. "It's like you're selling players steroids to cheat with."

3. It corrupts the experience. Seeking real money from players during the gameplay breaks immersion, Foddy believes. "In my view, a really good game has a particular relationship with the player," he says. "In a freemium game, it's relating to you more as a vendor, or a drug dealer."