Exclusive interview with developers of Orc Attack

"Orc Attack" is a game in the vein of Castle Crashers, which lets up to 4 players take the role of a band of gassy Orcs and beat their way through over 20 levels of human bashing goodness. I've had a talk with Igor Rodinski from "Casual Brothers", developers of this upcoming beat- and fart-em-up Orc Attack, which is looking to satisfy all your filthy human killing needs.

Here's a gameplay demo showing the game in action:

Now on to the interview.

Q: Firstly I’d like to ask you to give us a short introduction to Orc Attack. What’s the essence of the game?

A: The essence is, above all, fun, both alone or even better, with your friends.
The story has its fair share of protest against the destruction of the environment. The Orcs use to live wild and free in their homeland, until the humans arrive with their evil machines to exploit the natural resources to the exhaustion, bringing pollution to the land, water and air, and making the Orcs fell terribly sick, suffering severe gastric disorders that will result in extreme flatulence.

Q: The beat-em-up genre has had somewhat of a revival in recent years, especially after the release of Castle Crashers. Can you tell us a little about what your inspiration for Orc Attack has been and how Orc Attack stands out from other beat-em-ups?

A: We can’t deny we love Castle Crashers and that we found some inspiration in it. In fact, we were pretending to catch the spirit of 2D beat’em up classics, bringing them to 3D, something that no one done before, and we think we succeeded thanks to our innovative camera, for Orc Attack stands out from others beat-em ups firstly for been in 3D and for its innovative camera, focusing the action with all four players always on screen sharing the same view.
Secondly, the mass combat allow up to 50 enemies on screen, so the battles looks really spectacular. Of course, there is the difference that in this game you play Orcs against evil human, and, naturally, the use of gases, as farts and burps, to fight the enemies producing explosions and other deadly effects, is also a stand up.

Exclusive look at the indie game "Forging Life" - It's a jungle out there

For several years their has been a tendency towards making games more accessible and easier for players to get into.

More focus has been put into ensuring that games never frustrate a player and that they always feel like the center of attention in the game world.
This is a development that I am mostly pretty happy with, as I described in my post "Please Dumb Down My Games".

Forging Life can ambitiously be called a "world simulator"

However, even a lover of casual games can find himself wanting more of a challenge.
Sometimes you *want* a game that tests the limits of your skills and is not afraid to punch you in the face if you mess up.
The success of Demon's Souls is a testament to the fact that there is a demand for a game like this.

And Minecraft showed us that players are also perfectly happy with running around in a large world, where it is left to the player to make their gameplay.

The indie game "Forging Life", developed by a couple of Danish guys embraces some of these elements that you'll find in Demon's Souls and Minecraft, throws in a pinch of Ultima Online's sense of being just an insignificant cog in the machine and mixes it all together with some elements of their own to make a tasty stew of survival goodness.

Exclusive Preview of City of Steam - Your chance to play a mechanical Dwarf!

There are only so many traditional fantasy based MMO's that one man can stomach. When you're walking through a magical Eleven forest for the 24th time, you can start to suffer from some real Tolkien related fatigue.
Enter "City of Steam".
This free to play browser based MMO is going to take your Elves, your Dwarves and your medieval themed fantasy world, and process them in a giant, hissing piece of brass decorated machinery, spitting out a distinct steampunk setting, where the world is one giant machine and one of the base elements is rust (earth is so quaint).

Trains and airships. This isn't your average Lord of the Rings fantasy world

City of Steam is being developed by the China based "Mechanist Games" and has been in development for a couple of years.
I've had a chance to interview lead designer David Lindsay and Ian Morgenheim, who has been part of the process of creating the RPG books that the game is based on.

Q: First off, can you tell us about how you came up with the background for City of Steam?

A: City of Steam is actually the third iteration of the a setting that began as simply "Industrial Age Fantasy". That first version was a... bloated unwieldy beast of a thing! It had horns, tentacles and a monstrous index, I tell you! Imagine the Necronomicon from Army of Darkness: Painful to open, terrible to behold, but definitely a force to be reckoned with. But as a first product, and a solo writer/developer, it was a massive learning curve and a great experience.
I keep it in a locked trunk so it will never see the light of day, but without making any of those mistakes, today's game would never have been possible at all.