#lunar pack

[zip-toonz]

Lunar Pack leaders Jackal and Cara (previously bad crowders) Info on them and the lunar pack will be on the google doc 

[solarlunartwins-blog]

Vixen, thoughts on Mordecai?

Vixen: ah, the widdle ghost is sweet. and precious. and innocent.

....

he’s gonna get fuckin crushed

LOOK MAN IM SORRY BUT

i’m still not really certain how HE became leader of all of us over like.. me. not that im really cut out to be a leader like drake is but. still. i really hope he pulls somethin out of his ass real soon like because we need a leader for this team and we need someone who knows what the worlds like beyond some rose tinted goggles.

[witchoflunette]

my whole lunar pack is on tumblr now and this makes me so happy.

[witchoflunette]

so they claimed the moon as their own, and the sky bled red around the edges.

lunar pack.

[steamgameaday]

Lunnye Devitsy (2009-2013)

Genre: Puzzle Platformer Developer: Boss Baddie Price: £3.99 as part of the Lunar Pack

If you've been paying a creepy amount of attention to this blog, or merely are well on top of your indie game knowledge then you might have noticed that Lunnye Devitsy comes in the same package as Wake, the time attack sinking ship platform game that I held a particular affinity to earlier this month. Much like it's sister game, Lunnye Devitsy is a short form platformer and needs to be played through multiple times in order to be fully appreciated. Unlike Wake, however, Lunnye Devitsy has no time limit, no death and no gradually rising water, allowing the player as much time as possible to navigate and experiment in its weird and interesting world. Also I don't know how to pronounce it.

You play a small alien who, having fallen from the surface of the moon, must find a way to get back up there. There are six different ways to get back up, with varying levels of difficulty and creativity. Two require that the player explore and collect a certain number of items, one is triggered through exploration, one can be completed through experimentation alone, another requires that the player exploit the game's physics, and a sixth solution involves solving a relatively complex puzzle that includes experimentation, exploration and precision platforming combined. Once the six routes have been completed, a seventh task (a collect-em-up where the player must re-explore a now slightly expanded world picking up gold coins) becomes available.

Exploring the game's world is pleasant and interesting. The little creature has a run button and a jump button, both of which can be upgraded by finding a hidden collectible hidden deep in the world. The game saves automatically every time an item is collected, so once an upgrade is found it permeates through every subsequent playthough, and finding the various hidden rocket pieces and crescent moons can be performed casually over the course of several attempts. The platforming itself is fun and Mario-like, with a good amount of precision connected to its often silly amounts of momentum, and the world has been designed nicely to fit the player's platforming abilities. On the other hand, the game's physics occasionally feel a little dodgy, with anything designed to project the player in a particular direction (cannons, for example are scattered around the levels towards the endgame) appears to have been poorly scripted rather than actually programmed into the physics and so the game wrests control of the game from you until you reach the ground.

Also despite the fact that this is at least the second iteration of the game, the game's map feels weirdly incomplete. Whilst some areas of the game are lushly designed and full of unique detail, others consist entirely of featureless black floating rectangles and triangles with no background details whatsoever. The effect is somewhat jarring and rather cheapens the otherwise stellar look of the game. Aside from this, the game uses Boss Baddie's trademark crazy amounts of visual effects, so expect lots of blurring, fogging, bloom and weird lighting - a factor that some may find awkward or annoying. This can be switched off, but as the game doesn't have an options menu, it has to be done at the command line.

Lunnye Devitsy is an interesting little game, but not necessarily one that's worth your time. It's admittedly very creative (to the point where certain solutions may never have even occurred to me without judicious use of a walkthrough), but its world is too small, too patchy and lacks variety. The broken cannon physics ruin the endgame, and the whole thing is just a little too short. On the other hand its a unique little experience full of life and character, and as it comes in the same package as the absolutely excellent Wake, it would be silly not to take the time to at least try it.

How long did I play? - 2.0 hours Did I finish it? - No. I completed the original six methods, but not the seventh. Would I finish it? - Possibly. It still owes me one more Trading Card Drop, after all.

[steamgameaday]

Wake (2013)

Genre: Platformer Developer: Boss Baddie Price: £3.99 as part of the Lunar Pack

When I first played Wake I didn't like it. It's not a game that gives it's players the best of first impressions; graphically it's actively hostile to the player, it's music is a single loop of threatening-sounding music and the explanations are shown as a single screen of things to 'collect' and 'avoid'. Aside from that all I knew is that I was an engineer and that I needed to survive the sinking of a stricken ship by navigating up from it's hull to the very top. After some attempts at moving around the chaotically laid out platforms and through the utter maze of a ship layout I simply found myself falling down again and again, ending up in the same places and falling down elevator shafts I had just bypassed. Then I blamed the game's floaty jumping, swore a bit, put down my controller and gave up.

I don't know what drove me to pick up the controller again and boot back into the game. Maybe it was that a mere 30 minutes wasn't really enough even by this blog's standards (unless it's a single-table pinball game, might I add!), but I gave it all another whirl and convinced myself to play it through. In this case I was stunned to discover that far from being the difficult and annoying platformer that I assumed it to be, Wake is in fact a short and interesting little time-attack platformer with an interesting premise and a well designed and balanced set of levels and features.

Of course what originally threw me is that Wake is designed to disorientate the player as much as possible. Aside from the weirdly blurry filter that constantly obscures much of the game's detail, and the way that the whole game slowly rocks from side to side, the game throws out several ways to mess with the player whilst they frantically search for the way out of their predicament, the electricity fails periodically, plunging the player into complete darkness and forcing them to either wander around completely blind, or if they were lucky enough to find a flare or a torch, coping with an extremely reduced area of vision for the duration of the power cut. Other distractions for the player include the variable intensity and speed of the music, a radio that picks up transmissions that are actively designed to slow you down and annoy you, and distracting shadowy foregrounds that obscure some areas of the game.

The decks of Wake's ship are linear to some extent. Certainly the ship is always the exact same layout with the same passages and puzzles, however, the developers have designed the game to play slightly differently each time by changing the locations and intensities of the various fires that have sprung out throughout the sinking ship. Fire is passable, but if the player touches it for too long, they will themselves set on fire and need to dive into the rising waters in order to put it out. The player's equipment is always in the same places too; a fire axe to be used to cut through wooden doors, a torch and flare to see through the darkness of the ship's hull, various keys for accessing the remotely-unlocked doors on each stage and the first aid kits that contain a massively helpful dose of adrenaline to help the player get past some of the longer or higher jumps. Thanks to the suprisingly easy difficulty of the game at the beginning, everything is a learning experience, from getting the hand of the jumping and climbing to realising that it's easier to make long jumps when the ship is tilted in your favour.

Essentially once the player gets their bearings the game becomes as much about explorisation,memorisation and sheer knowledge of the surroundings as it does about skill. Whilst the ship itself is linear, the player's path through it can diverge massively, and whilst going in one direction might take you up through the gymnasium, another may take you past the art gallery or through the control room, each unique little area having it's own style of level geography and immaculate background. Especially nice in this regard is the ship's shopping mall, which is full of the most ludicrously British fake shop names you'll ever come across. Even the rising tide becomes your friend at this point, closing old pathways and opening new ones, giving the more daring player a chance to do some underwater exploration (at the risk of drowning, and immediately losing the game). Even more interestingly, the whole game is, in fact, a score attack, and players are judged on their speed, the number of meteorites they find across the ship, the number of keys they have left, the route taken, the height of the water and whether or not the player died during the course. All of this is tallied up at the end of each run and placed on an online scoreboard for all to see.

The game has four difficulty levels, each of which is unlocked after the previous. Whilst the easy mode is nice easy going, with slow-rising water and not too many obstacles, medium adds lasers that set the player on fire and increases the speed of sinking. The third level, Hard, blocks up a lot of the easier routes, intensifies the amount of fire across the ship, stops the player from viewing the map, and further increases the speed of the tide, and the nigh-impossible fourth level replaces the water with lava resulting in immediate burning death for anyone who falls down and (far more importantly) removing the easiest cure for being set on fire by lasers. After completing a difficulty level, the player is given the option to replay the level with a number of different conditions avaliable which increases the multiplier, but unfortunately this massively throws off the balance of the scoring as combining realism mode and switching off the power is arguably easier than the standard game and grants a considerable bonus. In fact, just before writing this article I went through a no-power, no-adrenaline realism mode run which netted me second place on the leaderboard.

But these issues aside, if you can get past the initial shock, Wake is a surprising little platformer with some seriously good atmosphere and a unique style and premise. Whilst it's most definitely not for everyone, there's enough exploration and experimentation here to keep a player entertained for a good while longer than you'd first expect, and it's full of challenges and hidden secrets for the perfectionists in all of us. It's an enjoyable bit of platforming under pressure, and an extremely fun challenge for even an experienced player.

How long did I play? - 3.4 hours Did I finish it? - Didn't you hear? Ranked 2nd globally! Also, I finished it on Easy, Medium and Hard. But not Lava. Good god, Lava. Would I play it again? - Yes

[bossbaddiegames]

Exciting news! If you like cheap games (who doesn't?) then we have a treat for you guys~ The Lunar Pack, containing two very awesome games, is on sale! For this week only (3rd - 9th of June), you can get Lunnye Devitsy and Wake for a teeny tiny £1.36. That's 66% off! Awesome right~?