Free indie games

FreeIndieGam.es is a website that posts many games from around the web. Particularly, they are games that the owners of the site find interesting. Many of them explore topics that haven't been covered by games before, others have interesting designs.

Out of the dozens I have played over the last fortnight, here are three that I particularly enjoyed.

Turtles all the way down

Imagine a multi-verse in which there are worlds / planes / places are linked by one-directional gateways. Anything can go through them in one direction, but nothing the other way. These gates and places form a graph that is acyclic - if you go from A to B, there is never a way of getting from B to A.

Airships

Last Exile screenshot, copyright Gonzo

Here's an idea for a game I've had for a while. It started partly with me wondering whether I could find a different take on a specialized, party-based system. Many MMOs have the standard roles of healer, tank, dps, and so on. Equally, there are some party-based shooters - Team Fortress springs most strongly to mind. What else could we have?

It also started with me thinking about the anime Last Exile, in which ponderous airships do battle in a fog shrouded sky.

Spelunking

A rough idea for a game about spelunking, reposted here from my Google+ stream. Apologies to those of you have who have seen this before. I envisaged it originally as a 2D platformer, but clearly it could work powerfully as a first person 3D game. The game is not trying just to be an action platformer, but to somehow encapsulate how scary I find the whole idea of cave exploration. The writing that follows reflects this theme.

How to break out of prison

Prison breaks make great stories. For starters, it's a classic underdog scenario: The jailers have huge resources. They have lots of manpower. And the prisoners are in a facility which the jailers have (presumably) spent years building, refining, and maintaining. The whole setting is designed to keep the prisoners in. So when a plucky protagonist prisoner plans to break free we root for them.