This Week In Indie: The Witness, Haxel And Rad Raygun

Here we are with another edition of This Week In Indie. This week the biggest indie news event happened at Sony’s reveal for the PS4, where Jonathan Blow revealed that his game The Witness would be released on the PS4, in the game’s launch window. You can read up about this in the PS4 reveal article. Therefore the indie news for this week is less than would be expected. However, with the exception of The Witness being announced for PS4; there were some interesting developments.

A retro-looking Megaman styled indie game has been released on XBL and it is selling for a mere 80 Microsoft Points. The game is called Rad Raygun and was developed by TRU FUN Entertainment. The game is obviously visually styled after the monochromatic visual design of the original Game Boy games, and has retro chiptune music to accompany it. The game makes fun of the Cold War, where you play as Rad Raygun a lone American hero who is fighting off Communist robots. This is what the description of the game is on the XBL Marketplace:

It is the year 198X. Big hair is hot, and the war with the Soviets is colder than a refreshing glass of New Coke. RAD RAYGUN must travel the world fighting communist robots, and save the 1980′s by shooting his way through 5 decade spanning levels. Ultra sharp 144p resolution graphics and 4 unique shades of monochrome off-green bring Rad Raygun to life, as only 80′s mobile technology can.

The game looks like great fun, and is selling at a very affordable price point. This is definitely a game that XBL indie fans should be looking out for.

Finally, another interesting piece of news has to be the kickstarter for the moddable first person shooter Haxel. Haxel is being developed by Dreamwagon Games. It is an online multiplayer FPS where players can create maps cooperatively, and compete against one another in many different modes.

Basically, Haxel comes across as a Minecraft FPS with its jagged pixel inspired graphics and very low system requirements. Therefore, there are endless world building possibilities for the prospective player. The map building itself seems very advanced, and can be read up on extensively in their Kickstarter page. This is what Dreamwagon Games had to say about that game:

Haxel is an online multiplayer first person shooter with cooperative map building. Haxel will be playable offline, on peer hosted servers, or the Haxel network for public match making, and ranked games. Haxel provides many gameplay modes, has destructible maps, and is designed to be highly moddable, allowing endless possibilities. Haxel will be shipped with a next generation voxel editor capable of rendering many different shapes and other customizations.

If you are at all interested in Haxel, I recommend taking a gander at the linked kickstarter page and seeing what the fuss is about for yourself. It is definitely an indie game we should be looking out for in future.

Anyway, that’s it for this week. It’s great to see that The Witness is receiving some high profile attention and that the PS4 will be catering to the indie crowd from the outset. Remember to keep it real and indie, and have a great weekend.