love posts

The hit sandbox indie game Minecraft has an art style and graphical look that is, well, simple in scope. However that doesn't mean that there are not some graphical challenges that need to be met. Eurogamer reports that the Minecraft development team enlisted the creator of yet another critically acclaimed indie game to help out.

That person is Eskil Steenberg, who launched the one-man fantasy MMO game Love. While Steenberg is not joining the Minecraft team, he states, "I was asked to help them use a few graphics extensions in OpenGL." In the meantime he continues to support Love which he says generates, " ... enough money to live off, sort of."

Ok, who ordered all of these late-night game announcements and reveals from EA today? How odd. Are the PR folks testing web news boys like us to see if we are still working? If so, the answer is obviously , "Yes".

• As we first reported would happen, Guardians of Graxia is now available on the Steam download service with a 10 percent discount for the next week.
• Also the Chaos Parachute DLC item for Just Cause 2 is now available for free via Steam to all owners of the game.
• There's a new Source Engine update available via Steam that fixes bugs for several Valve games.
• Bejeweled 3 is now available for pre-order on Steam with a 10 percent discount. Also owners of the Steam versions three previous games in the series can get Bejeweled 3 for 20 percent off.
• The creator of the indie-made MMO Love is giving away his animation tool.

The first day of September was very busy on the news side and it looks like tomorrow will be just as busy, if not more so. Brace yourself now:

• A second expansion pack for the PC port of Magic The Gathering Duels of the Planewalkers is now available via Steam.
• A new update for the beta of Counter-Strike Source is also available via Steam.
• Starting on Thursday and running through Labor Day you can download Where's Waldo? The Fantastic Journey from Games For Windows Live for just $3.75.
• You can try out the indie made MMO game Love for free starting on Friday and running through the weekend.
• Irrational Games' newest Irrational audio interview has Ken Levine chatting with comic book writer Brian Michael Bendis.
• Valve is holding a Midnight Riders/Left 4 Dead music video contest.
• It's not really PC news but you really should check out the iPhone/iPad Unreal Engine 3 tech demo Epic Citadel.

The very busy month of March continues with two big retail game releases, a downloadable expansion pack and the launch of an MMO made by just one person:

Just Cause 2: Developer Avalanche Studios and Square Enix give us another massive open world action game as your player character, Rico Rodriguez runs, drives, flies and swims in the fictional Eastern Asian island nation of Panau. PC gamers have to have either Windows 7 or Windows Vista and at least a DirectX 10 compatible graphics card to play the PC port of the game. Sorry, Windows XP PC users.

For quite some time there's been a lot of buzz about Love, the MMO that's being developed by just one person, Eskil Steenberg. The game has been in beta for a few month now but it looks like the progress has progressed enough for Steenberg to announce a launch date for Love.

Whlle as of this writing the date is not visable on the game's official web site, Steenberg's Twitter page has an update which states, "Love has a release date: 25th of March." Again we have seen a lot of advanced hype about how innovative the game is in terms of animation and art style. Will it live up to its promise?

If you have been waiting for some Love to come into your life, the wait is now over. The MMO of the same name has now entered beta testing. The title from the one man team of Eskil Steenberg can now be downloaded from the game's official web site.

While you can download the client for free to see if you can run it on your computer, you will have to pay a few buck (3 euros to be exact) to actually play on the beta servers for 30 days (this is a one man operation after all). As the FAQ states, "The amount of testing that can be done by a single developer of a multi player game is obviously very limited, so expect performance, and gameplay to be largely untested."

Can one man make an MMO game? Not without a lot of "Love" which also happens to be the name of the MMO developed by the one man team of Eskil Steenberg. The game's been in alpha testing for the past few months but on January 7 the game officially enters beta testing.

For the moment only people who participated in the alpha testing of the game (they had to pay 3 euros for the privilege) can access the beta. But Steenberg states that the beta will be open to anyone on January 7. The beta will still cost 3 euros to access for a 30 day period. Steenberg states that the beta means the game is now "feature complete". That means "all functionality planed for the full release have been implemented, so it's got loads of new cool stuff that I don't want to spoil."

A few days ago, the one man creator of the upcoming MMO Love released a test client of the game to check to see if the game would run on PCs. Now the creator has released a new client that now allows players to actually sign onto servers to check out the indie game for themselves.

There is a catch, however. While most alpha and beta tests of games are free to play, playing in the Love alpha will in fact require a fee of 3 Euros. In this case its someone understandable (one person, Eskil Steenberg, is making the game all by himself). However if you don't feel like paying some money to play an admittedly unfinished game then you might want to hold off.

The idea of an MMO game being created by just one person is certainly something of interest. For months now gamers have been hearing about such a project called Love, created by Eskil Steenberg. Now the developer has released a test client of the game to get some of the technical issues ironed out,

To be clear this client won't allow you to actually play the game online but according to Steenberg, "you will be able to see the engine run on your machine, giving you an idea of how well your machine will handle the game." That info will be sent to his master server so he can find out where the issues are in terms of the game's engine. So when will players actually get to play the game? Steenberg states there are a number of factors that will influence him but that "hopefully it wont be long now."

We here at Big Download love indie games. From telling you about them, playing them, or offering downloads for them, we are all about helping lesser-known developers get their name out into the world. Each week on Saturday, we'll give you the Indie Wrap-up, a collection of all the indie news stories and features during the previous week.

There were no major independent releases this week, with most of the week's news concerning more freeware than independent. There have been an explosion of new releases, however, thanks to the Procedural Generation Competition being held over on TIGSource. Stay tuned for more news concerning the excellent output from the competition!

Features and Downloads

	Freeware Friday: Torus Trooper Our resident indie fan James Murff takes a look at one of freeware's best shoot-'em-ups, even if he gets disoriented by all the twisting.
	Armageddon Empires demo available for download The incomparable Armageddon Empires now has a demo available for download through the Big Download service!
	MODvelous Monday: 6/2/2008 David Craddock takes his weekly look at mods to the excellent single-player Half-life mod They Hunger.