The Indie Game Legend 3D: Retro Gameplay in First-person
Press release available here.
Today, I’m proud to announce a project I’ve been working on since the beginning of the year: a game titled The Indie Game Legend 3D.
This is a fun project for me because it’s a remake and expansion of a friend’s 2D top-down game called The Indie Game Legend. The original game, which is finally online again, was basically made and released as a joke for the TIGSource forums in 2011. It was more than just a joke, though. Paul’s creative and retro inspired style of game-making made for a great little game. No wonder his NES-era design sensibilities are also being put to work right now on Derek Yu’s UFO 50.
What I loved about the original Indie Game Legend was that it and the motivation for its existence really captured what I love about the indie scene. Games are notoriously hard to make, yet some are compelled to create them, by themselves in many cases, just for fun. The fact that a complete and solid game exists to mostly poke fun at other game-making friends kinda warms my heart.
To me, this project is a celebration of the indie scene. No matter how viable it is to make these kinds of games, people will be making them.
The game itself is actually an homage to an NES cult classic called The Guardian Legend, which combined shmup gameplay and Zelda-esque action adventure. The original focuses more on the latter, which when adding guns to the mix becomes a sort of Metroidvania arena shooter. You explore the world room by room while taking on enemies, but also solving puzzles, avoiding traps, and finding your way to the next area.
The Indie Game Legend 3D captures this from the first person perspective. This change in format lets me bring in some classic 90s FPS influences, but also makes for something I haven’t really played before.
We’re also building on the original game by expanding the world with new areas, improved bosses, and a new narrative layer that lets us expand on story and add more humor.
The indie game makers you rescue are being updated as well to fit a new narrative and the new scope of the game. Hopefully we can keep a few from the original. A lot of them from the TIGSource community got to finish their breakouts hits, which interestingly all came not long after the release of the original Indie Game Legend. Derek released Spelunky. Phil Fish released Fez. Cactus released Hotline Miami. Paul Eres… well, I guess he named Minecraft.
Anyway, now that it’s public I can share a few other interesting bits. First, the game is being developed entirely live on Twitch. Pretty much every weekday you can join me while I work on the game. All of the streams are also being archived on YouTube. On top of this, my devlog thread on TIGSource has update videos that I put together every two weeks. These are quick and consumable, summarizing progress. There’s already a dozen of them:
We’re planning for release later this year. Right now we’re wrapping up an alpha preview of the first 3rd of the game to release in the next month or so. If you’d like to be notified of that or help with play testing there’s a mailing list for you below. After that, we’ll probably being doing Steam Early Access, so be sure to add it to your wishlist!
That’s about it. I’d love it if you shared this with anybody you know that’s into retro games or classic shooters, or if you joined me on Twitch as I slog away making this indie celebration happen. See you soon!
