Stoic points to a couple of Banner Saga updates, with Technical Blog #0 talking about their first programmer hire Victor Ude and his current work integrating sound.

In What is Told, the first of a series of lore updates is provided:

A lot of things were on Hafr’s mind.

Foremost was the ache that had found its way into his feet, unaccustomed as they were to shuffling across hard rock in thin leather shoes. The intricately carved walking stick in his hand had become more of an anchor than an aid. Aside from that, there was the complex pattern he had been failing to memorize for a week, the cumbersome bundle of books and scrolls boring into his shoulders and the irksome memory of a disappointing conclusion to an awkward conversation he had left on the lips of a girl. It chafed, looping over and over in his head with nothing but backcountry paths to distract him from it, and no recourse to be taken. At least, not until he was done with this, another pointless errand.

Today's Dead State update offers a blurb and nice screen of the looting/inventory interface:

We’ve got a pretty simple layout for our inventory. The player’s inventory is on the left side, where the container or body is on the right side. The tabs at the top are toggles to quickly find items by category. You can sort through your entire inventory by advancing each page. Most supply items, thrown items, and ammo will stack. Selecting an item will show a description of the item in the 3x5 at the bottom of the screen.

Your carry weight is determined by your strength. On the whole, when you factor in the weight of your armor and weapons, your own inventory space may not be many pages long, especially if your character isn’t strong and likes to wear heavy armor and carry shields. Allies can hold excess inventory, which can be done in a trade interface outside of combat.

Additionally, we would like to tweak this inventory screen to be used for a barter interface, when we have the time. Essentially, NPCs that want a certain item will weigh that class of items higher than of an item they do not want or have too much of. Bartering isn’t common in Dead State, though you may find a few folks who will trade surplus supplies. 

Catching up on some news, Rock, Paper, Shotgun has the announcement of a new game from Neocore (King Arthur) - an action/RPG titled The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, due Q4 2012.

We've covered Smuttlewerk's Companions and Time of Heroes for iOS before, so they let us know of new developments for their TBS game. A second campaign for Time of Heroes has been released and here are the details:

The Wrath Of The Prophet

Features:

- Seven brand new maps

- Two new heroes (Oskar, the iron golem and Runtula, the elven mistress)

- Three new units (iron golems, elven drones and elven archeresses)

- New achievements

- Hours of playtime

-----------------------------

This chapter concludes the story about the arrival of the northern people in Altland:

The servant of the dark god Detexx, the Prophet, has only one wish: to destroy every living being in Altland, especially the insolent humans who dare to defy the power of his insane god. His wrath is inconceivable! His powers terrifying!

The player has to lead prince Minos and the alliance of humans, dwarves and elves into gruesome battles against the “Hordes of Nether”!

-----------------------------

Players who are into turn-based strategy games, will get another round of great battles waiting to be won.

The campaign is available through in App purchase for 2,99$/2,39€.

For those who are unsure whether to buy the game or not, we designed a free “Time of Heroes – Zero Edition”. The first two maps can be enjoyed for free, the rest has to be purchased as IAP just as in the old version of the game. Once a campaign pack is purchased all ads we put in this version get removed.

Check out the video on Youtube.

Adam Smith from RPS has penned a Wot I Think for Cthulhu: The Wasted Land on PC:

Despite containing the horror of gas attacks, trench warfare, zombies and shoggoths, the story is more camp than creepy, with echoes of Wolfenstein and Hellboy. It’s serviceable enough, if on the short side. I don’t like to mention price but given that there are only nine missions, it’s useful to know that at $4.99 there’s a few hours of entertainment here. It’d be an uncannily lucky fellow who survived the later missions on a first attempt and even if so, the multiple objectives lead to some tough, drawn out defensive knuckling down.

No gasts will be flabbered by The Wasted Land but it’s a stern challenge with a strong set of numbers and rules governing its combat. As is often the case with this sort of turn-based skirmishing, there’s sometimes a puzzle-like precision needed to achieve victory, but in The Wasted Land there’s usually enough leeway for triumph to feel personal and well-earned, which made every minute I spent testing my mettle satisfying at the very least. And that’s in spite of the rough interface, which insists that the mouse button is clicked and then held for the majority of actions leading to the occasional mad slide around the map in an attempt to target a large man with a machine gun.

They also found the Intel AppUp thingy fairly harmless, so have a read if this is on your list.

I don't often post on user campaigns and polls but UnEpic's author Fran wrote in and asked for help getting the game on Steam. It's a fantastic platformer/RPG mix, so head over to the Steam forums and consider posting in their thread.

Almost Human's Grimrock blog has the first screen of the in-development Editor:

Friday time, Blueberry Pie!! Here is a work-in-progress screen grab from the upcoming Dungeon Editor. The editor is still pretty far from final but we wanted to give this early sneak peak anyway. There is no release date for the editor yet — we don’t want to risk making bad design choices by hurrying. You can follow the progress of the project here.

Jeff Vogel has a new blog post that reviews Legend of Grimrock...

I played Legend of Grimrock from front to back. It's a pure nostalgia trip, extremely well done, and I enjoyed it immensely. If you like role-playing games of the retro school, I recommend it.

...but goes on to talk about the "design space", saying that while there might be a Grimrock 2, he doesn't believe the concept has legs beyond that:

Once again, Legend of Grimrock is a ton of fun, and I enjoyed it immensely. However, it is a game on a square grid with monsters, pressure plates, secret door switches, and holes in the wall that shoot stuff out. There is only a limited number of ways that you can piece those elements together to make interesting dungeons for the player to explore. It's finite, and, by the time I was at the bottom of the dungeon, I was already noticing elements repeating themselves.

As I said, there might be a Grimrock 2. But, as we discovered twenty years ago, this earth will only stay fertile for so long before it needs to lie fallow again. Only then will it yield a fresh crop for a new generation of gamers. (Analogy!!!)

This is NOT a criticism of Legend of Grimrock, which is, for the third time, very good. This game doesn't have to be responsible for carrying future titles. It only has to be fun by itself, and it does so very well.

I just think it's a good example of the varying durability of different designs. Some can support many titles. Some only a few. This isn't a problem. It is simply important, when planning games beyond the first, not to heap onto a humble structure too many expectations.

Still no real details about the open-world RPG Warhorse is developing but Dan Vavra's latest blog post titled Choosing Your Religion talks about how they chose CRYEngine 3 for the project:

So here we are at Games Convention in Koln, Germany, knocking on the door of the booths of the likes of Epic, Crytek, Havok and many others, which was totally new for Martin and myself since we had always worked with in-house technology and only had a vague idea about how much it would cost to license an AAA gaming engine. I personally was also unsure if a company like Epic would be willing to deal with an unknown startup like us, but as it turned out this was totally unnecessary. We talked to almost everyone from Epic to the guys from Bitsquid and they were all great. Everyone was very supportive and open to various models of financing. Hell, it almost felt like they wanted to give it to us for free (and in the case of Cryengine and Unreal UDK, for indie developers they are). If I were to decide what we’d buy solely on my feelings, we’d have to buy everything.

Game Chronicles has a very short review of Avernum: Escape from the Pit with a score of 9/10:

Though there’s a more-or-less functional society deep underground that (of course) doesn’t mean your problems are over. The Avernite society is beset by cat- and lizard-men, goblins, and stranger monsters. And, of course, the game’s three main quests, finding escape, revenge, or safety, will keep you occupied for a while. As you explore the caverns and learn about the people and things that live there, the writing is consistently interesting, and the characters that you meet have strong personalities, even relatively inconsequential NPCs. Even the first characters you meet, cunning bandits, desperate refugees, and despairing quartermasters alike are practically dripping with character.

Gaslamp will launch a free expansion and Steam Workshop mod support for Dungeons of Dredmor on June 5th, according to their blog.

Ex-BioWare dev and creator of NEO Scavenger, Daniel Fedor, has been interviewed at The Digital Fix, mostly about his background and inspiration. You may recall NEO Scavenger is a post-apoc survival game - well worth a look. Here's a lengthy snip from the interview, which offers a trip down memory lane for some classic games:

You describe yourself as a "huge RPG nerd". Which games have inspired you?

As kids, we played a ton of AD&D. Pretty much all of the campaign settings. We also played quite a bit of Rifts and Shadowrun. Outside of those, we dipped our toes in Car Wars, Traveller, Twilight 2000, Mage: The Ascension, and GURPS, and I bought at least half a dozen RPGs just to enjoy reading the rules and settings.

In the realm of video games, I was big into CRPGs like Fallout, Shadowrun (Sega Genesis), Baldur's Gate, Arcanum, Nethack...man, this could be a long list. Looking over the stuff on my shelf, I think there are definitely some front-runners in the list of direct inspiration.

Rifts is a big one, for sure. I really enjoyed the mix of sci-fi and supernatural horror in a post apocalyptic setting. It went a bit bonkers, true, but the core concept was really cool to me. Arcanum had a similar tech/magic mixture, and offered a cozy paradise for the scavenging type.

GURPS's mechanics were always fascinating to me (and therefore Fallout's). The idea that one chooses a balance of advantages and disadvantages really grew on me later in life, as it forced more interesting role-playing and problem solving. You'll find that direct influence in NEO Scavenger right from the start, when choosing skills and traits.

The GDW games like Traveller and T:2000 were awesome because of their attention to detail and realism. I like my science fiction moderately hard, and most of the tech in NEO Scavenger is meant to be plausibly grounded.

Finally, the way magic is handled in Mage: The Ascension is really attractive to me. That it works in various and mysterious ways, and cannot be fully understood nor explained, is really cool to me. I'm annoyed by games where magic is formulaic to the point where a spell is just a +/- stat and one of the four Greek elements. Old D&D had some cool magic: the kind that was so idiosyncratic and full of contradictions that it felt like a forbidden art. If I can capture the mystery and power of magic like they did, I'll be happy.

There are a ton of other games that inspired NEO Scavenger, which itself is really just a collection of things I like from gaming. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, Deus Ex, Civilization, Silent Storm, Nethack...there are just so many games I've been influenced by, it'd be hard to list them all.

A short update from Almost Human this week that talks about their progress with the Legend of Grimrock editor in between their partying: 

I have a number of indie newsbits to catch up on, so I'll collect them here rather than spam them separately.

First, Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land Has Risen is now available from Intel's AppUp thingy for $4.99 - if you try it, let us know how you find Intel's client and, of course, the game.

IndieRPGs.com writes in with reviews of the indie strategy/RPG Styrateg (2.5/5) and turn-based strategy Age of Fear: The Undead King (3.5/5).

Megamat from our friends at RPG France wrote in with a new development called Fraternity Project, an "online" post-apoc 2D "old-school" project.  I can't tell you much more but there is a bunch of concept art on offer from the link above and they need more manpower if you are interested.

Von Paulus points out Sovereignty: Crown of Kings, a turn-based fantasy strategy game from The Lordz, described as "Risk meets Master of Magic". Due late 2012 - early 2013.

Lastly the Rampant Coyote has an indie roundup with a bunch of projects we follow but a number of others also.

Dealspwn has a review of Avernum: Escape from the Pit with a score of 8/10:

With no voice acting to fall back on, Vogel and co are forced to rely on the written word to deliver interesting characters, and do so with a degree of mastery that we rarely see from even the biggest and most skilled triple-A companies. The humble text box becomes our doorway into an entirely new world, with incredibly strong character and environment descriptions allowing us to conjure up vivid mental images of Avernum in our mind's eye. Dialogue flows naturally, and item descriptions crackle with subtle, playful humour. Most importantly, the story itself is remarkable, presenting a rebellious tale of survival against the odds and the pursuit of justice in an unjust, desperate place. The longer you spend reading, digesting and understanding the text, the greater your appreciation of the world will be; Avernum feels as visceral and real as any Unreal-powered title even though most of it exists in your own imagination.

The promised updated release of The Age of Decadence Public Beta is now available, offering a slew of fixes and improvements. You can grab the updated version via these links:

AoD Public Beta Release 2:

• Download from RapidShare
• Download from Atomic Gamer

Torrents:

• thepiratebay.se

...and this thread has the full changelog if you need a reminder. A small snip from the lengthy list:

Exploration

- Added a new encounter with a gang in the slums.
- Added a character you talk to in the graveyard.

Improvements:

- Added the option to leave screens by pressing the same key that you use to enter it.
- You can access the crafting screen by pressing R.
- You can switch between screens with the hotkeys (from inventory to character screen, for example).
- More buttons with sounds.
- Better formating for the description text in the character screen.
- You can resize and move the textbox in the main gui.
- Added synergy and background description to the character creation screen.
- Added tooltips to the tabs.
- Q and E now rotate the camera.
- Character creation is now tailored to resolutions between 900h and 1080h.
- Added new dialogues screens, with bigger fonts, darker background and better formatting.
- Anisotropic filtering now also affects all weapons, armors and some minor items.
- Now you get a rank if you are part of a faction.
- Notices in dialogue (text between *) now are centered and with a different color.
- Added expanded dialogues about the world with the Inkeeper and Feng.
- Now there is a list with all locations on the right side of the map.
- Now there is a menu from which you can select which bodies you want to loot when 2 or more are in the same place.
- Added sitting animations to filler characters.
- New look for the lorica segmentata.
- All screens fit higher resolutions better.

Fans of Matt Barton will find a review of Legends of Grimrock in his latest Matt Chat video.

Open-world squad-based RPG Kenshi has launched a crowdfunding campaign at IndieGoGo to pay for contractors to help round out the game with additional programming, art and sound. Kenshi has been around for a while and can be purchased as an Alpha, so it will be interesing to see how this effort goes:

• Original take on the RTS-RPG hybrid genre. No "hero" characters with artificially stronger stats than everybody else-  Every character and NPC you meet is potentially an equal, and has a name, a life. 
• You are not the chosen one.  You're not great and powerful. You don't have more 'hitpoints' than everyone else. You are not the center of the universe, and you are not special. Unless you work for it.
• Freeform gameplay in a seamless game world stretching over 400 square kilometers.  The game will never seek to limit you or restrict your personal play style.
• Purchase and upgrade your own buildings to use as safe fortified havens when things go bad, or use them to start up a business.
• Start with a mining business and build up your own fortress or outpost
• Research new technology and craft better fortifications and equipment for your teams.  They need to be ready when an enemy horde is at the gates.
• Carry your wounded squad mates to safety and get them all home alive.
• Variation and possibilities of gameplay. Be good, be evil, be a business man, be a thief, live in a town, live in the desert, join the army, fight the army, travel alone, travel in hordes, build a fortress, raze a city.
• Dynamic, ever changing world. Support or hinder whoever you wish, or keep to yourself, the world won't stop moving. This is not just a "game", you are living and surviving in a simulated world.
• Absolutely no Level-scaling.  The world does not level up along with you, and the shops don't change their inventory to only items matching your level. At the start of the game almost everyone will be stronger than you, and survival will always be a struggle.
• Realistic medical system that affects gameplay.  A character with a wounded leg will limp or crawl and slow the party down, wounded arms means you must use your sword one-handed or not at all.  Lose an eye and it will affect your field of vision.  Blood loss means you can pass out, and the blood will attract predators.  Exhaustion affects performance and is increased by equipment weight, weather, blood loss and thirst.  Severed limbs will need expensive robotic replacements.
• Intelligent AI that allows for characters to reason and work towards long-term goals and desires. Squads work together and carry their wounded to safety. Characters can be setup to take care of micromanagement for you.
• Aid or oppose the various factions in the world while striving for the strength and wealth necessary to simply survive in the harsh desert. 
• Independently developed with no design influences, or alterations dictated by men in gray suits who have never played a game before in their lives.
• Original game world. There are no fantasy-knock-off cliches. No magic.

This week's Dead State Design Update introduces the team working on the game (beyond Brian and Annie) and offers a single new screen:

Just a quick update this week. We’re hard at work locking down and polishing what we want to show for the Kickstarter. We want to make sure we show as much of the Dead State experience that we can before we ask fans and gamers to pledge money to our game. To that end, we’ve actually been expanding our team. The GUIs you saw last week were done by Mazin, who also did the GUIs for Age of Decadence. We’ve also added a composer to the team whose work you will be hearing soon.

That brings our team size up to about ten people working on weekly tasks for the game – and that’s not counting semi-regular contributors on the art side. I see my name or Annie’s thrown around as the “people who are working on the game” so I think this week I’ll do a refresher on who else has been working on this game.

Oscar – Oscar is our Lead Artist. Oscar supervises all of the other art tasks, and is responsible for much of the art and level work in the game. He is pretty much the jack-of-all-trades on the project and assists in design and scripting tasks in addition to his art lead responsibilities. Oscar is also responsible for the art direction on Age of Decadence.

Nick – Nick is our Lead Programmer. Nick is responsible for engine modification, content tools and systems implementation, and pretty much anything that has to do with the code. Nick is building upon code he worked on for Age of Decadence, though Dead State has plenty of new features that have kept him busy.

Ivan – Ivan is our animator on Dead State. You’ll be seeing a lot more of his work when we show off footage of the game. Ivan also worked on the animations for Age of Decadence.

Kim – Kim is our portrait and 2D artist. She has done all of the portraits for Dead State and is working on multiple other 2D art tasks such as inventory icons.

Brandon – Brandon is another 2D artist specializing in logos. Any time you see a store logo (of which there are many in a modern day game), mascot, product billboard, or poster in the game, it was probably drawn by him.

Joao – Joao is a 3D artist who did all of the weapon models in the game and is currently working on level objects and level art.

Jason – Jason is another 3D artist and longtime contributor helping out with objects in the game.

Joey – Joey did the 3D models that you’ll see in the trailer and our screenshots.

Mazin – Mazin is our new GUI artist. He also worked on the Age of Decadence GUI.

Leif – Leif is our composer. You will hear his work in the trailer and some of our other promo material.

And that’s who is working on Dead State. Obviously, one reason we’re doing the Kickstarter is to compensate our team and allow them to devote all or most of their time to the project, which will allow us to plan around more rigid milestones. Many of our team members have been working on or contributing to the game for a while now. You’ll find most of them stopping by here on the boards, so feel free to give them a virtual thumbs up. 

Head over to check out the new screen.

Alex Thomas from Stoic chats with Wired in a lengthy 6-page interview about The Banner Saga. Here's Alex's reponse to a question about Choose Your Own Adventure books:

Thomas: From the start of the design we intended to make each of our three main systems (combat, travel and conversation) influence the others in exactly the way you’re talking about here. To summarize briefly; the story involves you and your people trying to escape what seems to be the literal end of the world which is sweeping slowly across the land. The travel scenes from the video are actual game-play which are akin to a cross between King of Dragon Pass and Oregon Trail. You’re not responsible just for a single character or a party, but for an entire society of people, and that opens up a lot of options people haven’t played with much in role-playing games.

As you travel events will happen — your clansmen get in disputes, supplies run low and a wide variety of other unexpected issues come up that you have to deal with. Making decisions during travel can affect the difficulty or frequency of combat, and in turn barely surviving a fight doesn’t return you to full health afterward. You know you’ll be in trouble if you get in another fight soon, but making camp to rest will chew up time. Time is a key element to the game, and events can change based on when you encounter them. Through these smaller events you’re forming the story of your caravan, and through primarily dialogue you unravel the mystery of what’s happening to the world and what you can do to change things. One of our key goals has been to let bad things happen and to allow the player to deal with mistakes and keep them. Being a smaller, indie project has given us the ability to mess with the world in a way that bigger developers may shy away from. If your home town goes up in flames, you haven’t lost the game. It just keeps going. What is important to you, as the player, should be to do the best you can for you, your friends and your people.

The Gaslamp blog announces a free expansion for Dredmor will be released "very soon", offering Steam Workshop integration and new game features. The expansion comes via collaboration with modders but doesn't have a proper name yet:

team Workshop; mod integration with Steam! We’re turning it on! It’s Steamy!

Battle Geology, a wizard-like warrior skill with earth-shattering consequences by the terribly mysterious Null (how mysterious? terribly.)

Clockwork Knight and Rogue Scientist, a pair of crafty steampunk skill lines by the too-clever-by-half Ruigi

Warlockery, the wizard skill for wizards who would rather by warriors, by the utterly mad Essence — he wrote over 500 lines of xml for one spell.

A mess of twisty little rooms, all different, created by the deranged architect our mortal speech renders “Bergstrom“; The geometry is all wrong.

And to inhabit the renovated Dungeons of Dredmor we’ve summoned a pack of new monster variations dug up by one FaxCelestis, from the existentially troubling Poorly Cloned Hero to the lofty Diggle Rocketeer.

Naturally there are some new items and other such nonsense happening which you’ll have to discover on your own.

OK, this isn't so much an update for Knights of the Chalice 2 / Fantasy World Engine as a heads-up for those who missed what is going on. Heroic Fantasy Games has updated their front page and, as fans will know, we're waiting for them to finish work on an RTS before getting back to the good stuff:

Since I'm cleaning up my website's files I might as well update this (very irregular) announcements page. Considering how the Fantasy World Engine is such a huge project, I've set myself a shorter-term goal, to make a 2D real-time strategy game with a map and campaign editor.

I've worked on this for a good while now. All I have left to code is the function of buildings, win and lose conditions, some interface for game and campaign saving and loading, a minimap, help files, and all of the artificial intelligence.

And after that I'll have to paint a set of good maps with the editor, playtest them, finalise Windows, Linux and Mac versions, update the website, release the game, do the marketing, and then finally I may be able to work on Fantasy Work Engine - with the advantage of having more experience and a lot of flexible classes ready for re-use.

Official forums have been launched for The Banner Saga:

Here's a quick overview: We've got a news and off-topic section where we'll be keeping you up-to-date with any good interviews or previews that come up. There's the special Backer-only subforum just for you, and the general discussion Longhouse, where we've already started a discussion about guild crests. The beginner's circle is where we'll be answering all the basic stuff- what's the game about, who are we, etc.

We'll be answering the boards as much as possible, but we've also gotten some help from a few guys who will be doing some moderating for us- Sean (from The Old Republic), Scott and Stelly, so if you see them answering questions it's because we asked them to :)

Eric Schwarz from Gamebanshee has written a 4-page review of the new iPad version of this game.

A quote on the exploration in the game:

If there's one thing that Avernum completely gets right, it's open-world exploration and a sense of progression. While not entirely free-roaming, you'll work your way from one corner of the world to another, following more or less whatever path you want. With the single goal of escaping Avernum, there's a lot of room to take your time and figure things out. As you explore the world, so too will you grow in power, learn more about Avernum, its people and history, and so on, until you're finally both tough enough and well-traveled enough to leave it behind. Trekking deeper and deeper, the distance from civilization growing as the land becomes more and more desolate, Avernum is able to create a feeling of scale and, later, isolation, that few other games can.

A quote on some of the quirks in the game:

This new version of Avernum has some additional quirks; the transition to the new engine, as well as cross-platform play on the iPad, has brought with it a share of compromises. For one, the ability to close doors manually has been removed, which means that now stealing items can be very difficult without being caught. Additionally, changes to the non-combat skills mean that searching for secrets is now done by clicking hidden switches on walls, with the emphasis not on finding secrets but on whether your party is smart enough to press these buttons - a little silly, in my opinion. The auto-regenerating health from Avadon is thankfully gone, but now your party fully heals whenever it enters a town, and there's no hunger system in place like some of the other Avernum titles, which makes eating food or staying at inns completely useless. It's simply hard not to feel like you're playing an old game with a fresh coat of paint, and like the simpler story and gameplay mentioned above, these more modern design choices don't always fit, or simply weren't necessary.

A quote on the leveling system:

Leveling up is fairly frequent, although different from the 1999 version of the game. Aside from a single attribute point per level (along with some "natural" bonuses as you go), you'll also get two skill points and, sometimes, a trait. Skills cover everything from passive bonuses, to the aforementioned non-combat skills, to defensive abilities like parrying, to more general bonuses that allow you to learn spells and battle disciplines (activated combat abilities). Traits, meanwhile, are now passive benefits earned every two level-ups, and they either take the form of health bonuses, attribute bonuses (strength, intelligence, dexterity, etc.), or skill bonuses.

A quote from the conclusion:

Overall, I can recommend Avernum: Escape from the Pit to just about any fan of old-school isometric RPGs. For your $10 USD (on Steam, anyway), you're looking at about 40-50 hours of gameplay, which is phenomenal value no matter how you slice things...... Fans looking to get into the Avernum series will do very well with Escape from the Pit, and while the improvements beyond the game engine and visuals are relatively modest, there's still a lot to enjoy even if you've played through the game once before already.