s&box, from the creator of the popular Source Engine sandbox Garry’s Mod, released three days ago. s&box is based on the Source 2 engine, and not only a sandbox but a game development and publishing platform, including publishing on Steam.

The news post one day after release openly covers the mixed ratings, public finances, doubling their play fund that pays creators, and public roadmap.

I was surprised to see they openly and transparently publish day-by-day finances.

The public performance stats are interesting too.

Refreshing. I wish more publishers would do these kinds of things with deliberate open communication and transparency.

The platformer Unless became free on April 12th. They felt it was not successful enough with the 5 USD price tag. They made it free, hoping that many more players would get to experience the game.

It’s an excellent platformer, especially for a free title.

If you like platformers, I wholeheartedly recommend playing it!

My review:

Unless is an exceptional free platformer.

+ Great, colorful, varied, discernible pixel graphics
+ Great platforming, control, environment and gameplay variance, progression
+ Very good tech; snappy loading, resets, navigation, platforming
+ Good story characters (just two; they add character and meaning)
+ A lot of optional and bonus content, speedrun mode, challenges, leaderboards
+ A lot of settings to customize control, difficulty, game behavior, accessibility
* ~70/100 min playthrough (all levels/all levels+bonus levels+10 As)
* Non-voiced text story dialogues
* Limited character mechanics; there’s only jumping, with height control; all variance comes through the environment, which I consider a good, well-implemented design

If you like platformers or jump-and-run games, play Unless!

• 0:00 - Intro
• 0:39 - 2D Animation
• 6:34 - Pixel Animation
• 11:49 - The Hybrids
• 17:08 - Boycott acknowledgment
• 18:03 - Naturalistic 3D Animation
• 28:32 - Stylized 3D Animation
• 42:08 - Condolences (again)
• 42:36 - Wrapping Up

About ‘ambience’, ‘atmosphere’, and ‘immersion’ in games.

Mattel Electronics Auto Race was released in 1976 by Mattel Electronics as the first handheld electronic game to use only solid-state electronics; it has no mechanical elements except the controls and on/off switch. - Wikipedia

Over the years, our server has been racking up costs, and the now-unsupported software it was running on finally gave out.

All online services have now been migrated into permanent offline features. We made sure nothing was lost.

• The Level Editor now saves levels directly to your disk […]
• All community-created levels […]
• All-time high scores have been immortalized […]
• New high scores are saved locally […]

The game Dual Snake on Steam is free and was released in 2018.