Towns (Steam Greenlight)

So this last week I saw a game that had recently been greenlit on Steam Greenlight called Towns. Now Towns is a game that is quite similar to Castle Story in a lot of ways, but with a number of differences. First, Towns in it's current alpha state has a lot more content than Castle Story in it's alpha state. That is, there are a lot more things to find and do in Towns. However, even though Castle Story has buggy building construction, Towns somehow manages to have even worse building construction. As both games are in alpha still, neither is really user friendly or good at directing the user to understand the interface and which things should be done.

One thing I've started doing in Towns, is to set a few commands for my town citizens to follow, then walk away and let them live their lives to see what they've done when I come back. Most of the time, I've come back to a ghost town where literally all of the town citizens have been killed and ghosts have spawned from their corpses. However, as I've managed to set up a fairly well armed standing army, the last couple attempts I've been able to return to a town population that was even greater than the one when I left. Right now my recommendation would be towns over castle story, just because there is more content in towns so far. It'll be interesting to see both of these games progress to see how much fun they can be when they are finished.

Castle Story Prototype Controls

Last night I was able to download the Castle Story Prototype and begin playing it a little bit. The first thing I noticed with the prototype, is that the controls aren't immediately intuitive. The camera mouse controls can be turned on by pressing "space" and you can select and control the yellow guys when you are not pressing "space." In order to mine, you need to first assign people to a mining group, then describe the zone that should be mined by drawing with the tools on the right. Setting up lumber teams can be done similarly. Finally, in order to construct things, you should assign brick men to the building team and lay out where the bricks should be placed using the blueprint tools. While using the building tool, you can hold right-click to bring up a menu or single right-click to rotate the currently selected block. Here's an annotated screenshot that will hopefully help you learn some of the controls.

Kickstarter – Castle Story

A while back, my friend showed me an interesting video for a game called Castle Story. Right now, they have a kickstarter campaign going, where you can get the full game for only $15. They've already reached their funding goal several times over, but if you are interested in the game, this preorder will give you access to the beta and will likely be a lower price than the final release. To get an idea of the game play, check out the video embeded below.