Randy Smith is co-founder and designer at Tyger Style Games, creators of games such as Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor and Waking Mars. He began his career at the legendary Looking Glass Studios with Thief: The Dark Project, and later served as chief designer in Thief: Deadly Shadows at Ion Storm Austin. He has also been a columnist for EDGE magazine, where he has emphasized in interactive storytelling. Ruber Eaglenest from Spanish site Indieorama.com caught up with Randy on the score of the upcoming publication of the sequel to Spider: The Rite of the Shrouded Moon. Here's a talk at length about being independent and the human connection between design and video games.

Indie Fund, a funding source by and for indie game developers, announced the other day that it will be providing financial assistance to Loveshack Entertainment so the developers can finish work on Framed. I contacted Joshua Boggs of Loveshack to ask him some questions about what the support of Indie Fund means for the future of Framed and found out that things were looking pretty grim for the Australian development team before this happened.

Owlchemy Labs' psychological survival adventure game Dyscourse was successfully funded on Kickstarter a few days ago. It has no zombies, instead focusing around characters stranded by plane crash on a deserted island. Imagine a brightly-colored version of Don't Starve with multiple characters and a narrative with enough branches to rival the size of the Mana Tree and you'll have some idea of what Owlchemy Labs is working towards with Dyscourse. Grab a cup of something delicious, watch the gameplay demo above, and read on for some words with Alex Schwartz about where Dyscourse will go from here.

TinkerHouse Games is looking to break down the walls between genres with Dwarven Delve by combining dungeon crawling action with the ability to manipulate the flow of the dungeon via mechanics similar to puzzle games in the vein of Pipe Dream. By rotating the hexagonal rooms and changing the available paths through the dungeon, the player will be able to funnel monsters towards the party, funnel monsters towards each other so they fight each other, funnel monsters into traps, and open up routes for the party to get around traps and straight into treasure rooms.

Photo by Marjorie Becker for Chiptography

When last we heard from chip music VJs Outpt and Paris, they were touring with Anamanaguchi and designing an indie game to give you power over improvisationally generated sprite art imagery. For the past year, the New York-based multimedia artists have been running their own netlabel called Audio Visual Algebra, whose debut release is Drum and Space. More recently the team began surreptitiously releasing Commodore 64 seapunk tunes, as well as 8bitoperators remixes, under the handle Sea64. Electronically manipulating their vocal performances, they've gone undetected by the savviest of their fans in the chiptune scene. We caught up with Sea64, aka outpt+paris, to find out: Why the subterfuge?

Team Grand Slam, a collection of veteran Japanese developers behind the upcoming free-to-play Monken, recently ran a successful crowdfunding campaign on a Japanese platform called Campfire. They raised just under ¥2.5 million ($25,000 USD) for the development of a game they plan to release under a Creative Commons license. That may not seem like much money compared to the amounts raised by developers like Double Fine and Obsidian, but it's the largest amount raised for a game on this Japanese crowdfunding site to date.

The co-composer of the music score to the classic sidescrolling beat-em-up Streets of Rage III will be scoring the soundtrack to Necrosoft's PlayStation Mobile driving game "Oh, Deer!" The collaboration marks Tokyo-based musician Motohiro Kawashima's first foray into indie territory and has already entailed the creation of ten music tracks for the mobile title. Live performances of songs from the game will debut tomorrow at the Sabaco venue in Tokyo, alongside sets by game-inspired hip-hop artists Mega Ran and DJ DN3 of Mega Ran in Language Arts.

Purveyor of some of the finest indie pixels you will ever find and creator of excellent arcade experiences that happily run on PCs, Locomalito has been kind enough to answer our questions about his work, influences, games, goals and more. If you have even enjoyed a game of Hydorah, maldita Castilla, l'Abbaye des Morts and Viriax or are interested in finding out more about one of the most prolific and talented crafters of freeware games, please, do read on:

1. Even though most indie gamers know your games and what Locomalito is all about, would you mind re-introducing yourself? Is there a dark gaming secret of your we have somehow lost?

I'm a homebrew developer from Spain. I grew up with arcade gaming values, imagining my own games and drawing levels and stuff in my notebooks. I still love those old games today, their aesthetics, sound and gameplay values, and I really miss new games like those now.

So, why not? Now that companies are focused in other things, and now that there are tools for non-professional people like me to make games, I can take it as a hobby to bring those ideas back to the present; just to preach about videogame values and for myself to have a break from the daily problems.

After releasing a preview a couple of months ago as an entry in a game development competition run by GameProg.it, the much anticipated final version of Mixed Bag's Futuridium EP in now available for free download for PC with a Mac version coming after App Store approval.

Being a life-long fan of Andrew Braybrook's Commodore 64 classic Uridium and its 16-bit sequel, the promise of a remake using a fresh 3D perspective, backed up by a bassbin-rocking glitch-hop, breakbeat and drum and bass soundtrack had me hyped, to say the least. Thankfully it was a promise that Mixed Bad successfully delivered - piloting a nimble one-man fighter craft and taking on a fleet of epic armed-to-the-teeth alien dreadnoughts has never been so much fun.

IndieCade's annual E3 showcase serves as a first look for some of the year's biggest independent titles. Many of the showcase's offerings reemerge later in the year during IndieCade's October festival in Culver City. This year, the showcase showed off a wide range of titles, from Die Gute Fabrik's Sportsfriends (announced for PlayStation 4 just before the conference) and Tale of Tales' newest iOS experiment, Luxuria Superbia.

On the face of it, Luxuria Superbia is an abstract, flower-themed game that involves venturing through a tunnel. To actually play it, however, affords a much more tactile and sensual experience.

To be brief, it's a game about sex.