Screenshot Saturday Featuring Day of Destruction, Lingotopia, Many More

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Screenshot Saturday persists, week in and week out.  It’s an ongoing weekly feature that grew on Twitter where developers take a minute to show off the week’s progress, and a great way to learn about all sorts of interesting games that might have passed by without a signal boost.  Images, animations, music, and even bits of code all demonstrate what’s new, and the games range from first attempts to high-end indie, with the occasional near-AAA making an appearance.  That’s fairly rare, though, because the bigger a company is more tightly restricted its PR gets.   For those developers who know how to have a bit of fun, though, Screenshot Saturday is a great way to drum up a bit of interest.  This feature usually pulls about a dozen images from the hundreds that are posted but sometimes things get a bit out of hand when there’s a lot of choices to make and no real reason not to include just one more.

Lingotopia-  After washing up on the shore of a strange city, a young girl finds herself alone in a foreign land where nobody speaks her language.  As it turns out, though, all the languages are ones that actually exist, and figuring out how to get through the city’s streets and talk to its people means actually learning something.  Maybe not enough to speak fluently, but to at least get by.  Lingotopia is currently running on Kickstarter.

Rogue Aces-  Fly and shoot in the wartorn skies, but watch your butt when you land.  Nursing a wounded plane down for a perfect landing doesn’t count for much when a tank shell leaves your poor aircraft a singed pile of smoking metal.

Pachacuti-  Modular Castlevania-style action platforming that draws from Incan mythology rather than gothy vampires.  The levels are semi random, in that they’re constructed from pre-built parts put together in random order.  While the main character is in her warrior form in this animation, she’s got a thinner, more agile version she can switch to that’s more suitable for platforming challenges.

MOCT-  Atmospheric co-op action platformer where each of up to four players use their complementary skills to help each other through the arenas.

Atmocity- Very little info is available on this but it seems to be a city-builder in the clouds. Whatever it ends up being, it produces environments that belong on 80s sci-fi book covers.

0°N 0°W – Go for a nice walk to other dimensions where the basic underlying rules of light, sound, and color are as alien as the landscape. Basically a walking simulator through shifting interdimensional psychedelia.

Elium- Fight your way out of the dungeon in an FPS roguelite with only a sword and a little stealth to see you through, plus whatever you can scavenge along the way.  If that means crushing a guard’s skull by sneaking up behind and smacking him with a chair then it’ll work just fine, even if maybe it doesn’t technically count as “sword fighting”.

Crest- Become a god, which sounds amazing until you realize that people have free will and are just as likely to ignore you as they are to completely misinterpreting your divine word. Pretty weather, though.

Mobility!- Hardcore platformer that’s also tooled to be more forgiving than the standard “I want you dead now!” difficulty, depending on player preference. The platforms electrifying after use is a nice, if evil, touch.

Day of Destruction- Sure, the scrappy humans fighting off an overwhelming alien force hell-bent on flattening their cities is always a good story, but the aliens get to have a great time breaking everything until the world joins together as one to fight back against the carnage.

Vavio- Bullet-hell set to music, where the pulse of the patterns is cued to the beat.  The solid colors and intricate patterns make this as pretty as it looks difficult.

Unnamed- The most Super Hang-On game of the day, and while candy land is a bit cloying and pink the jump looks good and the pixel-art bike explosion feels pleasantly crunchy.

Ground Runner: Trials- Hope into a hoverbike and hit the dusty trails in VR, shooting through the badlands while keeping the bike under control.  A year may not be enough time to complete a game of this scope but it’s plenty of time for big, obvious progress to happen.

RRshooter-  Run & gun with a nice touch of bullet hell, plus the precision in control necessary to thread through the chaos.  There’s a demo on itch.io showing a lot of promise, although the few minutes I’ve put in playing so far hasn’t shown me how to do the twin-stick aiming featured in this clip.

Unnamed-  As mentioned in the tweet, a text adventure Twine game.  What makes it notable is the name of the biologist, which is impossible to improve on in any way.

Unnamed-  Maybe there’s a game in here or maybe it’s just a modeling exercise, but there’s definitely a noir/spooky something-or-other waiting inside.

Bonus Image-

Unnamed-  It’s been an unnecessarily stressful day for a lot of people.  When in doubt, creating things and having something to show can help take the edge off, even if only a little.