After weeding through much drivel and sub-par exploits, here is XBLIGR’s meritocrous (yes we just made that word up) list of the best games in the XBOX indie marketplace:

1. Solar 2

RELEASE DATE: 6/19/2011
DEVELOPER: Murudai
GENRE: Action & Adventure
FEATURES
Offline players 1
Dolby Digital

Solar 2 is the ambitious and sizeable upgrade to a game wherein rather than race among the stars firing at hostile objects, you ARE the celestial bodies, trying to absorb others into your gravity field with the motivation to become a cosmic force of nature. Your little star becomes a sun which develops a solar system whose planets develop life and then those various life forms go to war with each other all the while you dash through the universe hungry for more influence over matter.

Backed by a meditative ambient soundtrack, this unusual setup is both contemplative and challenging and it merits top marks for both its ambition and deployment.

2. Sequence

RELEASE DATE: 5/5/2011
DEVELOPER: Iridium Studios
GENRE: Role Playing
FEATURES
Offline players 1
Dolby Digital

Iridium lists this as an RPG, but really, it is more like a music-driven beat-matching version of Tetris on three different layers with spell casting thrown in for good measure (yes, that’s a mana bar alongside your hp meter). Or, maybe a better description is it is like Lumines Live in that the aim is to knock out your opponent, while doing it to the beat.

Add some very slick title and cut sequences and this rounds out as a very smart package indeed. You may never know it, were it not for all the critical acclaim, as its rather conventional cover art and title slid past in the indie marketplace, but this is one heck of a clever spin on the various genres it encompasses.

3. Alien Jelly

RELEASE DATE: 12/21/2011
DEVELOPER: Collective Mass
GENRE: Puzzle & Trivia
FEATURES
Offline players 1 – 4
Offline co-op 2 – 4
Dolby Digital

An amazingly well designed puzzle platformer that could easily fit into the top of the XBLA catalog. It’s no wonder it was a two-time finalist in the Dream Build Play competition. In Alien Jelly, you command a brain-shaped alien lodged inside a cube of Jell-O. Use the B button to rewind time in order to solve many puzzles, most of which involve dropping to and returning from otherwise impossible drops as you strive to collect all jewels before returning to your spaceship and moving on to increasingly elaborate challenges. With full 3D cameras and a great Danny Elfman-esque score, Theremin and all, though this is at the upper price strata of XBLIGs at 240 MSPs, it is still a ridiculous value.

Oh almost forgot to mention that after you have jiggled your way through forty odd levels that include all manner of spooky sci-fi obstacles, you get to build your own levels! We bought and then gifted a copy to our neighbor.

4. T.E.C. 3001

RELEASE DATE: 8/24/2011
DEVELOPER: Phoenix
GENRE: Platformer
FEATURES
Offline players 1
Dolby Digital

This amazing-looking title from indie developers “Phoenix” is pure adrenaline in the spirit of Sonic the Hedgehog meets Mirror’s Edge but reskinned as the Terminator in the world of Rez HD. Running through an RGB portal changes up the color scheme so you don’t burnout on the look as you learn the course via trial by fire.

Speed boosts, power bursts, double jumps all come at you at lightning speed and the ultimate effect of success is one of pure exhilaration.

5. Blocks That Matter

RELEASE DATE: 5/12/2011
DEVELOPER: Swing Swing Submarine
GENRE: Platformer
FEATURES
Offline players 1
Dolby Digital

Blocks That Matter made quite an impact in the indie game market in 2011, and we were lucky enough to have it show up in the XBLIG market too. A comedic context wraps around an amazing puzzle platformer that requires you to use and recycle a variety of block types to get to any given level’s exit while attempting to collect any bonuses. Hours of gameplay for a paltry sum of MSPs.

6. Wizorb

RELEASE DATE: 9/28/2011
DEVELOPER: Tribute Games
GENRE: Action & Adventure
FEATURES
Offline players 1
Dolby Digital

Honestly, there were only two things that kept running through my mind as I played this: the first was “Happy happy joy joy” (and not because I was playing Ren & Stimpy reruns in my mind either) and second that I couldn’t wait to build a standup arcade housing just so I could host this game in my den and charge my friends quarters to play it, because they would. In fact, they’d probably go change whole ten dollar bills for rolls of coins they would want to toss in.

From the “why didn’t anyone think of this before” files comes a mashup of Arkanoid and puzzle quest, or in other words, a JRPG version of Breakout. You are a wizard who travels from village to village surveying the wreckage left in the wake of a series of cataclysmic monster attack and, in hopes of raising funds to make donations so as to repair the villages (a little like Bastion) you must clear ten levels per village by using your trusty wand (or paddle as it were) to knock out bad guys, clear out bricks, boxes and other sundry items, occasionally tripping switches and sneaking into secret passageways to bonus levels and shops, AND you can cast magic spells to manipulate the field in various ways.

Everything, down to the score font is a perfect tribute to classic arcade games of yore. One of the best finds on XBLIG in 2011.

7. Oozi: Earth Adventure Ep. 1 & 2

RELEASE DATE: 11/25/2011
DEVELOPER: AwesomeGamesStudio
GENRE: Platformer
FEATURES
Offline players 1
Dolby Digital

Though there is nothing overtly groundbreaking about Oozi, it may be the best looking title on this list. With great control response, beautiful set pieces with nicely implemented parallax and solid sound design, this Super Mario Bros. side scroller is a complete steal at 80 MSP.

8. DLC Quest

RELEASE DATE: 11/2/2011
DEVELOPER: Going Loud Studios
GENRE: Platformer
FEATURES
Offline players 1
Dolby Digital

This is what happens when someone who has played way too many games, and knows all the tropes far too well, gets sick of the BS and decides to take their proverbial revenge on Seattle. As one might expect, in hindsight, such a person endeavoring to make a game that rallies against the pitiful habit of AAA companies releasing downloadable content at a cost to the consumer for the most asinine additions (and in many cases for things that should be included in the first place) their own game would have a hard time at sucking. And DLC Quest, though on the surface, a joke, is in fact an excellent platformer filled with clever, self-referential puzzles and commendable game design.

In a nutshell, by using the very cliches that it is criticizing, DLC Quest becomes, in itself, an excellent addition to the platforming gamespace.

9. Cursed Loot

RELEASE DATE: 8/22/2011
DEVELOPER: Eyehook Games LLC
GENRE: Role Playing
FEATURES
Offline players 1
Dolby Digital

In a way, we are cheating by including this remake / official release of Epic Dungeon, a title we already voted for in our Best XBLIGs of 2010 list, in our 2011 list. But Eyehook’s bigger, badder, better version which now includes a slot machine mini game, two new playable classes (the goblin and the peasant) and dozes of new weapons and “awardments” under a new name still makes for the best Roguelike in the XBOX Indie marketplace (until Gaslamp decides to release Dungeons of Dredmor on XBLIG of course).

With an added content patch that came out two months after its release, this is a developer and a title that just keeps on giving. Just don’t die, it’s a ROGUElike for heaven’s sake!

10. Astroman

RELEASE DATE: 12/23/2010
DEVELOPER: StarQuail
GENRE: Platformer
FEATURES
Offline players 1
Dolby Digital

With a soundtrack that sounds like it was made by Moby, and early-Saturday morning cartoon-style graphics, this groovy little 2d platformer actually delivers a lot of bang for the buck. Although it was technically released December 23rd, 2010, we included it on this year’s list becuase there was no way it could have made it on last years lists, and it does deserve its moment in the solar system.

11.Platformance: Temple Death

RELEASE DATE: 6/20/2011
DEVELOPER: Magiko Gaming
GENRE: Platformer
FEATURES
Offline players 1
Dolby Digital

With their follow up title to 2010′s Platformance: Castle Pain, Magiko has demonstrated that they aren’t kidding around when it comes to bringing the best of the Castlevania style to the XBOX Indie Game world.

With Platformance: Temple Death, the devs have on offer a challenging, and amazingly detailed Castlevania type platformer with an Indiana Jones theme. We played it, and died, a lot, but what with all the zooming in an out of the action, it was a hell of an adventure.

12. Hidden In Plain Sight

RELEASE DATE: 11/18/2011
DEVELOPER: Adam Spragg Games
GENRE: Other
FEATURES
Offline players 2 – 4
Dolby Digital

Hrm. OK. So imagine a game where you and three friends are all sitting in a room together staring at your HDTV and wondering which of you is controlling what character on the screen but you don’t want to give it away in the process of figuring it out, so that you can gank one another. A brand new take on the stealth genre, or better yet that game we used to play as kids that involved no pixels whatsoever called Murder.

Does the title start to make more sense now?

13. Production Panic

RELEASE DATE: 7/13/2011
DEVELOPER: MikeE
GENRE: Puzzle & Trivia
FEATURES
Offline players 1
Dolby Digital

Fans of popular indie breakout SpaceChem or Lazy 8 Sstudio’s steampunk puzzle game Cogs may actually love this challenging puzzle game that involves routing goods down the correct conveyor belts in increasingly complex sequences. Various shapes of conveyor belt are picked up and placed so as to guide various products through their process and ultimately out the delivery exit. Action can be sped up with the X key on your controller making this feel a little more like a tower defense. With tidy design, solid implementation and crafty puzzles that work, this is a sure standout in the 2011 slate deserving of more attention. A groovy instrumental J-Pop soundtrack accompanies the action.

14. Doom & Destiny

RELEASE DATE: 8/25/2011
DEVELOPER: HeartBit Interactive
GENRE: Role Playing
FEATURES
Offline players 1
Dolby Digital

Kicking off with a group of four D&D enthusiasts who walk through a door into an alternate dimension, reminscent of Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits Doom and Destiny brings to XBLIG another 8-bit styled JRPG: Check. Manga-influenced chat illustrations: Check. 15 hours plus of engaging story and gameplay: Check. Monthly DLCs: Check.

Doom & Destiny fills the void in 2011 left by Zeboyd Games and the fact that Unepic isn’t available for the XBLIG marketplace.

Get your 2D Final Fantasy on!

15. Cute Things Dying Violently

RELEASE DATE: 8/24/2011
DEVELOPER: ApathyWorks
GENRE: Platformer
FEATURES
Offline players 1 – 2
Dolby Digital

A decidely sadistic take on Pachinko, this puzzle game is full of personality and the physics are pretty good too. The object is to fling as many critters as possible towards and into an escape elevator. Drawing down on the right thumbstick controls the strength with which they are flung. We actually started to feel remorse sending these poor innocent balls of expression to their gruesome and untimely demise.

16. Rainbow Runner

RELEASE DATE: 6/28/2011
DEVELOPER: Progpixel Games
GENRE: Action & Adventure
FEATURES
Offline players 1
Dolby Digital

Taking cues from bit.trip Runner, Rainbow Runner is a side-scrolling twin-stick shmup with color-matching a la Simon, a Euro trance soundtrack and neon outline renderings wherein animal bosses look like something out of a fairytale written by TRON. Interestingly enough, it all works and we had a great time with it.

17. Dead Pixels

RELEASE DATE: 9/15/2011
DEVELOPER: CantStrafeRight
GENRE: Role Playing
FEATURES
Offline players 1 – 2
Offline co-op 2
Dolby Digital

In the event you are burned-out on zombie-driven 8-bit tributes with an overlay of TV static, how about a Walking Dead rendition of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World for XBLIG? Somehow, this one was more satisfying than all other comers in its style. We just couldn’t stop.

18. Jellyfish MD

RELEASE DATE: 9/2/2011
DEVELOPER: Kevin Costello
GENRE: Puzzle & Trivia
FEATURES
Offline players 1
Dolby Digital

This odd pairing of a children’s book 2D illustration with a mesmerizing 3-dimensional Rubik’s Cube puzzle is a bit of a garage sale in design, at first blush, but that should not detract from the fact that it is an advanced and excellent puzzle game that deserves every Microsoft point for which it asks.

19. Battle High: San Bruno

RELEASE DATE: 2/8/2011
DEVELOPER: Mattrified
GENRE: Fighting
FEATURES
Offline players 1 – 2
Dolby Digital

In the Fighting category that draws on the legacy of Street Fighter and Marvel vs. Capcom, comes this witty “meet me after school” KO fest with a wide variety of interesting characters that include nerds, freaks, geeks and cybrids, worthy of some playtime with that buddy with whom you have a vendetta.

20. Homeless

RELEASE DATE: 12/18/2011
DEVELOPER: Silver Dollar Games
GENRE: Other
FEATURES
Offline players 1
Dolby Digital

Silver Dollar Games, who are the team behind Homeless, seem to be the type that throw everything against the wall to see what sticks. With dozens of titles released on XBLIG by this crew alone, from titles like “Try Not To Fart” to “Blow”, one might consider them to be the purveyors of bargain basement fire sale material, but every once in a while the “try anything” experiment actually works and Homeless, while simple in execution, is fascinating, moving and makes you think.

The simple gameplay consists of little more than pressing the A button when the most, or best passersby enter within range of a pair of red vertical lines reaching out either side of your static homeless avatar. Collect the amount of money in your goal before your energy runs out for the day. What makes it so compelling, however, is the heartbreakingly earnest audio recording of a real homeless person talking about life on the streets while a series of images depicting life on the streets cycles on a billboard above you. It might not represent the height of game mechanics, but it takes a chance, and it leaves an impression; Homeless puts you in the shoes of someone who you may never have considered being and maybe gives you a new impression on things; that is a LOT for a game to accomplish.

Honorable Mentions:

Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess

RELEASE DATE: 8/24/2010
DEVELOPER: Mediatonic
GENRE: Action & Adventure
FEATURES
Offline players 1
Dolby Digital

Think of it as Super Meat Boy except in the land of the undead. Wall jumping, big baddies, a time limit all add to the tension, but that “look up” action on the left stick got to be inexplicably un-useful. Otherwise a fun title to bounce around with.

Recommended for post SMB burnouts.

Rotor

RELEASE DATE: 2/10/2011
DEVELOPER: Pocket Starship
GENRE: Racing & Flying
FEATURES
Offline players 1
Dolby Digital

A lovely thing to behold, with its muted, plastic-looking Truman Show cityscape, this 3D helicopter racer is a bit hard to control, but, did we mention it looks amazing?

The Sugar Killerz

RELEASE DATE: 3/8/2011
DEVELOPER: Fun Hazard
GENRE: Action & Adventure
FEATURES
Offline players 1 – 4
Offline co-op 2 – 4
Dolby Digital

With smooth cartoony graphics and all manner of enemy, including those that stick to you with their tongues, waiting to be shot off by you or one of your peers with a variety of bullet-based weaponry, Sugar Killerz is a great time to be had in a local group. We really mean that.

Rare stuff you may have missed (released prior to 2011)

Protect Me Knight aka まもって騎士

RELEASE DATE: 5/14/2010
DEVELOPER: ANCxna
GENRE: Action & Adventure
FEATURES
Offline players 1 – 4
Offline co-op 2 – 4
Dolby Digital

You may want to click the title of this game above to actually find this at the XBOX Marketplace because it is listed by its Katakana title and not its English translation.

More tower defense and action than it is Ultima or Zelda, PMK is a glorious romp of flying 8-bit mayhem as you erect defenses and smackdown creeps with your arsenal of power attacks. Strong recommend.

Explosionade

RELEASE DATE: 10/7/2010
DEVELOPER: Mommy’s Best Games
GENRE: Action & Adventure
FEATURES
Offline players 1 – 2
Dolby Digital

How’d about some over-the-top Metroid by one of the best devs for the indie game marketplace?

This article originally appeared at IndieGameReviewer.com and is republished here with permission.

The original article has been expanded and embellished here for those more focused on the Xbox Live Indie Game Community.

I have been having fun playing with the free XNA Game Studio 3.1.  Although I have a moderate ability with programming C#, there are excellent tutorial videos available at the XNA Game Studio site that walk you through every line of code you need to program a basic game.

One of the best ways to learn coding is to be fearless and hack away / reverse engineer code and see what the results are.  So long as you understand how and why you break the code and get bugs, you are learning how to do it yourself.

At the time this article was originally published, there was a serious lack of RPG content on Xbox 360 Indie Game marketplace (since then we have started to see some truly excellent titles emerge like Masters of Belial, Breath of Death VII, and Dungeon Adventure although these focus less on storylines and more on classic hack n’ slash adventure type RPGs) so I did a search and lo and behold there is a recently uploaded starter kit for an RPG!

Once you have installed the free Microsoft’s Visual Studio C# Express Starter Edition and XNA Game Studio 3.1 (also free), you need simply download and install the RPG Game Starter Kit and can open it as a template from the software.

There are some basic XML based tutorials for how to create your own quests, and if you are feeling brave you can start the time-consuming process of creating your own custom Sprites and background textures to make the game feel more like your own. If you want to make this a lot easier, consider using a free program like GraphicsGale to build, develop, animate and save your game sprites.

• For example Parachnidox posted a mod that demonstrates how to transform your RPG from one where you interact with things by walking into them, into a more elegant system where you can click on objects with which you wish to interact by clicking on them.

Check out Parachnidox’s RPG Starter Kit Quick & Easy Click Interaction System at the XNA Forums

• Here is another interesting and helpful thread from EEKER at the XNA RPG Starter Kit Forums about creating Multi-Window Dialogs with a content pipeline intro.
• Charlie Calvert has also created a useful post for those just getting started with Role-Playing Game Starter kit, that discusses the Tile and Quest engines, respectively. It’s worth a look if you haven’t played around with this sort of backend before and need to grasp the fundamentals.

In the early days of the RPG Starter Kit, a guy by the name of Craig Giles decided he wanted to teach himself to code in 3 months with XNA using the RPG starter kit as a launching point.  His so-called “ShackRPG” named after the Shack community he frequented, demonstrated some very interesting customizations, expansions and developments to the start kit that showcased its potential.  

Here is a video of the ShackRPG progress – note the dropdown menus, follow-cam, smooth avatar movement and more.  He also ended up introducing a very stylish “cover-flow” style inventory system and deeply modified combat system.  Though ShakcRPG was just the startoff point for a game with the working title Mier, sadly, not much has been updated since 2008, but he did make the source code for his work freely available for study at Google’s codeplex.

Note that none of these hacks or mods are guaranteed to work; there are many reasons why they may or may not. What is important is to read along and understand how they are thinking about the code structure and the possibilities within the framework so that you can begin to make more informed decisions for yourself and customize the game in your own way.

A screenshot from the free XNA Role Playing Game Starter Kit

Here is the direct link to the main Role-Playing Game Starter Kit thread at the XNA Game Studio forums.

What I did was read some of the above posts and discussions and then after getting everything installed, started customizing little things within the existing demo game that comes with the RPG Starter Kit. At first I just changed some of the dialog or the starting position of an NPC. Later, I began extending the quests or altering background images. Then I moved on to creating my own custom animated sprites and changing the maps around. In the meantime, I was developing an understanding of how the various modules were interacting and put together, until finally I was building my own from scratch.

Eventually, I realized I had a pretty cool storyline with some very interesting characters, but really I was just writing it as I went along. Any author or editor will tell you, however, that this is not the best way to create a truly great story; before you get in too deep, take some time to map out your story, characters, quests and graphic style and start over again with these goals in mind. Whether you choose to continue with the RPG starter kit at this point, or begin with a fresh basic template is up to your comfort level with programming in this software environment. Regardless, you will come away with a far richer understanding for how this sort of game can be put together.

Because great RPGs are more about excellent storytelling and world-building than anything else, I encourage you to at the very least, go and tinker with the RPG Starter Kit and the free-to-download XNA Starter Kit.  I do caution that you may lose night after night of sleep as you descend into the limitless word of game building, but you will at least know that in the end you can submit your project for peer review and maybe ultimately turn a buck by selling your wares on Xbox Live someday in exchange for your efforts.

Note: in order to test your game directly on your Xbox 360, get reviewed or put it up for sale, you will have to purchase a premium membership – $99.95 annually. However, you can still program games for Windows PCs that you can distribute to your friends – free.

Will you build the first great role-playing for Xbox Indie Games? If you have the constitution, courage and thirst for knowledge to take up the quest, a great adventure awaits you!

Developer

Fumbo is an African themed puzzle game designed to be casual yet mentally challenging. Fumbo does away with the overused bubble bursting, board clearing, time limited scenarios of the puzzle genre and replaces it with a puzzle that is challenging but allows the player to solve it at a comfortable, relaxed pace.

What We Think:

Hanging in the Serengeti, grooving to a catchy jungle rhythm and circling over multiple animal halves; it sounds like vulture Valhalla, but in fact, it’s Fumbo, a laid-back, yet highly-enjoyable puzzle game. To solve the puzzle, you must rotate and move pieces each of which contains four animal halves each until you can match them all up and complete the picture.

Gonna Take Some Time To Do the Things We Never Have:

There is no time limit, so there’s no need to rush, and that’s a good thing! Even the most basic puzzle size will keep you flipping pieces for a good while, and I found even the second difficulty level to be daunting. Feel like sneaking a peek at how the finished game should look? Hit the cheat button, and lock the image that appears in your mind. The game will go back to where you were after a few seconds. There’s no harm in it…save for the air raid sirens that blare for the duration of the reveal, making sure that anyone else in the room now knows full well that you are a filthy cheater.

The Circular Soundtrack of Life.

There’s only one song to be heard looping throughout the game, but it’s a catchy one, with a soothing rhythm. Though fitting and well orchestrated, some musical variety would have a nice way to break up the thorny task at hand.

So set your difficulty, and move things about until no one animal is missing his legs. The clock and the number of moves you make tick up, not down, so your only competition is your previous best performance. Simple, but polished, and like a giant jigsaw puzzle on a lazy Sunday, you might just find yourself drawn back to take another relaxing turn with Fumbo.

Rating: ★★★★☆