Naradja: Garuda Nest Resque by Mechanimotion Entertainment is of course not a Flappy Bird clone, which is obvious from the screenshots alone. It is something like a mix of good old Paperboy and Temple Run. So why does it reminds me of it? Because it's hard, it's fun and and the fun comes from the difficulty.

Garuda is a mythical bird in Hinduism and Buddhism and your task in this game is to feed little Garuda hatchlings after their parents mysteriously dissapeared. You play as Naradja, who is also a main character of an Indonesian novel and animated series.

The game is presented in 3D and you run from left to right. To control the character, you need to sweep up and down and tap two buttons: Throw (seed) and Jump. Sounds easy, but since the game is played in landscape mode as opposed to the portrait mode of similar runner games and everything moves quite fast, it takes some time to get used to it.

AutoTileGen is a new multiplatform tool from Javi Cepa that allows you to quickly generate complete 2D tilesets from just three special tiles. You only need to create a base tile, both sides in another tile and bottom and top in a third tile (caps) and you are done. It sounds too easy, but that's the reality.

Creating 2D tileset for a platformer is a real breeze. I can imagine it can be used for creating top-down tilesets too.

There are basically two ways of creating the tiles. First, you prepare the tiles beforehand, upload them to AutoTileGen and just let it do its magic. The tool gives you some tools to tweak the borders, corner blends and overlaps, then save the tileset in a PNG. Second, you can use the built-in pixel editor to create the tiles in AutoTileGen. Both approaches can be combined.

AutoTileGen is work in progress. There still are a few bugs and the interface lacks some useful options, but I am sure Javi is working hard to make the product perfect. If you are interested, check its crowdfunding campaign. It is near its end and there are plenty of stretch goals! People who back the project with $20 (which is the standard price of the Pro edition) will also get a free AutoTileSet plugin (think Tiled editor inside Unity and maybe other Game Makers soon) and PixelPerfect plugin which makes pixel art games in Unity look more "pixel" :)

Check the video to get better idea on what AutoTileGen can do. The video shows the Unity plugin as well.


   
And the result, 16x16 complete tileset generated from AutoTileGen Pro. It is enlarged, because the original is too small.



Flappy Bird clone anyone?

Summary

AutoTileGen is really great for creating tilesets. The community of users is not big yet and the crowdfunding is still on. It's the best time to evaluate the tool and maybe suggest some features. AutoTileGen comes in Free and Pro versions, but the Free on is really limited and Pro totally worth the $20. Pro version features built-in pixel editor, normal map generation and preview and custom corner masks and more. In combination with the Unity plugin, AutoTileGen significantly shortens the time to develop let's say a 2D platformer and makes it possible to the artistically impaired devs (like me) to make some cool art!

Official website

Golf! (Masters Time) is a quiz game created and published by an indie developer Chris Nowell. It was released just before the Masters tournament starts in April.

The game is a simple quiz where you are supposed to answer ten questions about the Masters golf tournament and its participants. The questions deal with the tournament's history and present.

The questions are challenging for a person with only a basic golf knowledge but getting a perfect score should be easy for golf enthusiasts.

The whole app is pretty basic. There's no music, no sharing of scores, just the ten question. Each question is accompanied by a golf related illustration.

Here's a little serie of tutorials on how to record videos from Android. We will start with recording short films to use on Twitter or developers forums from apps running in Genymotion emulator. These can be useful to share progress with other devs, make simple teasers and so on.

With Android 4.4 KitKat you can now record video directly on the device. But working with the device is not always easy. Moreover the recording is not available in the emulator, it misses the neccessary hardware. Genymotion offers direct recording only in the paid licenses and if you just need the recording capability, it is pricy.

As a reviewer I have a unique chance to play great games that I would normally miss. And I am glad that CLARC was submitted for review by its makers from GoldenTricycle, because it's absolutely awesome.

CLARC is a puzzle game about a little robot (called CLARC) that can pick up and move boxes around using a tractor beam. The description makes it sound very easy. But soon you will realize that this game will stretch your brain to the max.

The puzzles are smart and the difficulty increases exactly at the right pace. First your task is to simply move a box from A to B, then you need to maneuver yourself into a narrow passage while carrying the box...