What started out as a goodwill Halloween gesture to the community by indie developer Wadjet Eye Games turned into a nightmare last night. Wadjet Eye Games made the latest game in its popular point-and-click adventure game series Blackwell Deception available for free. It was supposed to be available until midnight on November 1, but Wadjet Eye Games was forced to shut the promotion down early, leaving many who found out about the freebie later to miss out. Fans who didn't know what was going on were obviously peeved with the indie developer.

A few days ago, indie developer Ryan Sharr accused 505 Games of ripping of his game, Roam.

Roam is a zombie survival game where players must scavenge a ravaged world for the tools you'll need to survive the zombie hordes.  It was successfully funded on Kickstarter last February.

Three months later, 505 Games announced How to Survive, a zombie survival game where players must scavenge a ravaged world for the tools you'll need to survive the zombie hordes.

2D point-and-click adventure game sequel The Ballads of Reemus 2 managed to raise $15,170 CAD via its Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign, putting the project $170 CAD above its funding goal of $15,000 CAD. As of this writing, the crowd-funding campaign has just over two days to go before its Kickstarter campaign comes to a close.

Valve has greenlit 37 new titles through its Greenlight program, including games, mods, and some software applications. At a glance, the new greenlit titles include Towerclimb and Ikaruga, a Half-Life 2 mod, and more. All of these titles will appear on Steam in "the coming weeks or months", Valve announced earlier today.

Greenlit titles are voted on by the Steam community, with press reaction and past performance on other platforms also affecting the process, according to Valve's criteria for Greenlight submissions..

Munich, Germany-based game designer Kira Resari is working on an interactive video game that puts players in the shoes of Anne Frank, with the hopes of memorializing the Holocaust for the millennial generation. The 25-year-old designer recently told a German media outlet that "younger generations need access to history on their own wavelength."

Adventure game sequel The Ballads of Reemus 2 is in the home stretch of its crowd funding efforts with just three days to go and less than $1,300 shy of being successfully funded. The game has managed to raise $13,702 CAD of its $15,000 CAD goal.

Developed by Hamilton, Canada-based indie developer Jay Ziebarth, the game is a follow-up to The Ballads of Reemus, a 2D adventure romp with a wacky storyline about a medieval exterminator and his loyal purple bear sidekick Liam as they battle giant insects in a quest to legitimize "extermination" as a heroic career path.

Did you think Humble Bundle had closed up shop?  We're not sure why you would think that but the Pay-What-You-Want bundle dealer is back with a new bundle featuring four games: Ticket to Ride (plus the USA 1910 DLC), Greed Corp, Incredipede and Anodyne.  Also included are the soundtracks for Ticket to Ride, Greed Corp, and Anodyne (plus a remix album).

This Thursday, October 17 the gaming group Cloudboat Armada will kick off its third annual Indie Games for Good charity marathon benefitting Child's Play Charity. The Indie Games for Good marathon will be broadcast live over the internet on Thursday and will run around as long as the donations continue to come in. The marathon could span multiple days if people open their hearts and their wallets for those playing games for the children's charity.

Chris Roberts and his company Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) have announced details on a design contest for fans of Star Citizen that could net budding designers a cool $30,000. The modding competition, The Next Great Starship, calls for teams to design, model and rig a spaceship that will be integrated into Chris Roberts' upcoming space simulation game. Teams of up to three people are eligible to enter the competition which carries a grand prize of $30,000. Sponsors for the competition include Alienware, AMD, Autodesk, Crytek, Cologne Game Lab, Wacom and YouTube.

Double Fine will host a special event with the help of iam8bit called Day of the Devs on November 2. Free to the public, the special event will let the general public rub elbows with the wonderful folks at Double Fine (as well as other indie developers) and give them hands-on access to the Kickstarter-funded game Broken Age (Double Fine Adventures) and an unannounced title from the developer.

Gorilla Press Games has launched a crowd-funding campaign for Legend of Lancer, a game it describes as a "2D Metroidvania" for PC, Mac, and Linux that focuses on the art of jousting. Inspired by the writing of J.R.R Tolkien, Miguel de Cervantes, George R.R. Martin, and T.H. White, Legend of the Lancer is a 2D action-adventure game that focuses on the balance between telling an interesting story and providing players with compelling gameplay.

Valve announced today that it has green lit a fresh new batch of games via the Steam Greenlight program.

A total of 32 new games get the thumbs up from the community including a batch of simulations, action games, RPGs, horror adventure titles, and many more. Many of these titles are familiar but the majority of them are interesting indie titles.

You can find the full list of games below, or you can visit the Steam Greenlight page for more details.

Wasteland Kings has been renamed to avoid a trademark dispute. Super Crate Box and Ridiculous Fishing developer Vlambeer revealed that it has changed the name of its post-apocalyptic rogue-like shooter Wasteland Kings to Nuclear Throne. The name change comes after a branding dispute with inXile Entertainment, whose members made the original Interplay game Wasteland.
 

By the skin of its nose, Neverending Nightmare, Matt Gilgenbach's psychological horror game inspired by his battle with mental illness, has been fully funded. As of Friday, the game was around $20,000 below its $99,000 funding goal on Kickstarter. Neverending Nightmare's Kickstarter campaign ended over the weekend. By the time it ended it had managed to raise $106,722 from 3,608 backers.

The game will launch in August of 2014 for Linux, Mac, Windows and Ouya.

The next few days will either make or break the crowd funding ambitions of Matt Gilgenbach's Neverending Nightmares, a "terrifying psychological horror game inspired by the developer's battle with mental illness." The Kickstarter campaign for the game, to be released simultaneously on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Ouya in August of next year (assuming that it meets its funding goal) is within striking distance of being successful. With only 58 hours to go, Neverending Nightmares has managed to raise $69,437 of its $99,000 goal from 2,564 backers.

In the early hours of the morning IndieGameStand expanded its operations from offering small indie 96-hour flash sales of select games to a full blown catalog. We thought it was an interesting move given all the competition in the space, but we wondered why over 72 indie developers jumped at the chance to be part of the catalog and why 14 of them wanted to be part of the very first sale.

After a year of small sales of some great indie game titles, IndieGameStand is going big. The digital storefront dedicated to selling the best indie games becomes a full blown indie game digital store front, joining the ranks of Steam, GOG.com, and the Humble Game Bundle. The store now has a permanent and dedicated store front with a full catalog of indie games - in addition to the 96 hour indie deals it has become famous for.

Android-based home console maker Ouya announced this week that it is making important changes to the way its Free the Games Fund works after it acknowledged that the program contained "too many loopholes" that could be manipulated by those who want to take advantage of the matching funds program. The $1 million promotion had offered to match the donations made to Kickstarter games that raised at least $50,000 in exchange for six month exclusivity to the system.

Another indie developer has walked away from the Ouya console because of its Free the Games Fund. The fund, which sees the platform holder matching the funds of successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaigns, has seen its fair share of controversy since launching. The Free the Games promotion promised to match Kickstarter donations for any game that committed to a six-month exclusivity window on the console and raised more than $50,000 on its own. Since then, multiple projects have been accused of gaming the system.

Ouya founder and CEO Julie Uhrman attempted to address the controversy surrounding its 'Free The Games' funding program in a blog post last night, but her statement has further exacerbated the situation and caused at least one developer to pull her game from the platform. Developers have criticized that platform holder for failing to address concerns related to its funding program. Uhrman's statement did little to quell that criticism, as developers took to the blog post to loudly complain about the tin-eared response.

According to Nintendo's manager of business development Dan Adelman, over one-thousand indie developers have expressed interest in developing for the Wii U. During the Game Developers Conference in March of this year, Nintendo launched a new Wii U developer website (wiiu-developers.nintendo.com) that allowed smaller, independent studios to register their interest in making games for Wii U. Adelman revealed the numbers during a recent interview with GameSpot.

Majesco has launched a new publishing label for indie games called Midnight City, headed up by a former public relations firm CEO and a former editor from IGN.

Steam has greenlit one-hundred games today including Precursor Games' Shadow of the Eternals, which failed to meet its funding goal on Kickstarter earlier this month. Addressing the community in an update today, Valve Software's Alden Kroll said that the company decided to release all of these new games as part of a stress test of the Steam Greenlight system.

The first two games to be funded by Ouya's "Free the Games" program are an officially licensed NFL title and the adventure game Elementary, My Dear Holmes. Both reached their funding goals via Kickstarter campaigns and Ouya took notice.

During its Gamescom press conference in Cologne, Germany today Microsoft finally detailed how self publishing will work on Xbox One for indie developers who do not want to sign a first-party publishing deal with Microsoft or with some other third-party publisher. Earlier in the year the company said that those would be the only options for indie developers to get their games on Xbox One, but Microsoft later reversed its stance.

Vlambeer's ridiculously popular iOS game, Ridiculous Fishing, is edging towards $1 million in sales, developers Rami Ismail and Jan Willem Nijman revealed today during a panel at the 2013 Game Developers Conference Europe.

"We're so close," Ismail told Polygon. "We're almost at $1 million."

GOG.com has launched a new portal intended to entice indie developers to join its DRM-free PC games digital storefront. The new portal, found here, encourages indie developers to apply with GOG to have their games available for sale on the site. The site offers details on royalty splits and how developers who need a small investment can get some help from GOG.

Earlier this year Mojang co-founder and Minecraft creator Marcus "Notch" Persson said that he was having a creative block and that he would put his pet project, 0x10c, on hold. The game has remained on hold since that time, and during a recent Team Fortress 2 live stream on Twitch, Persson revealed that he has all but given up on developing the space-themed game inspired by Minecraft's aesthetics.

The Indie Megabooth at PAX Prime 2013 will offer visitors more than 80 games to check out including Anodyne, Bit.Trip Runner 2, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Don't Starve, Gravity Ghost, Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number, Legend of Dungeon, Octodad: Dadliest Catch, N++, Scale, That Dragon Cancer, and Where is My Heart? There's also a Minibooth that includes over 25 games from ultra-small indie developers. These booths allow developers to share the cost of showing off their games at PAX Prime...

While a majority of the stories about Google Glass are about privacy concerns, people being idiots with the wearable device, or some Google Glass wearer getting banned from a business because it creeps everyone around them out, it can be used for pursuits many of us are interested in - like gaming.