Barry Collins is a freelance artist and 14-year veteran of the video game industry who's been singlehandedly working on his passion project, Ashen Rift. During GDC he showed us a demo he put together in five months of the spartan post-apocalyptic survival shooter, which revolves around a man and his dog, Bounder.

"You will seldom find enough ammo for any given situation, this forces the player to rely on Bounder to help you find useful objects and ammo," Collins told us. "You'll find yourself keenly aware of Bounder's state of mind as the whimpers and wines may be indicators of trouble nearby. Don't make too much noise. Don't waste ammo... and leave nothing useful behind."

The game is currently on Kickstarter with a very reasonable $45,000 goal. Collins needs the money to pay for a Unity3D license, get some help with coding and music, with the end goal of the game being a "3 to 5 hour" experience on Mac, PC and Linux. If everything goes well, the game should be available by December 2014.

Indie developer Grimm Bros opted for a retro, SNES-inspired style for its debut game, Dragon Fin Soup. The developer recently achieved its $24,000 goal on Kickstarter to bring the RPG to PC, Mac, Linux, PS4, PS3 and Vita.

Sporting turn-based movement and a classic 2D top-down visual style, Dragon Fin Soup is an action RPG with roguelike qualities set in the world of Asura, which rests on the back of a giant "dragon-turtle." Players can learn more about the world through a blend of scripted events and quests as well as procedurally-generated content in the game's story mode, led by Dragon Fin Soup's first playable character, Red Robin. It also features a survival mode marked by permanent death in which players are dropped into a dangerous forest with limited supplies, fighting their way through generated dungeons that increase in difficulty.

Dragon Fin Soup still has roughly three weeks to go before its crowdfunding campaign ends, and is seeking stretch goals to fund expansions and port the game to the Sony platforms. It was among the 75 games recently approved for Steam distribution via Greenlight. Grimm Bros was founded by former Human Head COO Ash Monif and artist Randis Albion in March 2013.

Players who pre-order the Windows PC version of RedLynx's motorcycle stunt sim Trials Fusion can get a head start on the competition in a closed beta test prior to the game's launch next month, publisher Ubisoft announced today.

Starting March 21, players who pre-purchase Trials Fusion at GameStop, Amazon, and other retailers can download a beta version free of charge. Trials Fusion is also slated for release on the PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One, though Ubisoft's beta offer is available exclusively for the upcoming PC release.

Trials Fusion will be priced at $19.99 when it premieres digitally on April 24.

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There are only two things that zombies love: delicious, moist brains, and the lure of pop music. If Thriller wasn't proof enough, Sega's most recent DLC addition for blood-soaked keyboard primer Typing of the Dead: Overkill certainly cements the idea.

The "Dancing With The Dead" lexicon transforms the phrases that players are tasked with typing into popular song lyrics. Sega is being coy on which songs it has lifted words from, but the publisher's announcement this morning includes references to groups like House of Pain, Will Smith, The Clash and probably a few others that we're not picking up on.

As with earlier DLC releases for Typing of the Dead: Overkill, the Dancing With The Dead lexicon bears a $3 price tag. It's currently available on Steam to satisfy all of your oddly mundane fantasies of battling walking corpses armed only with keen office skills.

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Founded in 1982 as a new division of George Lucas' entertainment empire, LucasFilm Games intended to hinge its products on cutting-edge technology. David Fox, also known as LucasArts Employee #2, envisioned a visually rich first-person spaceship game for Atari 8-bit systems – and doesn't that just sound perfect for Star Wars?

"I wanted it to be a Star Wars game originally," Fox said, "and we were told right up front, when we asked, that we were not allowed to do Star Wars titles. "And I was really upset," he said, laughing. "I joined the company because I wanted to be in Star Wars and that was the closest way I could do it, to create a game and do it that way."

Though LucasFilm Games would eventually align with Star Wars as it became the LucasArts we knew, it was this initial denial that set a course for long-lasting collaboration and unique design approaches. Speaking at the Game Developers Conference, in the first postmortem panel dedicated to a company, former figureheads spoke of an atmosphere in which creators were permitted to do anything but Star Wars.

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Though it borrows a superficial structure from Super Smash Bros., upcoming indie multiplayer game BitBrawlers sets itself apart by giving players the ability to customize their combat.

According to developer Tiny Build Games, BitBrawlers offers players the chance to customize abilities, weapons and even the environment they're fighting in. That trailer above demonstrates a few of these user-generated elements, though the process through which players build new elements for the game remains a mystery. That said, Tiny Build claims it built the above trailer in "an hour on the GDC showfloor," which suggests that the tools are easy to use once you've got a grasp on things.

Tiny Build has yet to offer a solid release date for BitBrawlers, but plans to release the game to Steam at some point in 2014.

Following the flatulence-laden release of South Park: The Stick of Truth, developer Obsidian Entertainment has revealed a new explosive game. Armored Warfare is the company's first foray into the wild world of free-to-play games and features modern tank battles.

Armored Warfare is being published and distributed by Russia-based My.com, publisher and developer of free-to-play mobile games.

The team-based PC title will feature player-vs-player and player-vs-environment gameplay and is expected to launch a closed beta sometime in 2014.

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Signal Studios has acquired the rights to its original intellectual property, Toy Soldiers, from Microsoft.

"That was our first game, it was our baby," said Signal Community Manager Becky Taylor. "We are working on a future game in the franchise, we have a large publisher interested who we haven't announced yet," she told Joystiq today at GDC.

Taylor tells us the next game is planned for next-gen systems. She continued, "Since we acquired the rights back, we've put out Toy Soldiers Complete, which includes the original game, Cold War and four DLCs... and it's 10 bucks through 'early access'."

The original tower defense shooter hybrid Toy Soldiers and its sequel, Toy Soldiers: Cold War, have sold a combined total of 2.5 million units.

Andy Schatz is doing it again.

Monaco seemed to linger in development limbo forever because it received attention from the IGF early in its production process. In reality, it took 3.5 years to come out. Schatz's new project, codenamed Armada, is a vague concept at this point: He has a clear vision for the design, but the theme, style and development team – not to mention the name – are all still up in the air. He announced it anyway.

"I don't care this time because, fuck it," Schatz tells me at GDC.

He's not going to release a game until "it's worth buying," but this time around he plans to throw Armada up on Steam Early Access and get player feedback. Monaco launched on XBLA, so Early Access was out of the question.

Schatz isn't shooting completely in the dark with Armada – he knows what type of game it's going to be, and he has an idea for the theme. He wants to build an RTS with MOBA elements, something accessible yet still complex. In the way Monaco twisted the stealth genre, he wants Armada to feel familiar to RTS players, but with layers that smooth out the learning curve. He throws around the name StarCraft, and elements such as "champions" and "decks."

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The Creative Assembly has been forced to make a number of changes in order to realize the vision for Alien: Isolation. After successful pitches to both Sega and 20th Century Fox, the developer turned to recruitment, ensuring it added new members to its team that were capable of crafting the exact game it pitched, what Creative Lead Al Hope calls: "The Alien game that we always wanted to play." A game completely different from that other Alien game, which his team at The Creative Assembly had no involvement with making, yet keeps coming up, just the same

Its pitch demo for Isolation was built in four weeks and featured two identical medical bays: one with its environment and objects in pristine condition and the other obliterated by an unknown menace. The juxtaposition led to immediate questions: "What happened? What did this?" Soon, an answer invaded the screen as a large xenomorph falls into frame, ending the demo. Sega was immediately interested, Hope says, as was Fox. Adding new talent to execute on the project was necessary. For the better part of a decade, The Creative Assembly has focused its attention on the RTS genre. Once its pitch was green lit, Creative Assembly brought in talent that contributed to a host massive franchises, including Grand Theft Auto and Assassin's Creed. Its team assembled and its concept approved, the developer began its work over three and a half years ago on Alien: Isolation – a survival horror game based on a beloved movie from the late 1970s.

"This is exactly the game we want to make," Hope says.

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Comcept released a new gameplay video of crowdfunded platformer Mighty No. 9 running in alpha, and it showcases some familiar-feeling run-and-gun gameplay along with images of Mighty Numbers 1 to 8. If we had to pick a favorite it would have to be Mighty No. 6, because he's got a cross between a bomber plane and a helicopter for a head, and missiles that launch out of his ankles. He looks like he'd be a lot of fun at a party.

Keiji Inafune's new platformer was one of the most successful gaming fundraisers of 2013, amassing a mighty $3.8 million through Kickstarter alone. While Comcept is starting to show more and more gameplay we're still a good year away from the estimated release date of spring 2015, when the game will rock and roll onto Xbox One, PS4, Wii U, PS3, Xbox 360, Vita, 3DS, Windows PC, Mac, and Linux.

Octodad: Dadliest Catch sold more than 90,000 copies on PC, Mac and Linux, and that is enough to keep developer Young Horses afloat through the end of the year with a lineup of full-time staff, CEO Philip Tibitoski told Joystiq at GDC. Before launch, the Young Horses team split their time between day jobs and development work, but now it's all Octodad, all the time.

"If it hadn't sold well, I'd be out looking for a job right now," Tibitoski said. "I don't have to worry any more."

The next step is a PS4 launch, scheduled for April. Fans on social media are eager to control a suited cephalopod with the DualShock 4, Tibitoski said, noting that some have vowed to buy it twice. And chances are, they will buy it – Young Horses has no plans to make Octodad a PS Plus free game. Tibitoski said a significant number of players expect Octodad to be free on PS Plus simply because it's an indie game on a Sony console, but that's not something the team wants. A launch sale, maybe.

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We saw this scene right at the end of our preview playthrough of the first two hours of Wolfenstein: The New Order, and it introduces Frau Engel to players for the first time. Engel looks to be sadistic bordering on psychopathic, toying with hero B.J. Blaskowicz as he tries to keep his cool and maintain his cover.

For what it's worth (spoilers), when we played this sequence we didn't go for the gun despite how crazy the crazy lady was. Instead, we simply picked the cards. That caused Engel to angrily declare we were impure and point the gun to our head, only for her sultry toy-boy to calm her down and remind her it was all a game.

Bethesda released a separate video interview today (below the break) with MachineGames' Narrative Designer Tommy Tordsson Bjork. In it he describes conceiving the Frau Engel character as his proudest moment because she's "such a cool, female villain, which is not that common in video games."

Engel is just one of the antagonists Blaskowicz faces in MachineGames' alternate vision of a post WW2-world where the Nazis won, and players will get to see the whole lot - possibly including a mech-suited Fuhrer? - when the game hits Xbox One, PS4, PS3, Xbox 360 and PC on May 20 in North America, and May 23 in Europe. Bethesda recently revealed pre-orders net players an invite to an upcoming beta for the next Doom game.

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Hyper Light Drifter's combat mode is a solo or co-op evil-beast explosion – it begins in a training room lined with dummy targets, and a seafoam platform that recharges your magic. A door etched in rune-like symbols waits at the end of the room. Behind it, when you're ready, lies an arena filled with creatures bent on your destruction.

First, the training room allows you to play with mechanics: Plugged into a MacBook Air, playing with an Xbox 360 controller, press the right bumper to see a circle of weapons and map the ones you want to the Y or B buttons. These weapons include an enemy-seeking mine ball, a shotgun that shoots in a diamond formation, a boomerang, and a close-up attack that embeds a fucshia crystal in an enemy, which you then detonate into huge crystal splinters covering the surrounding area. These attacks drain magic.

The A button is a (very useful) dash, and X is a sword slash. Left bumper displays magic and health bars, and your weapons.

Unfortunately, there's no button to halt the flow of angry, violent creatures that swarm you once you open that door.

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Mike Bithell, creator of Thomas Was Alone, is always up for a fun chat. A lot of what we discussed while checking out his new game Volume at GDC was left on the digital cutting room floor, including a chat about his dream of doing a musical game (like, West End/Broadway), but we do touch on it briefly without breaking out into song.

We may have to go back and release the b-side version of this interview, but what we've got for now is a closer look at Volume and Bithell's vision for the streamlined stealth game, which should hopefully be available by year's end. However, Bithell is clear to emphasize, it'll be done when it's done.

Before it comes to Xbox One as part of Microsoft's independent games initiative, apocalyptic racer/shooter hybrid Calibre 10 Racing Series will launch on PC through Steam's Early Access program – likely as soon as next week. The game's developer, Bongfish, expects the alpha development period to last around six months, after which the completed game will make its way to Xbox One, roughly around Fall.

Calibre 10 Racing Series hinges on two-player teams competing on and around a deadly racetrack. One person drives to the finish line, usually in a glossy sports car that hungers for power-ups littering the track, while the other takes command of gun turrets positioned alongside the route. Drivers can defend themselves with barrel rolls (as recommended by anthropomorphic space animals), temporary shield pickups, or collect turret upgrades for their gunning teammates to rain down hell on opponents.

Developer Bongfish considers Calibre 10 a spiritual successor to Harm's Way, the bouncy arcade racer that emerged in 2010 as a finalist in Doritos' "Unlock Xbox" game design competition. If the game finishes its early access circuit with aplomb, it hopes to offer a hub for the community to design high-end concept cars. And then shoot them in the world's toughest safety standards test.

In previous versions of Project Spark, players were allotted 40 minutes of free Spark Time every day. Spark Time, despite its perky name, was limiting: you could only play user-made levels built with paid content you hadn't purchased or features unlocked above your current level for 40 minutes each day. If you wanted to play more, you could use in-game credits or pay real world cash for tokens to buy more Spark Time. Purchased Spark Time came with bonus XP and bonus credits, but those would-be customer loyalty perks still rankled players that felt that they were blocked from content for insidious reasons. No more.

Eager to respond to negative feedback, Microsoft announced changes to the game on Tuesday that should mollify fans upset with pay gates in the upcoming Xbox One and PC video game builder. Just as the Xbox One Project Spark beta opened up to all players, developer Team Dakota completely removed Spark Time from the game.

Other microtransactions were transformed rather than excised. Spark Power remains on sale in Project Spark, though it's now called Spark Premium. Spark Power allowed you to play levels with DLC or level-blocked content indefinitely with no need to worry about Spark Time, and it granted a 200 percent boost to experience and credits earned. As Spark Premium, players just get the experience and credit boosts, making it easing to unlock new content in the game.

Microsoft's added 3-month, 6-month, and 12-month Spark Premium purchase options to the existing 1-day and 1-month options, making Project Spark into a more subscription-centric experience rather than one defined by piecemeal purchases.

Action RPG Sacred 3 will hack and slash its way to PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 systems in North America on August 26. Deep Silver offered a new trailer for the top-down brawling game, which is geared toward both online (four player) and offline (two player) cooperative multiplayer.

Sacred 3 will be accompanied by a Malakhim class, which joins previous characters from the series, Seraphim, Ancarian, Khukuhru and the Safiri. Deep Silver will also offer an "Underworld Story" piece of downloadable content at the game's launch. In the Underworld Story DLC, players will ascend a tower to face Black Seraphim, a rival from the previous game in the series.

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Having proven itself on iOS, Gun Media's tactical strategy hit Breach & Clear is now coming to the PC, Mac and Linux platforms via Steam.

If that title is totally new to you, you can think of Breach & Clear as a turn-based shooter focused almost entirely on close quarters combat. Players lead a team of hardened spec ops agents who travel the world snuffing out threats and dealing with dangerous situations. The new computer versions of the game feature a revamped interface, new weapons, new missions and the addition of the German KSK as a playable faction.

Breach & Clear is slated for release on March 21, at which point it will feature a $15 price tag. To celebrate the launch, however, developer Gun Media plans to reduce the game's price to $10 "for a limited time."

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