I picked this up for $5.99 during the Steam Summer sale, and it's in the running for the best six dollars I've spent all year. Thanks to Summer Sale bargains and Humble Indie Bundles, my Steam library has grown to epic proportions; my list of unplayed games has nearly caught up with my Netflix queue. I truly despair of catching up (I know, #firstworldproblems). But Gunpoint stands out like a shining star, so much so that as soon as I finished the game I started over and played it all over again.
Remember the early days of video gaming, when a couple guys with thick glasses and poor hygiene could crank out a hit game by toiling away in a basement? For a while there, it seemed like those days were long gone, subsumed by the monster budgets of the AAA development cycle. But between cheap, user-friendly creation tools like the Unity and Game Maker, and the limitless crowd resources of the Internet, the game industry has come full circle back to the days of garage development. Case in point, Gunpoint was created by an editor at PC Gamer with no programming experience experimenting in his spare time. Designer Tom Frances built a working prototype, got some outside help with art assets and music (which he recruited via his blog), and voilà- a hit was born.
Total development cost? $30.
