Stray Games

Box Zombies: Secret Updates
Box Zombies has undergone a lot of updates in the last month or so. Uncaptured hostile parts of the world now turn black and white, building in an area will restore color to that part of the world. Vehicles have been added, and actually control like you would expect a vehicle to; up and down control speed, left and right turn the vehicle. RTS-like building systems are semi-completed, and buildings now have unique graphics instead of just being made out of square tiles. A lot of new items have been added (new clothes, hairstyles, melee weapon types, and more), and the loot stat mechanics have been revamped to make items actually worth equipping. You can also sell items now, and inventory scrolling and sorting systems have been added. Special zombies have been semi-added, though their effects are not completed yet. All special zombies currently have a colored outline (which shows what type they are) and have a large health bonus so it takes several extra shots to kill them, they also have 100% chance of dropping an item. Currently, there are only 4 special zombie types planned, but there will probably be more: Green will have a poison cloud which will damage you if you get near them, Blue will have a frost aura which will greatly reduce your movement speed, Red will have an even larger health boost and will gain even more health when normal zombies near them are killed, and Yellow ones are just Treasure specials with the normal health boost and 100% drop chance. There are also new Skill systems in the works, which will be vaguely similar to Diablo 3's. A 3D version of Box Zombies is also being worked on in Unity.

Other Updates
Heroes United has had several major updates in the last month or so, (new game modes, hotkeys, level locking, new CW flags, DuelZ changes, and plenty of other things) and a few more planned for the near future. IconShare also received an update, but it was nothing major. Monster Kindom has now been released with the rest of my <a href="
http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=821032">open sources. I have also setup new systems for loading subscribers, which should use less bandwidth, load more consistently, and be generally better. Released another easy to use utility for importing sprite sheets into BYOND icons; IconImport.

Standalone
Recently, BYOND released its own attempt at standalone games. However, it is ridiculously overcomplicated to use and customize (seriously, has anyone figured out how to make any part of that thing work?), it creates an installer, which seems unnecessary and probably a bit suspicious to the users, and their ridiculous guidelines pretty much prevent you from releasing the game outside of BYOND - which kind of negates the point of even having a standalone to begin with.

So, I have just decided to make my own. Majority of it is made with BYOND, so anyone who understands BYOND (presumably, anyone releasing a BYOND game) can easily understand how to use it. It is fully customizable the way any game would be anything from objects on the map, to client.screen, to the interface, or anything else you might use in your game can be used to customize the appearance of the launcher. No install required, you just download, unzip, and play. There are a few problems with it, mainly with the way BYOND secretly downloads resources so it looks like the program has just died (I'll be testing a plan to work around this using preload_rsc sometime soon) (Finished the test on this, not only did it solve the problem, but it seems like a superior setup in general), and also that non-BYOND users will be logged in via guest accounts. That second issue isn't too much of a problem, considering the main purpose of this standalone is to be paired with Box Zombies so that it can be distributed via Steam once it is more complete, multiple account sources will need to be applicable anyway; So, I have just setup my own account system through my website, and will implement that sooner or later into the games.

Unrelated
On an unrelated note! Source Filmmaker has only been out for about a month now, but some great videos are starting to come out of it. "Parodies" of other game's trailers, which are better than the original. Artsy videos of various Valve games. And countless videos that simply tweak the example video included with SFM.

Team Fortress 2 has also released a new Man vs Machine mode (also a video made with SFM). Which is basically a ridiculously hard version of horde. Coop Survival. I haven't managed to get into a public game yet because the queues are ridiculous, but playing it solo was near impossible, I couldn't even get past the first wave.

Guild Wars 2 comes out in about a week. Perhaps the best MMO of all time? Have to wait and see.

Recently, I have been playing LoL with a friend of mine. Still find it by far the worst game and genre as a whole that I have ever played.

DayZ has officially announced that they will release a standalone version of their game: ie: You pay them a 2nd time for a game you already own, and they pre-install the mod files for you. The life-cycle of DayZ seems to be just about over, within the last 2 weeks or so they have lost nearly 40k daily players, and this standalone will most likely be the final nail in their coffin.
Luckily, a legit version of the new genre is being produced by a hopefully competent set of developers; War Z