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Go on a 2D adventure with your loser friends in Night in the Woods
Adventure/exploration game Night in the Woods achieved its $50,000 goal on Kickstarter after one day on the funding platform. The indie story-focused game comes from Infinite Fall, a two-person team composed of Aquaria developer Alec Holowka and animator Scott Benson. Night in the Woods has players exploring the town Possum Springs as college dropout Mae, a cat with recently-developed "paranormal abilities." Mae joins a ragtag group of "loser friends," including a bear named Angus, described as "that kid in school who wore ties and fedoras for no good reason." Mae's growing abilities grant her access to new parts of the town as the adventure wears on, including an area near Possum Springs' old mine where "something in the woods" resides. Night in the Woods is planned for PC and Mac, and is currently estimated to launch in January 2015. The Kickstarter project will close on November 22.
Indie Game Music Bundle 2 now available, with Aquaria, Sworcery, more
You could spend the rest of the day accompanied by the sounds of indie games, for a relative pittance. The second iteration of the Indie Game Music Bundle is available for the next week, offering a Humble-style collection of game soundtrack downloads.For your [any amount of money] you get the soundtracks to Aquaria, Superbrothers Sword & Sworcery EP, To the Moon, Jamestown, and Machinarium. Hold on -- before you start throwing money at this, there's more you need to know. Pay over $10, and you'll get a pile of additional soundtracks, including Mighty Switch Force and Cat Astro Phi. Physical bonuses will be conferred upon especially high rollers.OK, now you can get your money out.
Semi Secret publishing Aquaria for iPad
Developer Semi Secret (the folks behind the popular game Canabalt) posted on its blog the company will be publishing Aquaria, a very popular indie game from a few years ago, on the iPad. Aquaria is a really beautiful underwater exploration title, and as you can see by the teaser video released by the team, it looks to be adapted quite well for the iPad, making solid use of the touch interface and the tablet itself, along with a few other new gameplay improvements. The app is also being worked on by a developer named Andrew Church, who apparently ported Aquaria to the PSP on his own before being contacted for the official iPad port. That's pretty impressive as the game was apparently optimized for the first iPad and thus should run quite well on the iPad 2. We'll look forward to this one. Semi Secret says there will be more information available on the new port soon.
Aquaria coming to iPad this fall
IGF 2007 winner Aquaria, the underwater exploration adventure by Derek Yu and Alec Holowka, is flowing from PC to a new platform: iPad. It's being converted with the help of Andrew Church, who worked on an unofficial PSP port, and impressed Holowka enough with that work that he's now involved with this official iPad version. It's due sometime this fall for iPad and iPad 2. To get an idea of the new touch interface (which makes Aquaria more "intimate," Holowka said), and to see plenty of footage of the latest version, dive into the video above.
Humble Indie Bundle 2 now includes Humble Indie Bundle 1
It just became so much easier to compare last year's Humble Indie Bundle with this year's Humble Indie Bundle 2 in terms of value -- because as of today, Humble Indie Bundle 2 includes last year's Bundle. It's official: these developers have lost their damn minds (for charity). If you've already bought Bundle 2, you're free to download Bundle 1, which has World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, Penumbra Overture, and Samorost 2, all playable on PC, Mac, and Linux. If you haven't bought Bundle 2 yet, you're only eligible to get the bonus games if you spend more than the average payment of $7.34. You have through Christmas Day to pick up this year's offerings. You can download these straight from the site, but you can also unlock them in Steam (by getting a keys from the HIB site), with a few caveats. The Steam keys are "a little glitchy," lacking access to Samorost 2 and lacking Mac versions of Gish and Aquaria. In addition, organizer Wolfire only has 150,000 keys to hand out, so if you already have the games on Steam, or you can deal with just downloading the games (DRM-free) and not having that Steam integration, perhaps you could leave the Steam key for someone else.
One-quarter of Humble Indie Bundle downloads were pirated
Perhaps you've heard of (or purchased!) the Humble Indie Bundle -- a set of five DRM-free indie games, which you can choose your own price for, the entirety of which goes to two completely deserving charities. Despite the bundle's altruism and affordability, Wolfire Games reports that over one quarter of the total downloads of the package were pirated. You read that right -- a grip of people have stolen the choose-your-own-price indie-bundle-for-charity. Talk about sticking it to The Man. This fraction of creeps shouldn't cheapen the fact that the bundle's already brought in $716,944 for the five games, as well as the Child's Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but it's still pretty disheartening. If you'll excuse us, we need to go watch Happy-Go-Lucky or perhaps a few episodes of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition until we regain our faith in humanity. [Via Ars Technica]
Humble Indie Bundle offers five great Mac games for pay-what-you-will
A group of independent game developers have released a "Humble Indie Bundle," and if you're a Mac gamer, it's a treasure trove. For a donation of your choice (the retail value is set at $80, but you can pay what you want, and you can even specify whether your money goes to the game developers or a couple of different charities), you can pick up the indie classics World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru, and Penumbra Overture, all playable on Mac, Linux, and Windows. Amazing deal, and this is about the most generous and customer-friendly way to do it. Any one of these games is well worth the purchase, and not only are you supporting developers and charities, but you're supporting the decision to release great games like this cross-platform, without DRM, and without a publisher or middleman getting in the way and taking a cut. Excellent deal -- they've already raised over $31,000, and if you play games on your Mac at all, definitely head over there and put ten or twenty dollars in the pot to support the bundle.
Humble Indie Bundle: Pay what you want for World of Goo and four others
You've commented on Joystiq posts about oppressive DRM many times before. You dutifully wear your Target-purchased indie game t-shirt every week without fail. And you read every Joystiq Indie Pitch we post. But if you want to put some money towards supporting indie games, you won't find a better way to do it than this. Wolfire Games and a few other indie developers have put together the "Humble Indie Bundle" sale, offering five terrific award-winning indie games (World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru and Penumbra Overture) for the low, low price of ... whatever you want. That's right -- they're asking you to pay what you feel is right for these bundled, non-DRM, developer-owned Mac, Linux or PC games. And that's not all: You can even specify part or all of your donation to go to a charity, either Child's Play or the Electronic Frontier Foundation. That's about as selfless as it gets in gaming -- pay what you think it's worth, to charity or the people who made it. The average donation so far is about $8.00, but individuals have donated as much as $500 to the effort. You get lots of chances to say you support indie gaming, but fewer great chances like this to put your money where your mouth is. And walking away with five great indie titles to play doesn't hurt, either.
Das Cube for iPhone
Das Cube [iTunes link, $1.99] is a simple little iPhone game that comes with a pretty impressive pedigree: it's made by one of the creators of Aquaria, Mark Johns of Space Barnacle, and features music by the composer of Canabalt's crazy addictive soundtrack. As you can see in the video above, it's got more in common with the iPhone post-apocalyptic running simulator than the underwater adventure: your job is to move a little ball that can smash together a series of abstract shapes that then explode into points. That's pretty much it -- as the game gets tougher (there are two difficulty settings, though I found the "Brutal" setting to be only a little tougher than the "Easy" setting in the first few minutes), more blocks drop, and while you can shake the iPhone occasionally to help you clear the screen, if you go too long without matching pieces, your game is over and the high scores are calculated. It's not quite as simple or addictive as Canabalt -- the controls feel a little floaty, and sometimes the ball you push around will squeeze in between the blocks. A few times while playing, it seemed to me that the easiest way to win would be to just swirl the mix around, and sure enough, when I just rolled the ball around the screen, I eventually got blocks to crash together randomly. But by the time I hit around 60,000 points or so (you can tweet your high scores, just like Canabalt), I found a little more precision was required, but even then, the controls are anything but sharp. Still, Das Cube is an amusing little mix of music and graphics. Unfortunately, there's no free trial, but what you see above is what you get: smash shapes together to groovy techno tunes. If that appeals, you can pick it up for $1.99.
Aquaria finally sees release
We first saw the dreamlike underwater adventuring of Aquaria way back in January at Macworld, and now, finally, Ambrosia has released the game for the Mac. It got pretty rave reviews on the PC, and the concept sounds like some great fun: you play an underwater dweller who can swim around in 2D while casting spells, singing magical songs, and just generally exploring a vast underwater world full of secrets. The graphics are simple but lush and beautiful -- looks like one of those games you can play to cleanse your palate in between the gritty urban wars of Fallout 3 and Gears of War 2.The game itself is $30US which, even though it's huge and comes with a level editor for even more playability, is a bit steep (especially with the glut of great games we're about to get this Fall and Winter). Fortunately, there is a 30-day free trial version available. And it's definitely the kind of thing we'd want to encourage anyway -- even though the port is coming a little (OK, more than a little) late, having innovative, well-done games like this on the Mac is good for all of us.
A sampling of Mac games on display at Macworld 2008
Mike took a tour of some Mac game booths over in Moscone West. Check out a quick review of Tiger Woods Golf, Sims Pool and Sims Bowling for the iPod, making machinima using 'The Movies' (who'd a thunk it), a brief interlude with Aquaria, a true Guitar Hero (seriously, one of the world's best takes on the hardest song on the hardest setting), and a look at EVE Online, now available in PC, Linux and Mac. All this in less than 9 minutes.
Award-winning indie game Aquaria now available
Gamers clamoring for something other than high-definition, high-poly shooters would be wise to check out Aquaria, a long-anticipated release from independent developer Bit Blot, and winner of the 2007 Independent Games Festival's highest honor.Aquaria tells the story of Naija, a magical being traveling the depths of the ocean in search of her family. The game features a unique blend of exploration, battling, and crafting, all presented with incredibly high production values, effectively raising the bar for the entire indie community.Aquaria is currently only available for PC, although Bit Blot states that they are working with Ambrosia Software to port the game to the Mac platform in the near future. A demo of the first part of the game is also available. Trust us, this one is worth playing.%Gallery-3627%
Aquaria blog discusses creatures, giant crabs included
Bit Blot, the indie studio behind Aquaria, recently posted a short development feature about underwater fauna players will find in its upcoming exploration game. After all, what's the point of swimming around if there's nothing to try and bite you? Expect a battery of crustaceans to give chase under the sea, including a giant crab or two, as well as the not-so-friendly sea dragon. Players will also be able to ride seahorses as shown above.Early in Aquaria's development, we were promised a thriving ecosystem of underwater creatures to interact with in the game. This is just an early taste. The team drew inspiration from the strange critters that swim Earth's seas. A thread on Bit Blot's forums is packed with images of strange and surreal animals.%Gallery-3627%
First look at Aquaria level editor
Bit Blot recently released a video (the first of several) showing off a graphical level editor for the upcoming exploration game Aquaria. The team, which includes artist Derek Yu and programmer Alec Holowka, decided to polish the editor and release it with a Mod framework along with the game. Aquaria walked away with the IGF Seumas McNally Grand Prize and is turning heads with its mix of gorgeous visuals and non-linear exploration-based gameplay. With powerful editing tools at their disposal, the (soon to be) teeming masses of Aquaria fans will go crazy with creativity.
