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Bounden, Fingle studio closes its doors in April
Game Oven Studios, the independent Dutch team behind body-morphing mobile games Bounden, Bam fu, Fingle and Friendstrap, will be disbanded in April, studio co-founder Adriaan de Jongh announced in a blog post today. Game Oven will release its final game, Jelly Reef, in March on iOS and Android. Game Oven developers de Jongh and Bojan Endrovski will continue to support Bounden, Fingle, Bam fu and Jelly Reef, but they will remove Friendstrap from stores on February 1. De Jongh and Endrovski founded Game Oven in November 2011 with their first game, Fingle, which was nominated for an IGF Nuovo award. Bounden, a two-player dancing game for mobile, is nominated this year for an IGF Nuovo prize and a GDC Innovation Award. Game Oven received financial support for Bounden from the Dutch grant program, Game Fund, and worked with the Dutch National Ballet to create the choreography. And, despite Game Oven's closure, Bounden is doing "really well," de Jongh told me today. "We're not making millions, no, but Bounden's profit is larger than the development costs, so maybe awards are not that disconnected from the financial success of the game," he said. "With Fingle, IGF helped us build an audience, helped us reach that critical mass, and even though we no longer do any marketing effort for Fingle, we still make one minimum wage from the game every month. The way things look now, it seems like Bounden is on that same road."
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Bam fu
It's not that there are too many indie games; it's that there aren't enough hours in a day to play all of them. The Joystiq Indie Pitch curates the best indies to play now and watch out for in the future. What's your game called and what's it about? Bam fu is a two-, three- or four-player game on one device where you tap on pebbles – a fancy word for the buttons in this game – as quickly as you can to make them your color. Other players are trying to do the same and the colors change in a cycle, so the pebbles will definitely not stay on your color for long. The game goes on with you trying to reclaim your pebbles as fast as you can, until all, or almost all, pebbles are your color. That's when you win. What's the coolest aspect of Bam fu? We think that the coolest aspect of the game is that you can play it with everyone. Any gender, age or language; literally everyone! The rules are so simple that it doesn't take more than a second to get them. In fact, we are yet to find a player who doesn't skip the the tutorial. Plenty of thought has gone into small details to keep things simple. For example, we are using the fingers on the hand to count your points, so it's immediately clear that you play to five. We have also made the game accessible to colorblind players, which was a challenge for a game than distinguishes between players by color. This is why the pebbles were designed to point toward a player's corner.
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Fingle
Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We at Joystiq believe no one deserves to starve, and many indie developers are entitled to a fridge full of tasty, fulfilling media coverage, right here. This week, Adriaan de Jongh and Bojan Endrovski of Game Oven feel out the indie industry with Fingle, a finger foreplay title for iPad. What's your game called and what's it about?The game is called Fingle, which obviously is a play on words on "finger." It has a bit of mingle and fondle in it as well. The game is about bringing people closer together. A lot closer.A bit more in detail, Fingle is a cooperative two-player puzzle game for the iPad. Both players drag up to five buttons on color-matching targets. The targets often move and you move your fingers with them. The puzzles were designed in a way that it is impossible to avoid contact, resulting in intimate or awkward intertwined finger moments -- depending on who you play with, of course. And there are a few slow funk tunes in the mix to set the mood.Is Fingle solely a foreplay game, or is there a deeper strategy you envision for it?Fingle is most definitely more than a foreplay game. The first part of the game is intimate, but as players get accustomed to the feel and touch of each others fingers, the game slowly switches focus. Later levels require more and more cooperation and trust among players to finish them.The foreplay element is the lure, the hook, it's what will catch your attention. But it is also what sets the mood throughout the game. The visual style and music are completely true to that idea and help reinforce the formula. The result is an intimate game, sometimes suggestive, but only as dirty as the mind will make it.
