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IndieCade 2010: Spirits preview
This past weekend at IndieCade 2010 in Los Angeles, I bumped into our old buddy Steph Thirion. He's the creator of the great Eliss iPhone app and a title that he's still working on called Faraway, which despite still being in development, was actually chosen as an IndieCade finalist this year. He introduced me to a developer named Marek Plichta, whose German company, Spaces of Play, was showing off another iPhone finalist called Spirits. I asked for a quick demo and got to check out the game in progress. Spirits will instantly be intriguing to anyone who's a fan of the old Lemmings title (which hasn't officially made it to the App Store yet, though there are a few games like it). Spirits' basic gameplay is the same as Lemmings'. A set of creatures slowly enters an environment, and it's your job to guide those creatures (or at least some number of them) to an exit by using certain abilities that they have. Where Spirits really innovates is in its look and feel. Rather than little cartoony, pixelated creatures, you feel like you're controlling beautiful little beings. When the wind physics start to do their thing, the experience is pretty magical.
IndieCade 2010: Superbrothers' Sword and Sworcery EP preview
I first saw Superbrothers' Sword and Sworcery in person back at GDC earlier this year. This past weekend, developer Capy's Nathan Vella met up with me at the IndieCade festival in Culver City, California to show off the latest build of the game. It's much farther along in development these days. While the GDC demo was more of a working prototype, Vella said the title is basically content-complete, and the creators are just polishing out the kinks at this point. What they've created is one heck of an experience. The concentrated story that I saw at GDC has grown into a gorgeous, expanded universe for your Superbrothers-style warrior to explore and interact with, and the game plays like an interactive piece of art, with mystery and magic around every turn. It's a game that's hard to categorize; there's not much text, and what's there is pretty incoherent, with phrases like "she knew whence we had come," and a quest for a book called the Megatome. When I asked Vella what genre he considered the game to be, he said it was "inspired by old-school adventure gaming, but we call it an exploration and experience." The basic mechanic is this: touch. Almost everything you touch in the world reacts in some way -- if you touch plants or animals, they will shake or run and hide. You can drag to move your character, or double-tap to send him around the screens. The general theme is exploration -- find caves, meet people, and learn about the world you exist in.
TUAW's Daily App: feelforit
I visited IndieCade here in LA this past weekend, and I got to play some of the best indie games on offer over the past year. There are a few more write-ups on upcoming iPhone and iPad titles coming out later on today, but feelforit is one of the finalists that's already out for you to download (for free) on the App Store, so I suggest you give it a try. Developer Chris DeLeon is quite a character -- he made "an experimental interactive thing every day for ~7 months" for a game-a-day project. Just loading up feelforit shows you what he's talking about: interactive experiences that make you consider the world from a new angle. That's exactly what feelforit does -- it offers up random puzzles that require you to tilt the iPhone or iPad to a certain place in order to line up colored lines in the right locations. Even after playing around with the app for a while, I still feel like I have no acuity for it (pardon the angular pun). But DeLeon was right when he told me that you can't think your way through it. You need to move the iPhone around until it "feels" like you're in the right place. It's barely a game since there's no time limit or requirement; there's just a reward once you've reached your goal. It's fascinating, though, and even more so because it only uses the iPhone's accelerometer, not the gyroscope or compass. Anyway, the concept is hard to explain, but just trust me and give the game a download. DeLeon and his games are one reason that the iPhone and the App Store are so popular with indie developers -- they can easily release their experiences to a wide audience without having to worry about commercial pressure. App Store customers should be glad to have them around.
IndieCade 2010 award winners announced
Last night's IndieCade 2010 awards ceremony recognized some of the best independently-developed games released over the past year, as well as Tim Schafer, who was not released over the past year. The full list of winners can be found after the jump. You're probably familiar with some of them, provided your gaming tastes wander off the beaten path -- there's Playdead's haunting platformer Limbo, Ian Bogost's Atari 2600 gem A Slow Year, and Steph Thirion iPhone title Faraway, which won something called the "Sublime Experience Award." We're sure the other honors are just as prestigious, but that's the best name for an award we've ever heard.
Tim Schafer to be honored with lifetime achievement award at IndieCade 2010
IndieCade will be awarding its Honorary Trailblazer Award for Lifetime Achievement to none other than Tim Schafer, he of the Secret of Monkey Island series, Psychonauts and most recently Brütal Legend. Schafer was chosen for the honor as a role model to indie gamers everywhere, and for personifying "the risk-taking, boundary pushing spirit at the heart of the indepedent gaming community," according to a statement from the conference. IndieCade 2010 takes place in about a week on October 8-10, 2010 in Culver City, California. Schafer will get his award presented to him by former (and current) colleague Ron Gilbert at the ceremony on Thursday night, hosted by Levar Burton.
