inertia
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Daily iPhone App: Inertia: Escape Velocity HD
Inertia is a really amazing platformer for the iPhone that uses a mechanic I haven't seen in any game in recent memory. It's a platformer, so you control a little spaceman that can walk left and right and jump from platform to platform. But Intertia adds another button that essentially will keep you moving at whatever speed and direction you're currently moving, sans gravity, when you press it. If that sounds confusing, it is, and fortunately, the game has quite a few levels of tutorials to really get you used to how the inertia button moves and plays. If you're rocketing up and you press the button, you'll keep rocketing up. If you're falling down at an angle, you'll keep falling, at exactly that angle. Once you figure it out, it's quite fun. And that very original movement also opens up all kinds of cool levels, where your little spaceman bounces around through 2D environments collecting various scrap pieces and running time trials. There are 35 levels to go through, and the game uses OpenFeint (not Game Center, though) for leaderboards and achievements. The lite version is well worth the download to check out the mechanic if nothing else, and you can buy a universal HD version for $3.99. I'm really impressed with this one -- the iPhone isn't always the best device to play a platformer on (given that movement really needs to be precise sometimes), but this inertia mechanic really opens up some new elements of a very old, well-traveled genre.
Limbo, Inertia! win 2011 Indie Game Challenge at DICE
Limbo and Xbox Indie title Inertia! have won the second annual Indie Game Challenge at DICE. Sponsored by The Guildhall at SMU, GameStop and the AIAS, the winners will each receive $100,000 and an EEDAR DesignMetrics title research assessment valued at $15,000. Limbo, which we felt was one of the best games of 2010, took the grand prize in the "professional" category, along with another prize of $2,500 for achievement in art direction Inertia!, available through Xbox Live Indies for $1, won in the "non-professional" category and also took awards for technical achievement, achievement in gameplay and "gamer's choice," for a total of an extra $15,000 in prize money. The game was created by Team Hermes, an eight person team of now-graduated students from The Guildhall at Southern Methodist University. Three members of the team, Evan Skarin, Michelle Hayden and Brandon Stephens, have started Inertia Studios, while the rest have already taken jobs at established studios. To check out all the talented nominees, head on over to the Indie Game Challenge site and watch the videos.
Curing MMORPG inertia
As MMOs become more accessible, casual players who have little contiguous time to play can run into a form of player inertia. The effort required to reach the next level is too great; levelling up is too far away to justify a week of plugging away for an hour a day. This inertia inevitably causes players to stop playing altogether, and to leave the game.This soapbox column at Gamasutra addresses the problem with an idea based around "dynamic lifestyle adjustment". Why should your characters freeze when you log off? Instead, let them do some low-level adventuring without your intervention -- a small trickle of experience gain which, if you're offline for long enough, will help push you towards that next milestone.It's an interesting idea; MMOs, for the most part, follow similar templates along the lines of "experience and skills are only gained when players log in and work for them". While some differ, none take it to quite this extreme, and it would be interesting to see a game take this idea and aim itself squarely at the casual market.
