retro-affect
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Thoughtful Bundle: Fieldrunners, Reckless Disregard for Gravity and more
Indie Royale's Thoughtful Bundle is live, and features five different PC and Mac games for a pay-the-minimum price, which is currently $5.46. Included in the bundle are Snapshot by Retro Affect, Cognition Episode 2: The Wise Monkey by Phoenix Online Studios, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! - A Reckless Disregard for Gravity by Dejobaan Games, Subatomic Studios' Fieldrunners and Snuggle Truck from Owlchemy Labs. Buyers that fork over at least $8 will also receive Night Animals, a chiptune album by Bright Primate.The Thoughtful Bundle will be available on Indie Royale's site until Saturday, March 23.
Snapshot: Snapshot (PC)
There are so many games out there we couldn't possibly review them all. Welcome to Snapshot, where we highlight games that might fall outside our usual coverage but are still something we think you should know about. Today: Snapshot for PC. Finally, someone made a game for all the Instagram hipsters in the world. All those crazy kids with their fancy smartphones, taking too-close photos of burritos and Starbucks cups, only to crop them, blow out the saturation, and add kitschy comments bookended by less-than-three hearts for all their digital friends to see. Retro Affect's Snapshot is exactly like all of that, except way cuter and not at all like that.What Snapshot does have in common with Instagram is its photography foundation: It turns taking a picture into a pivotal mechanic in an otherwise classic platformer. Also like Instagram, Snapshot is incredibly addictive.%Gallery-165173%
Snapshot strikes a pose on Steam
Snapshot is now available (surprisingly) on Steam. Retro Affect's 2D puzzle-platformer has been in development for several years and stars a robot named Pic, who can change the environment around him by taking pictures and placing them in the environment. The creative game is also coming to the PS Vita and PS3 later this year.Snapshot is the second project from Retro Affect – the studio's first effort was Depict1, a freeware game that came out of Global Game Jam 2010. Kyle Pulver, one of the members of Retro Affect, also recently launched his solo project Offspring Fling, a fun-yet-evil game about throwing babies around.
Snapshot training amateur photogs on PS3 and Vita this fall
Snapshot isn't a new game, though this may be the first you've heard of it. Nope, Snapshot's been kicking around indie game festivals and such for quite some time (since at least 2009, if not earlier), though we now know that Snapshot's being developed for PSN on both PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita.In Snapshot, you follow a little robot named (appropriately enough), "Pic," as he ventures across a puzzle-filled 2D world. By snapping square photos of the environment, Pic can alter the world around him – "taking photographs of light and using it to interact with physics" and momentum-based puzzles are both given as examples of Snapshot's gameplay twist.The game's a Sony exclusive (at least for now), with cross-platform save functionality built-in, and it's expected some time this fall. Check out the latest trailer just above – it's quite pretty!%Gallery-156371%
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Offspring Fling
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 believe they deserve a wider audience with the Joystiq Indie Pitch: This week, Kyle Pulver's Offspring Fling is the best PC and Mac game you could ask for in the week approaching Mother's Day. Or any other day, really. Pre-pitch-post-gray-intro note: Offspring Fling launched on Steam today for PC and Mac, and it's 20 percent off through May 18. It includes the Mother's Day Update, which has a level editor, replay and sharing features. Go make momma proud!What's your game called and what's it about?It's called Offspring Fling, and it's a game about a poor forest creature that has misplaced her children in a mostly happy but sometimes spooky forest. She'll have to make her way through more than 100 levels of baby throwing, puzzle solving, button pressing, bee-avoiding action if she wants to get them all home by dinner.What inspired you to make Offspring Fling?May 2011: I went to a local game jam in the Phoenix area. The theme: Motherhood. After an hour or so I had an idea of a puzzle-platformer game where you have to get a bunch of babies safely to an exit, and you could use them in all sorts of ways to solve puzzles and platforming challenges. Forty-eight hours later I had a pretty solid prototype of the game with 15 playable levels, and I ran with it from there.
Indie Megabooth devs let anyone ask them anything
At PAX East this weekend, 16 popular indie developers (plus one "bonus" developer) will congregate into a super-giant indie creature in the first-ever Indie Megabooth. Developers include Ska Studios, Strange Loop Games, Retro Affect, Dejobaan Games, Fire Hose Games, DrinkBox Studios, Pocketwatch Games, Carbon Games and the rest -- to get the indie love flowing, the previously mentioned developers are running an "Ask Me Anything" thread on Reddit, right now. So far, we've learned that each developer gets 99 bitches a day and that most of them cried while playing Journey. Andy Schatz of Pocketwatch Games, Eitan Glinert of Fire Hose and Retro Affect's David Carrigg have also offered differing perspectives on the possibility of indie development for the Wii U, or any Nintendo system in general. Said Glinert: "We're not. I don't know any small third party companies that make any serious money there. Nintendo sadly isn't serious about supporting non-Nintendo companies, and so it's not worthwhile for us to spend the time and effort bringing our games to their platform. Sad face." Schatz disagreed with the doomsday sentiment: "Speak for yourself Eitan! I haven't announced platforms for Monaco yet, but WiiU is still a possibility! Nintendo is slow to change (which is weird given the crazy innovation on their software side), but the boulder is finally starting to move wrt their digital sales storefront."Carrigg said Nintendo's eShop is "far behind" the XBLA and PSN competition, but Retro Affect has been talking to Nintendo and would "really like to work with them. I would not be surprised to see a Retro Affect game on a Nintendo platform sometime in the future."James Silva of Ska Studios addressed the lack of deadly dishwasher games on PC, saying he wants to make PC titles, but for now that would be a problematic process. The AMA is ongoing (as of this posting) so head on over and uncover some you-specific bits of information from this mega-group of indies.
