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Spellirium, from Ponycorn Adventure dev, out in alpha now
Spellirium is a mix of classic graphic adventure game Loom and word scrambler Boggle, and it's available for pre-order now on developer Untold Entertainment's site. Pre-ordering Spellirium grants instant access to the alpha version for PC or Mac, which is almost complete but is missing sound and some ending cut-scenes, as creator Ryan Henson Creighton explains in the above video.Spellirium has classic point-and-click adventure mechanics, but the core gameplay involves swapping letter tiles in the Spell Caster to create relevant words, rather than standard item manipulation. The word-find game goes deeper than spotting full words on a grid, sometimes asking players to look in specific directions or colors to complete puzzles. Pre-orders will go toward the final push on Spellirium's development, with different tiers and rewards. It's a "Kickender," as Creighton describes it.Creighton is the father of Cassandra Creighton, the 5-year-old mastermind behind Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure, 2011's breakout point-and-click oddity on the indie scene. Ryan Creighton has been developing games for 13 years for children's television shows in Toronto, but Spellirium is his first game for a broader public audience. He's trying to get it on Steam Greenlight, and it's due out "when it's finished."
Ponycorns creator('s dad) Ryan Creighton talks funding fun, family
Ryan Creighton makes sure to acknowledge precisely how average he is, but it's not a self-deprecating point. Creighton, the man behind Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure and dad of the designer, then 5-year-old Cassie, led a panel at GDC titled "Ponycorns: Catching Lightning in a Jar," which focused on tips for building a brand and marketing a product as an indie developer.For an "average" developer, Creighton makes some exemplary points.For example, build a game-specific blog or website and publish the story behind any game's development; personalize the process and make is easy for people to give you money, Creighton suggested and we completely agreed with.Even though Creighton offered some wonderful tips for emerging developers, he also pointed out that there isn't a guarantee for success, at least not in the traditional sense.Creighton's studio, Untold Entertainment, is in the hole at least $6,233, but it's raised more than $3,000 for Cassie's college fund, Creighton said. He didn't make Ponycorn to get rich -- luckily -- but had clear reasons: Creighton believes kids should learn to code, that there should be more women in the games industry, and he wanted to spend more time with his children by involving them in the family business. In these areas, it appears he succeeded.Creighton works on Untold contract projects and develops games for under-funded, lackluster Canadian television spin-offs to support his family, he told Joystiq after his presentation. Creighton had hoped to develop original titles for Untold full-time, but "it's been a rough three years," he said. He then turned to a circle of developers waiting to ask him questions and offered another piece of advice: "Here's a hot tip, fellas. Don't start your own company in the middle of a global economic collapse."Creighton is currently developing Spellirium, a "trashpunk" graphic-adventure, world-puzzle title for Mac, PC and mobile devices, which he is, of course, blogging about.
IndieCade 2011: Sissy's Magical Ponycorn misconceptions
Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure may be one of the weirdest anomalies in gaming lately -- it's a LucasArts-style point-and-click adventure game that was actually designed by someone who wasn't even alive when any of those games were released. 5-year-old Cassie Creighton designed the game with her father, Ryan, at a Toronto game jam, and when it was published online, it started spreading like wildfire around the blogs and Twitter accounts of game developers and fans, leading all the way up to its current status as a finalist at this weekend's IndieCade Festival. Dad Ryan Henson Creighton does enjoy all of the attention that his daughter's game is getting, but he told me at IndieCade that he's far from an innocent bystander. "People think that I'm some sort of oblivious dad," he says, "that sort of slammed it together using GameMaker or something, but we actually spent a good chunk of our money building a framework." That framework is called UGAGS, which Creighton originally designed for educational games, and while yes, Sissy's voicework, graphics, and plot were all designed by Cassie, her dad did most of the technical work with his own engine. "Sissy's Magical Adventure was the fourth game we've used it on, and we're using it on a fifth game called Spellirium. So we're not new at this."
XBLIG's 'They Bleed Pixels' features exp., Ponycorn crossover levels
Everyone frickin' loves Ponycorns, and Spooky Squid Games is no exception. The developer revealed that its upcoming XBLIG platformer They Bleed Pixels will feature a wonderful, entirely inappropriate crossover level designed by Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure creators Cassie Creighton and her father Ryan. That's not even the least likely crossover. There's a level designed by journalist Mathew Kumar, based on his exp. Magazine, and "featuring black and white photocopy art, an extra rare copy of exp. minus two, and words like orotund, grandiloquent and turgid!" Other guest levels include one based on the unreleased XBLIG game Techno Ninja by Michael Todd, and one based on Golden Gear Games' Starfall. If all this weirdness hasn't convinced you to watch the trailer, there's also a Ponycorns remix song by DJ Finish Him that you should really hear.
