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Early App Store hit Eliss expanded in upcoming Eliss Infinity
Steph Thirion's celestial puzzler Eliss emerged as a standout release in the early days of the iOS App Store, serving up unique multitouch gameplay suited for Apple's then-fledgling platform. Almost five years after the original game's release, Thirion revealed that an expansion, Eliss Infinity, is due to hit iOS devices later this week. Eliss challenges players to join like-colored celestial bodies together within each level's cramped boundaries while using skillful finger placement to stabilize on-screen objects. Infinity will include all content from the original Eliss along with the new score-based Infinity mode, which Thirion describes as "Tetris meets Super Hexagon." A sandbox-styled Spacebox mode is also included, offering a laid-back style of gameplay for newcomers. Eliss Infinity will be priced at $2.99 when it premieres for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad devices on February 6. [Video/image: Little Eyes]
Faraway crowned at Fantastic Arcade festival
Fantastic Fest took place in Austin, TX this past weekend, and as part of the festivities there, organizers set up a Fantastic Arcade, to show off some of the latest and greatest indie games to hit the scene. There were a few good iPhone and iPad games out there, and in fact one of them took top honors, as Steph Thirion's Faraway (which we're eagerly awaiting on iOS) picked up the prize for Best in Show. Vlambeer's Radical Fishing (which was recently involved in an IP clash with another game called Ninja Fishing) also grabbed an award for "Most Punished for Lack of Ninjas," and is due out on iOS at some point in the future. You'll find the full list of games that won awards at the show in the press release below. It's great to see some popular iOS titles make the grade at an event like this, and boy, if the hype for Faraway wasn't high enough already, this adds even more icing to the cake. Hopefully we'll see the game released to the public very soon. Show full PR text FANTASTIC ARCADE 2011 INDIE GAME AWARD WINNERS HONORED Best in Show Awarded to Little--Eyes' Faraway AUSTIN, TX – September 25, 2011 – Fantastic Arcade, the second annual showcase of independent games from the organizers of Alamo Drafthouse's Fantastic Fest, the world's largest genre film festival, wrapped the four-day event tonight with the Fantastic Arcade Awards Party: Starcade. Fantastic Arcade featured eight Spotlight indie games in the juried competition, each housed in retro-arcade style cabinets and available to the general public for play. These eight titles, along with thirteen additional showcased indie games, were culled from more than 100 submissions. The following is the full list of indie games awards and winners presented: Best in Show: Faraway by Little--Eyes Audience Choice Award: Fez by Polytron Most Punished for Lack of Ninjas Award: Radical Fishing by Vlambeer The Bionic Commando Award for Grappling Hook Excellence Award: Capsized by AlienTrap The "You got 2D in my 3D, or maybe 3D in my 2D" Award: Fez by Polytron The Mandlebrot Award: Fract by Phosfiend Systems The Most Recent Use of Japanese Tradition by Westerners Award: Skulls of the Shogun by Haunted Temple Studios The Implied Cephalopod Intercourse Award: Octodad by Team Octodad The Teach the Controversy Award: Jesus vs. Dinosaurs by Martin Jonasson, Petri Purho "Fantastic Arcade fuses the world of genre film with the burgeoning indie game community," said Mike Plante, Arcade Artistic Director. "Each Fantastic Arcade Spotlight game proved to be compelling, fun, accessible and a blast to play. In fact, the audience reached new record levels of thumb blisters!" Video game industry luminaries Brandon Boyer, Mike Plante and Eddo Stern curated the 2011 Fantastic Arcade. Panel discussions, developer talks and game tournaments were held each day of the festival at The Highball in Austin, Texas.
New Faraway video trailer, game coming to PAX
After an extended wait, here's some news on Steph Thirion's long-awaited iOS title, Faraway. I played it at GDC last year, and it's won several awards since then. Thirion then worked to refine and update the gameplay. It looks like he's satisfied, because a brand new, amazing Faraway trailer posted on the official website. Thirion says the game will be playable at PAX in Seattle this week, and an iOS release will be announced soon. He's gotten some financial support as well. Faraway has been selected as the fifth project supported by the Indie Fund, a funding source meant to offer indie game developers a little extra help with getting their games together. It's good to see that this one is headed back towards the spotlight -- I really liked it when I saw it last year, and was a little disappointed to hear that it had been delayed. Hopefully Thirion's put together the game he wanted to make, and we'll see a full release on iOS soon.
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.
GDC 2010: Interview with Faraway's Steph Thirion
Steph Thirion is a game designer who's been releasing some of the most inventive games I've seen on the iPhone. He started out with Eliss a little while back, and he recently announced Faraway, which I got to play at GDC. The night after I played the game (it was at a party called Gamma IV), I sat down with him to chat about developing for the iPhone, why Eliss wasn't bigger, and his biggest inspiration for the more casual gameplay of Faraway. Read on for the full interview.
GDC 2010: Hands-on with Faraway
Steph Thirion's first iPhone game was Eliss, a touchscreen-based arcade game that had you combining and maneuvering planets around one another, and trying to size-match them up with black holes to earn points. As he told us (stay tuned for an exclusive interview with the indie developer), it was pretty hard -- even more so than he actually intended it to be. So, for his second iPhone game, Faraway, he's gone much simpler. Inspired by the iPhone game Canabalt, Thirion has created a one-button game in which the goal is nothing less than to explore the universe. He has it running on a Mac at the show (so he can project the video onto a bigger screen), and we got to have some hands-on time with the new game. You control a comet that flies around an inky black void speckled with dots and circles; the pixelated space aesthetic from Eliss is back. This time, however, there's only one control, and it's a tap anywhere on the screen. Doing so will cause your comet to gravitate towards the nearest static dot, which will then slingshot you around the star until you let go, and the comet flings off in a new direction. There's an arrow pointing off of the screen, and by timing slingshots correctly, you will face the comet in the direction of the arrow.
Eliss creator's next game: Faraway
Steph Thirion, creator of the early iPhone standout Eliss, has a new game on the way, from a new company. The first game to be released by Thirion's studio, Little-Eyes, will be Faraway, a project Thiron says "will be about constellations and infinite space travel." Faraway will be on display at the Kokoromi Gamma IV event tomorrow, and should also be playable at the Gamma IV showcase during GDC. At that point, presumably, we'll know exactly what Faraway is and what platforms we'll be able to play it on. Our guess: Thirion's note that Faraway "drastically increases the scale of the play area" (compared to Eliss) could be a reference not only to the new gameplay setting, but a new platform: the iPad. It is, however, worth noting that the Faraway preview image on the Little-Eyes site is presented in the iPhone's display resolution.
