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Splice slices its way to PS3, PS4 on January 20
Splice, the gene-slicing game with a gorgeous piano soundtrack, is due out on PS3 and PS4 for $15 as a Cross-Buy game on January 20. PlayStation Plus members will get a 20 percent discount during its first two weeks on PSN. Splice comes from music-loving indie studio Cipher Prime and has players piecing together cellular strands in a moody, floaty environment. "We've been working for months to bring you a truly amazing experience for Playstation," Cipher Prime Creative Director William Stallwood writes on the PlayStation Blog. "It's been a childhood dream of ours for such a long time to release a game on a console, and Splice will be our very first. We couldn't be more excited to share with you our award-winning puzzler." To celebrate the console launch, Cipher Prime is offering the Splice original soundtrack, Flight of the Angels, for free this week. It's seven songs of haunting, emotive, original piano work; grab it on Bandcamp. Also, get the sheet music for Splice's songs in the links here, for $5. [Image: Cipher Prime]
Cipher Prime now selling piano music to Splice by
Developer Cipher Prime's genetic puzzle game Splice may have originally released in 2012, but if its beautiful piano melodies still linger in your mind's ear, you might be pleased to know that the studio has released sheet music for the game's soundtrack, allowing you to perform the tunes for yourself at home (or fancy parties, or possibly an airport lounge - wherever there's a piano available for use, really). If you're looking for a demo of sorts, the notation for the song "Cassiel" is available to download for free. Five dollars will net you the remaining 10 songs, providing a total of 46 sheets of music to impress your friends and family with. Oo, oo! And play that sad walking away song from The Incredible Hulk next! [Image: Cipher Prime]
Developer bike gang rides across the US to de-stress
William Stallwood is burned out. In 2008, Stallwood and Dain Saint co-founded independent studio Cipher Prime in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and they've since built a reputation for creating stylish games rich in music and dreamy visuals, such as Auditorium, Splice and Intake. Cipher Prime hit success on Kickstarter before it was cool. Stallwood is heavily involved in the local game dev scene, and he helped found Philly Game Forge, Philly Dev Night, and he's Creative Director of the Philadelphia Geek Awards. Right now, he and three friends are taking a break from normal life – and from Philadelphia – to ride across the country on bicycles. "Cipher Prime is down to just Dain and myself again, and I needed to sort of run away and collect myself," Stallwood tells Joystiq in an email. "I've taken on a bit too many management roles and my recent work on the Philadelphia Geek Awards has pushed me a little over the level. I'm hoping to refuel my creativity and process all the things I love."
Intake prescribes combos for iPad on May 1, OST to iTunes
Intake has been crushing pills into a points-based substance on Steam since November, but for owners of the iPad 2 and above, Cipher Prime Studios has written a new prescription: Take one copy of Intake on May 1 for $2.99 and lose a few afternoons to the arcade-style high score chaser. The iPad version will support multitouch gameplay, cloud saves and integrate leaderboards and achievements from Game Center. Cipher Prime Studios has tweaked its formula for all patients however, detailing improvements that will also reach Steam users on the same day Intake reaches iPad. In the related press release, the team notes that Challenge levels now "appear at regular intervals," while screen-freezing flashbang pills now appear a bit earlier in the game. You can also keep it basic with an optional No Nonsense mode, which Cipher Prime says will allow for constant gameplay. Fans will also soon be able to purchase Intake's peppy, electric soundtrack on iTunes, though the impatient among us can already sample and purchase the album for $3 at Bandcamp. [Image: Cipher Prime Studios]
Colorful, musical pill shooter Intake pops to iPad in April
Intake, the drug-induced shooter from Auditorium studio Cipher Prime, is on its way to iPad this month. Intake hit Steam for PC and Mac in November, after debuting in the Cipher Prime Humble Weekly Sale. Intake has players click a series of pills as they tumble from the top of the screen, toggling the mouse between colors to hit the matching pills. It's rapid-fire arcade shooting with club beats in the background. Intake on iOS will have Game Center achievements and leaderboards. There's no word on exactly how the touchscreen controls will work. "We've revamped Intake's color-switching pill-popping gameplay for a multitouch platform, and the game will have all the core features and content of the desktop version and updates," Cipher Prime says. [Image: Cipher Prime]
Cipher Prime's pill-popper, Intake, on Steam after hitting Humble Bundle
Intake has no business being as fun as it is, considering its super-simple premise. I first got a taste of Intake at GDC, during the second annual Indie Press Mixer, where I can state without shame that I had a blast popping pills to some of Cipher Prime's famously sick beats. That's the premise of Intake – split the Dr. Mario-esque pills as they fall from the top of the screen, while ensuring your clicker is tuned to the correct color. Super simple and super addicting. Intake is out now on Steam, on sale for $9 through November 13. It launched with the Cipher Prime Humble Weekly Sale in October, alongside some of the studio's established games, including Splice, Auditorium, Pulse and Fractal. The bundle ended up selling 41,529 units, studio co-founder William Stallwood tells me. "It's the best marketing tool we have," he says. "The guys who run Humble Bundle are fantastic. They help us launch and test and are very supportive. If we don't make any money, we still get to feel good – it's for charity." Besides, Stallwood says, getting on Humble Bundle is a measure of success: "I'm not sure the real value of a Humble Bundle is the money. I would say it's the exposure. It's almost an indie 'you've made it.'" Getting on Steam is also an indicator that a studio is doing something right, and Cipher Prime now has four games there.
Dubstep shooters, microbial puzzlers star in Cipher Prime's Humble Weekly Sale
Indie developer Cipher Prime headlines the latest Humble Weekly Sale, serving up a varied collection of synaesthetic puzzlers and shooters for a buyer-chosen price. The bundle includes Cipher Prime's kaleidoscopic Android action game Pulse: Volume One, along with the multiplatform puzzlers Splice and Fractal: Make Blooms Not War. Pay more than $6 for the set and you'll also receive the music-driven puzzle game Auditorium and the "retro-futuristic drugstep arcade shooter" Intake, which makes its Windows and Mac debut as part of the collection.
Splice cuts its way to PS3 this year
Splice is on its way to PSN for PS3, by early fall at the latest. Splice is the successful gaming experiment from Cipher Prime, a studio with a rich history of crafting clean, artfully scored and brain-twisting games, such as Auditorium, Fractal and Pulse. It's a puzzle game disguised as a science project, asking players to create specific cell strands from an unorganized group of binary branches. Each strand has a max number of moves, and if the player can't complete it within that framework, it's possible to reverse time and try again. Splice offers more than 70 puzzles to tickle your own cell strands. In your brain. Splice is available on PC, Mac, Linux (on Steam), iPad and Android.
Daily iPad App: Splice is a different puzzle game
Splice is an experimental puzzle game for iPad, put together by a developer called Cipher Prime. It was originally released on Steam and has received several awards. After being selected for PAX 10 and Indiecade 2012, Splice has made the jump over to iPad. Splice is intriguing in that it's not easy to get into, as it's a puzzle game that plays hide-and-seek with its mechanics. But it definitely creates a striking mood, and it wordlessly communicates its principles quite well. The basic idea is that you've got to line up what appear to be biological cells in a certain order, usually in a symmetrical pattern, by splitting and then recombining them (hence the title) a certain number of times. Like most great game ideas, this sounds more complicated to do than it is. In the end, you've just got to look closely for a pattern, and then figure out where the cells need to go. There are some great touches in the atmosphere of the game, too. For example, when you mess up and need to redo your splices, you just touch a timeline on the side of the screen, and the game artfully rewinds to the last cut you made. TUAW got a chance to talk with Cipher Prime at PAX last week, and founder Dain Saint said that the game was originally developed in Unity. Bringing it to the iPad didn't take long at all, but the optimization process took about a month. The company is now working on a sequel to a previous title, Auditorium, after having raised the funds for it via a Kickstarter earlier this year. But Saint also told us that before it makes Auditorium 2, the goal is to make a much smaller title, hopefully with a development time of just about a month, to "work through our production pipeline." After that, it'll be on to the bigger title, but Saint isn't sure whether either game will make it to the iPad just yet. With a team of just five people, there's obviously not a lot of time for extra tasks. At any rate, it's good to see Splice on the iOS platform, and hopefully its success will bring Cipher Prime and other indie developers back in the future. The game's artistic and experimental, so it might not be for everyone (especially with the current $3.99 price, despite the game being even more expensive on Steam). But if you're looking for a really gorgeous puzzle game with some out-there mechanics, Splice is a very interesting experience to try.
This year's PAX 10: JS Joust, Offspring Fling!, Puzzlejuice and more
The PAX 10, an illustrious group of indie games chosen annually to be spotlighted during PAX Prime in Seattle, have been selected. This year's rarified group include the likes of Johann Sebastian Joust, Offspring Fling! – a game we highlighted in length on the Super Joystiq Podcast – and hypnotic iOS darling Puzzlejuice.Other lesser-known titles include the latest from Cipher Prime, the studio behind Auditorium and Fractal, a Steam title called Splice, and puzzle games Containment: The Zombie Puzzler and The Bridge. Puzzle-platformer The Swapper is also represented, along with DigiPen's stealth-action game Deity and Catch-22. Turtle Sandbox's action-strategy hybrid Cannon Brawl rounds out the list of ten.All PAX 10 titles will be featured in their own special area at this year's PAX Prime, which goes down August 31 through September 2 in downtown Seattle, WA.
Splice takes experimental puzzle games back to the lab today on Steam
Splice, the newest game from Auditorium developer Cipher Prime, is available today on Steam for $10, on both PC and Mac. Splice is also available as a soundtrack package deal for $13, and the soundtrack, Flight of Angels, is purchasable on its own for $5.Coming from a studio known for its musicality, the Splice soundtrack should be a piece of microbial heaven: Immerse your senses in its auditory particulates with the video above or listen to the soundtrack on Bandcamp.Splice takes place in the world between millimeters, under microscopes, presenting geometry and sequence puzzles in the form of microbial strands, all set to the soothing melodies of science. Splice features almost 100 strands in all, with each one presenting new challenges and riddles.%Gallery-158296%
Auditorium 2: Duet raises the full $60,000 through Kickstarter
When we first began covering Auditorium, Pulse, and Fractal creator Cipher Prime, developer Will Stallwood spoke mostly in uncertainties concerning his coming sequel, Auditorium 2: Duet: "We're hoping to," "Only if," "We're going to try" and similar phrases. Today the update on Duet's Kickstarter is full of certainty: "WE DID IT!!!!!!!"With less than three days left to fund the project, Cipher Prime raised more than $60,000, completing its goal and ensuring work on Duet is a go. More than 55 hours still remain in its campaign, and it is still collecting what we like to call "icing" funding."We're going to make Auditorium Duet for you, and it will be awesome, and we truly, truly, truly owe everything to you guys," Cipher Prime wrote in its Kickstarter victory post. "Thank you to all of our long-time fans and people who've only just heard of us (we'll convert you into long-time fans soon enough!)."
The Schafer stigma: How his successful Kickstarter went to your head
I first heard about Kickstarter at San Diego Comic-Con 2010 in an early morning panel about black writers and artists in the graphic-novel industry, titled "Nappy Hour." I was there to secure a seat in the following panel -- which was a Dark Horse feature and may have included an appearance by the wonderful Gerard Way, writer of The Umbrella Academy and singer in this amazing band you probably haven't heard of (don't judge me) -- but "Nappy Hour" turned out to be one of the best presentations I saw that weekend.Throughout the panel, author and performer Pam Noles mentioned Kickstarter as an underground, free-spirited way of funding creative projects, and said she had used it to fund a few of her own endeavors. I imagined an online co-op of artists and philanthropists holding hands and running through rich, green fields together, composing sonnets about how wonderful everything was, and supporting only the most remarkable of projects. When I got home and checked it out myself, I found a site similar to Etsy, but where the items for sale were half-finished, semi-formed ideas from people who seemed dedicated to carrying them out.I thought it was wonderful.
How one indie studio burns $15K per month (or: this graph looks like Pac-Man)
$15,000 sounds like a lot of money -- why yes, I would like to buy a brand new motorcycle, thank you -- and for an indie studio, it's just enough to keep the engine running. Indie Studio Cipher Prime know this better than most, having tried various funding styles for its three titles, Auditorium, Pulse and Fractal, and now banking on Kickstarter to finance its newest installment, Auditorium 2: Duet.Dain Saint of Cipher Prime put together this handy visual breakdown of what $15,000 means for his studio, and for the likelihood that his team will be able to buy groceries each week. Co-founder Will Stallwood points out that the graph doesn't include health insurance, because they "opted for food over health insurance," and it doesn't list the debt Cipher Prime has piled up from using credit cards to offset slow months.Check out the full graph below for a rough representation of Cipher Prime's expenses. Again, note that it doesn't account for everything, including equipment costs or the price of a pro license of Duet's engine, Unity, which runs $6,000.
The price of independence: What it really costs to be an indie developer
Will Stallwood is a gambler. He's had the same addiction for years, yet he's never stepped foot inside a casino.He's never found himself hunched over a table fitted with worn green felt, sliding his last two chips between sweaty, shaking palms. He's never felt the sick dread as a slot machine whirs through its final frame; he doesn't know if he prefers red or black. Stallwood has been addicted to gambling on the success of his indie studio, Cipher Prime, since its triumphant launch of Auditorium in 2008. But this year feels different. This year Stallwood feels as if his lucky streak may finally be running out.Cipher Prime isn't an unknown team of novice developers working out of a garage, but that doesn't mean they're rolling in dough either. Its previous titles were successful, but after a deal went raw with Fractal's publisher, Zoo Games, Cipher Prime was stuck with a rushed title and more debt than it ever expected.Stallwood and Cipher Prime co-founder Dain Saint had to legally fight for the rights to their own game, eventually getting them back more than 200 days after Fractal launched on the App Store. Saint and Stallwood were understandably turned off of the old-school publishing route."We were not a fan of the publisher model before, because it just covers development and we never see royalties no matter how good the game goes," Stallwood said. "Now, we're just completely sour to the whole thing. We're not completely opposed if it means the difference between making games or not, but if there is any way we can avoid it and still make games, we're certainly going to try."Cipher Prime has found another way -- it hopes -- with Kickstarter.%Gallery-148865%
Auditorium 2: Duet multiplayer wants you to make sweet harmonies with that special someone
Indie studio Cipher Prime has launched a Kickstarter project for Auditorium 2: Duet, the sequel to 2008's rhythm-physics title Auditorium, which is celebrating its debut on Steam today. Duet aims to be a polished playground built on the experience Cipher Prime has gained developing Auditorium, Pulse and Fractal over the past three years, but its most exciting feature is something none of the developers have attempted before -- multiplayer."When we first started our studio we were very nervous," Cipher Prime's Will Stallwood told Joystiq in an exclusive interview. "We created Auditorium by accident and had little game design experience. We've spent the past three years honing our skills so we could tackle multiplayer."Auditorium has been our playground since the day we started, so the only logical step is to keep her as our playground," Stallwood adds, unknowingly outing Auditorium as a female game, for those of you keeping score.Auditorium 2: Duet will be optimized for two-player gameplay, and Cipher Prime will be testing it as a local feature to start, with tentative plans -- more like vehement wishes -- to include PS3/Steam and iPad/Steam crossplay functions down the line.%Gallery-148865%
Auditorium devs look to Kickstarter for sequel funding
Will Stallwood and Dain Saint of indie studio Cipher Prime don't want to buy new Ferraris.Actually, they may want to do that -- because hello, Ferraris -- but that's not where their current focus lies. Cipher Prime wants to make a sequel to its first title Auditorium, titled Auditorium 2: Duet, and has turned to Kickstarter to crowdsource a portion of its budget.Cipher Prime is the conductor behind a trio of ambient, subtly beautiful, rhythm-based brain busters. After launching the originally Flash-based Auditorium in 2008, the developer orchestrated two follow-up titles: Pulse and Fractal. Since then Auditorium has been ported to iOS, PS3, Xbox 360 and PSP, and today marks its launch on Steam -- and, Stallwood hopes, the launch of its sequel's development.Speaking exclusively with Joystiq, Cipher Prime's Will Stallwood says development of Auditorium 2: Duet will only take place if the team manages to hit its sizable Kickstarter goal of $60,000. According to the developer, the goal represents half of what the team needs to complete the project, with Cipher Prime contributing the other half of necessary funds.
Portabliss: Fractal: Make Blooms Not War (iPad)
Did you know that you can download handheld games now? That's amazingly convenient! The only inconvenient part of it is finding the right games to buy -- and that's where we come in, with our Portabliss column. In each installment, we'll tell you about a downloadable game on the iPhone, iPad, Android device, DSi, 3DS, PSP, etc. Today: Fractal: Make Blooms Not War.. My entire life, I've had a problem. When I see multiple shapes or objects of the same color, I feel this need to push them together and make them vanish. It's instinctual, some kind of primordial need I must fulfill at every given opportunity. And that's why I can't put down Fractal: Make Blooms Not War from Cipher Prime, the developer of Pulse and Auditorium.%Gallery-132534%
Get Pulse on iPad for $1.99 through August 12 [update]
Auditorium developer Cipher Prime released Pulse on iPad back in May and has since enjoyed 12 consecutive weeks in the top 10 iPad music game charts. To celebrate this success, Cipher Prime has slashed the price of Pulse: Volume One down to $1.99 through Wednesday, August 10 -- a 60 percent saving off its usual asking price of $4.99. [Update: The deal has been extended and will now conclude on Friday, August 12.] We'd never dare tell you what to do with your money, but we can think of worse ways to spend a couple bucks. Did you really need that comb that looks like a switchblade? Okay, definitely, but you get the point.%Gallery-122885%
Pulse, from makers of Auditorium, now on iPad
The lovely, addictive Auditorium is a big favorite at Joystiq HQ, and developer Cipher Prime has just delivered an equally enjoyable follow-up, Pulse: Volume One, a new rhythm game for iPad. It's unsurprisingly tough to describe, but if you like tapping screens in time with music as you simultaneously create lovely visuals, we imagine you're really going to enjoy it. If you're a little nervous about parting with $5 sight unseen, we've got a gallery of screens and a promo code for one of you just after the break.%Gallery-122885%
