mushroom-11

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  • PAX 10 spotlights Framed and Duet

    by 
    07.29.2014

    This year's PAX 10, a collection of games from independent developers, has been determined and will be highlighted at next month's PAX Prime convention. The ten games were hand-picked by 50 industry experts, starting with Duet, Kumobius' elegant arcade-style action game for iOS. Duet is joined by LoveShack's Framed, a narrative puzzle game trapped in a comic world. Both Duet and Framed received attention earlier this year when the games were among six total mobile titles in the PAX East Indie Showcase. Those two games are joined by an abstract 2D PC platformer from DigiPen's Neat Snake known as Flickers. Infinity Monkeys' Life Goes On is also in the mix, in which players set out to find the Cup of Life by ironically sacrificing knights to the game's deathly contraptions. Untame's amorphous puzzler Mushroom 11 will be included in the showcase, as will Funktronic Labs' sci-fi, turn-based adventure game Nova-111.

  • Just rolling with the apocalypse in Mushroom 11

    by 
    04.11.2014

    In the aftermath of global annihilation, Mushroom 11 gives rise to a bioluminescent blob that looks like someone made radioactive jello in a murky swimming pool. It expands, contracts, squeezes and climbs through dilapidated nooks and crannies, never losing its total mass while the player prods it into motion. It's easy to play and hard to look away. The quirky growth must use its weight and mass in clever ways to advance, be it creeping through the windows of a skyscraper about to crumble, splitting itself to trigger simultaneous mechanisms, or to roll past the attacking arms of a mutated plant. The trick is to realize that your touch (or mouse-click) removes adjacent pieces of the blob, which then immediately regrow, attached elsewhere. Closer observation shows it to be a living lattice of gelatinous material, moving and shifting its weight as it grows in response to your prodding. This makes Mushroom 11 a slower, methodical game, and different from fluid manipulation games like Pixeljunk Shooter. The other trick to Mushroom 11, according to designer Itay Keren, is to teach players how to handle their blobs without resorting to text and obvious tutorials. The game is striving for subtlety, both in its story of how the earth came to ruin, and in its teaching phase.

  • Indie Fund backing Global Game Jam hit Mushroom 11

    by 
    11.20.2012

    Mushroom 11, from 2012 NYU Global Game Jammer Itay Keren, is an experiment in mobility and art design, and it's caught the eye (and wallet) of Indie Fund. Keren won the Best Game Design award at GGJ 2012 with Mushroom 11, and has since focused on fleshing it out into a more polished, complete game. Check out some preliminary art and that wild gameplay mechanic in the above video."The design space being explored by Mushroom 11 is not something we've seen before," Indie Fund writes. "It's engaging and tactile and we're excited to support Itay and see where his design exploration leads!"Keren has previous development experience for mobile devices, but there is no word on potential platforms for Mushroom 11.