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Semi Secret publishing Aquaria for iPad
Developer Semi Secret (the folks behind the popular game Canabalt) posted on its blog the company will be publishing Aquaria, a very popular indie game from a few years ago, on the iPad. Aquaria is a really beautiful underwater exploration title, and as you can see by the teaser video released by the team, it looks to be adapted quite well for the iPad, making solid use of the touch interface and the tablet itself, along with a few other new gameplay improvements. The app is also being worked on by a developer named Andrew Church, who apparently ported Aquaria to the PSP on his own before being contacted for the official iPad port. That's pretty impressive as the game was apparently optimized for the first iPad and thus should run quite well on the iPad 2. We'll look forward to this one. Semi Secret says there will be more information available on the new port soon.
GDC 2010: Canabalt postmortem
"What kinds of games do you like?" Adam "Atomic" Saltsman asked of his panel audience at the Canabalt postmortem during the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. "Role-playing" was yelled out, as was "puzzler," and eventually Saltsman picked "platformer" as the genre. Without another word, he quietly went to work on a laptop. Then, his partner at Semi Secret Software, Eric Johnson, took the podium to tell us all about what it was like to make one of the App Store's most popular games. He started by saying that the game was originally developed in just "five very long days," and was created for the Experimental Gameplay Project and based around simplicity -- it only uses six colors and, obviously, the one button. For a game that's so simple, it actually had a lot of complex influences. It drew from older games, like Another World and Flashback, as well as modern works, like Half-Life 2 and District 9.
