Monday, October 12, 2009

Fig. 8: beautiful indie game

Check out this free little indie game called Fig. 8. It is the whole package.

Created by a collective from Iowa called Intuition Games.

Beautiful music and style, simple premise executed well. Control is simplicity itself but gets progressively more challenging in the environment.

I love the integration of the HUD and tutorial into the game map.
A very relaxing experience and perfect for unwinding at the end of the day!

Monday, October 5, 2009

Lucidity launches this week!


Just a reminder to everyone that this Wednesday is the big day where you will be able to get your hands on Lucidity.
It launches on XBLA & Steam for (I think) the very reasonable price of $10!

Later today we will be answering some questions from people on the development of Lucidity over at LucasArts Workshop. If you haven't checked out the site I recommend it, as we continue to post stories on the development of Lucidity.

We thought it would be interesting to share as much about the development process as we could, in the spirit of sharing key learnings and challenges with anyone else developing small games or interested in doing so.

In the mean-time, a pretty cool hands-on preview over on WorthPlaying continues to help build the good buzz prior to launch. We've been getting a lot of good buzz about the visual style and the audio, but this one gets into the nuts and bolts of the gameplay as well.

FTA;
Lucidity is a shockingly addictive game. The randomly generated nature of the items makes replaying stages exciting and interesting because there isn't a single set solution. Whether you're simply trying to reach the end of the stage or replaying to collect fireflies, the game encourages you to be creative and tricky

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Article on Reductive Design

Read a great article from Rodian Joubert today on Gamasutra called Minimised Game Design For Indies: Yes Or No?. (the article is a republish from this site)

This quote from the article by Anna Anthropy sums up the point well;
"contemporary game design is a victim of clutter," says Anthropy. "because the games industry is hit-driven (big budget games need to sell huge amounts just to recoup their costs), games are designed to be everything to everyone. unfortunately, the result is a game full of features which all tug in different directions, and which stretch the idea of the game thin beyond recognition ... they stretch an hour's worth of ideas over eighty hours of filler."
This reminds me of conversations we had about the Lucidity gameplay during early prototyping. We started expanding the core functionality of the game, adding a much wider range of different pieces and also power-ups. We decided in the end to strip it back because we felt that the additions really didn't add anything.