The good folks on Steam have bundled up a bunch of indie games and are selling them for ridiculously low price of 29.99$ (or 19.99$). Crayon Physics Deluxe is one of them as is World of Goo, Braid, Audiosurf, Blueberry Garden, Everyday Shooter and more.
In other news, I’ll upload the improved No More Sweden game on Monday. In the mean while you can download it from here.
Last weekend I traveled to Malmö Sweden to participate a game jam called No More Sweden. This was the second time the jam was organized and it had grown from our humble begins of 10 people to a party of 40 or so. It was a sweet jam and I had a lot of fun, meeting old friends and making new ones. And making games as well.
We had a web-camera that was broadcasting video from the party place to the internets. So now thanks to advanced technology you can experience exactly what No More Sweden was like if you were a web camera running at the speed of 1 frame per every minute.
Big thanks to Martin “grapefrukt” Jonasson and other organizers for the work they did to make this happen. As a sign of my appreciation I’ll post an image of Martin with his mustaches on.
We also made a game together with Martin. I was responsible for the coding and Martin played the part of a graphics designer. And he played it well, going as far as to demand such features as: “You have to use the color burn filter when you render this sprite” and “We have to have dynamic lightning effects in our game”. The game design fell into place pretty nicely, even though when we created a quick a mock up of our original idea we had to scrap it, because it sucked hard.
Here’s a pic of me battling with some bugs in the code of our game:
We’ll release the game after I’ve fixed few things with it. I’d expect it to be out on the 1st of August 🙂
Here’s what No More Sweden looked like from the point of view of my laptop’s desktop.
Ever wondered how to prototype a game really quickly. I decided to record my work progress with a tool called ChronoLapse. So here’s what it looks like when I work on a prototype.
The game that I created can be downloaded from here: https://www.kloonigames.com/blog/games/sticky_notes
The project that inspired me to start Kloonigames is back in a new modified format… And I’m part of it \o/
Experimental Gameplay Project was originally a semester long crunch to crank out 50 experimental games (one every week). And it had a profound impact on me. I was blown away after seeing the games that these guys had managed to do in such a small time frames. I discarded my old spend-a-few-years-on-your-freeware-game habits and started Kloonigames and decided that I would try to crank out a new game every month. And that turned out to be a way better idea than I could ever have imagined.
I’m honored to be part of this and so horribly shamed that my first assignment is late. I have my reasons but luckily Shalin is slacking off too 🙂 But my unexperimental shooter should be done today or tomorrow. In mean while you can go and test out the already released games by Allan Blomquist, Kyle Gray and Kyle Gabler.
Version 3.0 of Experimental Gameplay Project is bit different from the previous ones. The main idea now is to hold a friendly monthly prototyping competition amongst our selves. Which means that I’ll be (hopefully) creating a prototype every month, which means that monthly games will be back on this site well… But more about that later. Now I should go and start coding my game… But first I’ll play a little Spelunky to get inspiration… NO! I should code first and then reward myself with Spelunky… But on the other hand I did update the blog so I should reward myself now. Snakes beware, here I come.
Blueberry Garden won the Independent Games Festival Grand Prize 2009 at GDC and I had the pleasure of giving away the award to Erik. I was literally jumping up and down of joy when I heard (before the show) that Blueberry Garden had won.
It’s a bit hard to describe Blueberry Garden if you haven’t played it. The experience of soaring through the skies, exploring the beautiful outdoor world all accompanied by the beautiful piano music by Daduk is just (for the lack of an better word) awesome. It’s an exploration platformer game, little in the vein of Knytt, but not really. The best description that I’ve read was by Michael Rose, when he wrote that “Blueberry Garden is like the Moomins as a computer game (minus the dodgey theme tune)”. Btw. Go and read the rest of Michael’s review.
Anyhow big Congrats to Erik for finally releasing Blueberry Garden. And in case you missed here’s the link to the Steam page.
P.S. In case you enjoy Blueberry Garden, spread the word, blog about it, YouTwitFace about it. Let people know, since indie’s don’t really have the luxury of a gigantic marketing budget so the only way to spread the news is word of mouth.