An interesting design detail can be found on the lofi-platformer “You probably won’t make it“. Each level features only one single screen. The game keeps on suggesting, it is a “brutal hard” game. In order to reach the goal, you have to make use of double-jumps, avoid the “needles” and reach the goal. Well, if you loose a life, than the blood of your death and – this is the interesting detail – the path of you last played game will be displayed on screen. Nice thing to visualize and really not hard to implement. It is somehow a more static version of that trail of the Feist-character.

I think the game is not too hard, and the music is good, but a little bit repetitive.

via inbetween

Note the plain colors. Music is plain as well.

“White Butterfly” is an excellent shooter, that (at least in my opinion) did not got the attention yet, that it would deserve. It’s an brilliant designed game, made by Linley Henzell.

The game is unbelievable hard, even the first level makes you struggle, unless you play punishment-hard shooters on a daily basis. Each element in the game is well balanced, making the game fun and addictive like hell. You can choose of five ships, each equipped with three different weapon systems. Even if you fail each time at stage one, trying out different ships and weapon systems is a pure pleasure. Linley invented funny things here. You will end up try and try out new strategies to beat the enemies with different cannons. Inside the game each weapon will get stronger and stronger, the more enemies you beat with it… So even inside the game, you can every time change your strategy and focus on a weapon of your choice. Beautiful.

It’s been a long time that I seen an indie-game, that was so well-balanced with all details, even the colors, the sounds, the music are a perfect fit, underlining the whole game-experience. I would go so far to say, that this game is somehow a secret masterpiece! Don’t let it go without trying.

White Butterfly: Gameplay Video

Linley Henzell also made lots of other really good games, utilizing the Allegro-library.

discovered via TIGSource

Yesterday I discovered a very lovely game. It is “Corpse Craft” and although the game is about killing, it is very very cartoony and sweet. The style is oriented on vintage horror, like Edgar Ellen Poe or the game Alone in the Dark, but in a plain illustrated hand-drawn style. With extreme charming details. Just have a look at this detail:

Detail: You against your enemy, zoomed x 2

Even the gameplay is somehow inventive, but foremost addictive. It features a combination of various game-genres and mixes them together into a whole gaming experience. The most basic gameplay is in an arcade-puzzle-style with game-mechanics, you should be familiar with. But… you do not solve the puzzle all the time just for the fun itself, but in order to fill up your energy-portions. If you have enough of them, you can send zombies into the arena, because your primary goal is to defeat your enemy. This is where also a strategic component comes into play. As the levels progress, you are able to collect points on a meta-layer and exchange them into special items. The games uses the “Whirled“-API to manage the transaction, that is relative new, I think, it’s in beta-phase. You can even play against others with the integrated multiplayer mode.

Nevertheless, just try out this game. And be sure… you will be entertained! Play it on Kongregate or Whirled.

The finalists for the Independent Games Festival student awards have been announced. There are also two contributions from Germany: Where is my heart and Zeit2. But my attention fell to this two games, that look fresh and interesting:

City Rain

This is some kind of Sim City meets Tetris meets hints and thoughts on sustainable city-development. Go to the website.

Feist

Dark, moody and with a dense atmosphere and astounding graphics – this is what Feist is about. It is a mixture of platformer and adventure. Go to the website.

Frequon Invaders 2.0 Ingame

Well, Frequon Invaders is different. It is something, that would not come out of a normal game-designers head without going through deep fundamentals of complex math. It is experimental gameplay in the deep sense of meaning of the term “experimental”. And it seems, that the game popped out of the head of a mathematician. So, how is the gameplay like?

You are your”self”, represented by a circle, controlled by mouse. Your aim is to catch “Frequons” on a psychedelic colored playfield. But… you can’t see them. There are several visual clues that will help you finding the “Frequons”. The game makes use of Fourier Analysis and complex patterns and derive the gameplay from it. The display shows your”self” and any launched Frequons in this Fourier Domain, where they become wave patterns. If you do not understand anything, than it’s pretty fine. Me was too.

Now, what you actually have to do in the game, looks like this: Move around your cursor with the mouse, while the psychedelic color pattern changes. The “Frequons” are hiding, but you come close to them, if the “pits” in the background-patters get larger (or lesser) and darker. You will search for places, where the pattern gets more simple. If you are near them, they show up until you hit them.. and the Frequon disappears. Some Freqons are also moving arcoss the playfield and in later levels the patterns are getting more weired, while up to four Freqons at the same time appear on screen. The pattern in the background is always a calculation of the Fourier field, the Frequons and your self. Once again: this is the first game, that plays on the 2 dimensional Fourier Space!

via Auntiepixelante

Pacman Dungeons is a browser-ready textadventure, where you play PacMan, in order to collect pills and avoid ghosts. It’s a homage to the two most popular forms of computer games in the late 1970s and early 80s: Pac-Man and text adventures or interactive fiction. Quite a neat interpretation of a classic game. Playing pacman was never so… slow!

Osmos is a truly beautiful game, very concentrated, ambient-like. The game uses the biological principle of “Osmosis” as basic game-mechanics. You are a mote (something like a cell). By absorbing other motes, you will grow bigger and if you run into a mote, that is bigger, you will be absorbed, until you die. You can use propulsion to navigate through the matter around you, but beware, propulsion will cost you energy and shrinks you again: “Good things come to those who wait”, the makers of the game say. The motes look like cells or even planets, and also behave a little bit like them. There are special orbit-levels available with gravity involved.

Osmos is a mixture of a gaming and an ambient experience. The game has a special soundtrack, provided by musicians, that are around the netlabel scene, too. At the most recent version, the music was made by Loscil, Julien Neto and Gas/High Skies. Truly a good match! Let’s float around a little bit and relax with the game.

Until now only the demo of Osmos is released. There is a small suggestion, to enhance the controls in the next version of the game: At the recent version, you have to use the mouse wheel, to zoom in or out the scene. But what, if you don’t have a mouse wheel? It would be good to offer two more alternate zooming mode controls, for example with the right mouse key + mouse moving or even plain keys on the keyboard.