A carefully crafted game is on its way by Derek Yu, Mr. TIGSource himself. Even the name is kind of friendly: Spelunky!. It is the first game Derek made with the Game Maker tool. He writes on the forum: “Probably the easiest way to describe Spelunky is that its (kind of) like La Mulana meets Nethack – every time you play the levels, items, monsters, and so forth, are all procedurally-generated. And the terrain is destructible and there are quite a few ways in which the various game elements can interact with one another.”

What I read so far about the game was quite enthusiastic. The procedural design of the levels also will result an interesting play, re-play value. You also do not need to be an expert to detect the first class quality of the graphics. But you will need to have a play, to be convinced also of the playable qualities of Spelunky! Unfortunatelly I have problems in downloading the game. The download stops after downloadings some megabytes of the 11MB package for unknown reason. Someone maybe upload the game to a mirrorserver? That would be great!!

Ratloop figured out an extremely cool way of designing and creating your avatars and textures for the avatar, as well as puzzles and leveldesigns, in a charming, but also likely technically overdriven way at thier game Mightier. In order to get your avatar, you print out a sheet of paper, fill it with the texture, the body, the physiognomy. You do it by drawing face, foods, legs, skin with a bold pen simply on the paper. It is easy as that. After feeding your creation into a special scanning system (you can use a webcam), it magically turns into a virtual avatar. The same princible applies for creating platforms, levels and landscapes, simply by drawing lines on paper.

The game was submitted for the Independent Games Festival Award 2009 and can be downloaded on their website. Someone just handout the award for them.

A nice mixture of music and puzzlegame is Auditorium. Your goal is to “put on” audio-engines by throwing particles on it. The more particles it receives, the louder the sound will get. If all audio-engines are on, the level is won. On later levels more engines will appear and also more “particle modifiers” and the particle steam will have a more complex route to pass. Unfortunately, at least on my computer, the CPU usage really got high at higher levels. A non glossy cpu-friendly version of this game, a lot more trickier, with better puzzles and a more fun gameplay, could make this a much much better game. You can set the flash-player into the “low-quality” the optimize to performance a little bit. I also think that the the particle-stream without the glow-effect is pure and intense, beginning to melt the sensitive motion and the music into a good flow.

Thanks Frank for the tip!

Oh boy, this currently released material of the game “Owlboy” just left my mouth wide open. Owlboy is an upcoming independent platformer with more than just “incredible” pixelgraphics. Really, it is hard to tell, how awesome the graphics are. The style is absolutely pure pixelstyle, but in a very laborious manner. Gameplay is also very classic in the style of jump’n’adventure, a little bit like Gargoyles Quest, Castlevania or Rainbow Islands. Owlboy will be a pleasurable graphic-adventure trip, but it is in 2d and feels extremely good and cutting edge. Should somebody say, that graphics lost its relevance. (I suggest this posting on 2d-sprites and animations on GameDesignScrapbook).

The publisher of Owlboy D-Pad Studio should think about releasing printed posters to sell, just instead or besides the game. I would definitely count in for such a goodie.

Meat Boy is great a independent game. You play a “juicy piece of meat”, that has to save a girl in each level. The story and the gameplay feels really oldschool, and in fact it is. What makes the game so great is not only the gameplay, but foremost the blissful graphic and the excellent leveldesign, that is really in the neigbourhood of oldschool-arcade games from the 8- and 16-bit era.

You can play Meat Boy online, or download the package on your windows-machine. The games was made by Edmund McMillen and Jonathan McEntee. Plus: there is also a leveleditor on board. Happy sharing.