Yes people, I did it! I finished a game for the Global Game Jam! It is a two-player-game and some sort of “space-fighting game”. (The topic of the game jame was “Extinction” by the way). Since I had extremely limited time at this weekend, I decided to make a game I can assemble in 30 minutes or so. In the end it took me about 8 hours.

This game reflects my growing interest in “fighting games“, that developed over the last 10 or so months. I like the idea of games, that do not have a “optimum strategy” to win the game, like “knowing and mastering all secret moves” or “pushing the button faster or harder“. The idea of having a game, where you can combine tactics to always make a turn on the game against your enemy was and still is of high interest. I am also thinking about stuff like the “All in” at a poker game: you can always be the matchmaker and win epic or fail miserably. Ok, enough of the theory.

“An Accident in Paradise” is a 2-player space-fighting game for iPod Touch and iPhone. You play with another human on the iPod as a playboard. The bullet strength is determined by the time-interval between the single shots. Stronger shots extinguish weaker shots. There is no optimal strategy to win, but you have to examine the enemies moves to decide, what works best for you to hit the enemy ship. Unfortunately there is nothing to play on the web right know, because I made this on the iPod Touch device only. I am heavily thinking about polishing the game a little bit and ship it with the Apple App Store. But this won’t be within the next 3 weeks.

Ah, I had a great inspiration this weekend by Sven Väth’s first album “An Accident in Paradise” from 1993. I can still recommend this 17 year old record much, much, much. Here is the title-track “An Accident in Paradise“, but for more popular I suppose is “L’Esperanza“.

Global Game Jam Link: http://globalgamejam.org/2011/accident-paradise

PS: Later this week I will post about other interesting submissions of the Global Game Jam Cologne. Thanks again to the Cologne Game Lab to make this great event happen once again!

You can head over to the mini-site for Paniq’s new album “Beyond good and evil“. Have a listen there, buy the album as 320kbit mp3 or FLAC as pay what you want (no minimum required), of order the CD like shown above. Or order this CD along with a “Fine Arts Calender”. This is meanwhile tha 11th album from Paniq!

Beautiful letterprints in pixelstyle with unusual-source-materials is the work from Physical Fiction. They use dices, lego and various modified mosaik-boards, cover them with paint and make unique prints out of it. If you come close, you will also see fine-granular patterns, attached to some of the pixel-tiles. Physical Fiction is the effort of Samuel Cox and Justin LaRosa. (via)

Luckily I was having the chance to beta-test Krystian Majewskis indie-masterpiece TRAUMA. Everyone can cheer for the day, that game finally will come out. I won’t spoil you, but this game got its very own language, rhythm and what surprised me most, is also addictive, because of the dense atmosphere to literally fall into. The riddles are so basic and good, do not need words. Finally you find yourself playing at a meta-layer – that is disconnected from everything else: the cut-scenes, the game-play itself. Hard to describe that. I can agree with the review of Katharina Tillmanns from the Cologne Game Lab: “Having said this, I have to get back to testing – for therapeutical breakthrough I might have to play TRAUMA over and over again.”

Hand out a price to this man finally… ;)

And here is the trailer again:

PS: You can follow the last steps of Krystian’s progress of TRAUMA at his (always worth reading) scrapbook-blog. Get the letest news there!

Uh huh! The Impact-JS game engine was released today! It is a game-framework, that allows you to make games in JavaScript, that basically should run in every modern JavaScript-enables browser. The funky-detail is, that you can even code games, that run on the iPhone, iPod Touch and the iPad. Still there are some minor quirks to solve, as the creator Dominic Szablewski writes in his blog:

All those platforms still have their problems with sound and the iPhone 4 has a hard time filling all its pixels, but the games remain to be playable even on the 1st gen iPod Touch.

For me this looks like a project, somehow between an awesome proof-of-concept and some serious stuff to build upon. And it seems, that I am not the only one, who is a little surprised, that Impact should now be at sale for 99 Dollars, instead of making this stuff free and open source. Hm… really, nothing against making some bucks from the own hard work… but this project here smells more like a BSD-licence with some serious business work wrapped around it. I think this would be a better fit. Or like someone, who wrote at Dominics blog: “I wish you luck making some sales… but you could have the next jQuery on your hands if you released this for free.”

On the other side, maybe there will be impact with Impact. At least the way to make games, that are playable at the iDevice-range, could be a great opportunity. Still wondering, what Apple will have to say to this.

Anyway, no matter, which way he will choose! Good luck and thanks for making this real!

Uh, it seems, that Jonathan Lavigne is growing into my all time pixelartist toplist, not only, because of his game “Ninja Senki”, that should be released at the 21 December 2010. He also did the artworks for Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and other games, mostly for Ubisoft. Ninja Senki is his first indie-game. His graphic-style combines a modern and fresh approach with very classic 8-bit styles, that is absolutely unique. Less is more! You can follow his blog Pixeltao. Feel free to also read an interview with Jonathan. (via)

Based on the success of the first “Humble Indie Bundle”, that raised over 1 million dollars in a “pay what you want” manner, it is time for a second edition. Same concept: a bundle of great indie-games are bundeling together. This time it is Braid, Osmos, Machinarium, Cortex Command, Osmos and Revenge of the Titans. Plus bonus-features like soundtracks. The games are DRM-free and are available for all platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux. Some games have their debut on Linux in this bundle. Once again you can choose to give your backs away for charity and spend some amount to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) or Childs-Play. Don’t hesitate, get the bundle here.