The A MAZE-Festival is spreading its wings. The “warming-up” before the conference starts is an exhibition called “First Step” and can be still visited today. It is some sort of small, improvised exhibitions of game art – they did changed a private living room into an exhibition space for this reason. You can read this report (in German) from Robert Glashüttner, that explains the experience and the exhibits in detail.

Roy Block

One of the works shown there was the “Roy Block“, a media-project by Sebastian Schmieg he made at the Merz Academy Stuttgart. It’s an a tangible interface, that provides an experimental gaming experience, where you take real cube objects, to control the player on the screen. Roy Block is written in Processing and uses “reacTIVision software” for tracking.

Experimental storytelling Sunday! Air Pirates is a game by Cactus, he made with his studio Lo-Fi Minds for e4. It is flash and it will be released next month. The trailer indeed convices by blocky and dirty style, ill colored pixels and music from The Death Set.

Fathom is an absolutely lovely made free flash game, ready to play in your browser. The game is a little bit diffrent from others – read here if you get stuck. It’s made by Adam “Atomic” Saltsman and Danny “B” Baranowsky. They also teamed up at the game Gravity Hook for example.

At least interesting is, that the game took only 10 days to develop, utilizing a self-made flash-framework for 2D-games, called Flixel. It should have some not-so-obvious algorithmic wonders behind the curtain (as you obviously can experience at Fathom) and should see the first public release soon!

Windosill does look interesting. This flash-based game is a point and click adventure, but it made the jump from being a collection of ideas to being a world full of riddles, possibilities and atmosphere. Think of games like Loom or Samorost. I even identified elements from Little Big Planet. Similar to the former games Feed the Head or Arcobots, the narrative is on an abstract level. Exploration and surprises are the thing you mainly will do, compared to use logic in order to solve riddles. The graphics are plain, clean and mostly blue, just like the other games from Vectorpark. The animation are very smooth and delicate. If you are into surrealistic worlds, subtle sound effects and well done animations, you should give this game a try. Just download this pleasure. There is also a full version available, costing only 3 dollars, so go for it! Read more about it at Jay is Games.
(via Torley)

PS: Check out other recommended game-content on Digital Tools.

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

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.