Knytt Stories Release Date

By: Derek Yu

On: July 11th, 2007

According to Nifflas’s website, Knytt Stories, the spiritual sequel to the much beloved Knytt, will be arriving on August 30th.

Also arriving on August 30th: the peaceful plant aliens from the planet Geti Prime, here to share with us their delicious recipe for meatloaf that stops aging and cures cancer. Which are you most interested in?

(Source: Total Klik)

Knytt Stories

By: Derek Yu

On: April 20th, 2007

NotKnytt is now known as Knytt Stories, and according to its creator, Nifflas:

“I’m still waiting for material. Some text, and some music, and a very important extension. Once I add it, the game itself is complete. Although it would only require one or two days of work to add the material, I can’t add it before I have it.

However, even if I had that material now, I wouldn’t be able to release the game for a while anyway, since I’m planning to sell expansions. I really want to release the expansions at the same time as the game. I need to learn about all those things – and I must redesign the website.

I will probably not be able to release NotKnytt before sometime at the end of the summer. "

And… a shot from the level editor (thanks, Tim!):

Knytt Experiment

By: Terry

On: October 30th, 2007

There’s a good chance you’ve already heard the news by now: a week or so ago Nicklas “”http://nifflas.ni2.se/“>Nifflas” Nygren announced the Knytt Experiment, a totally goal-less version of Knytt with one level, built out from the centre of an empty world with user submitted maps. After working on that for a couple of days, he cancelled the project, along with the new Knytt Stories expansion. Apparently, he feels that the success of Knytt Stories has put a lot of pressure on him to produce something at the same standard, and that it’s affecting the quality of his work. On the future of his projects, he had this to say:

I’ll definitely keep creating games, but I need to find the way back to the spirit I had when I created Knytt, when nothing mattered except just the artistic expression. One step in this is probably to keep my future projects secret. You’ll probably not even know about them before the release.

(You can read the full forum post here.)

Nevertheless, Knytt Experiment is basically finished, and released. You can find it here, on his forums. At the moment it’s quite small, but it’s growing all the time – when you first start it up, you’ll only have access to the centre room. To get the latest maps, simply select the “update world” option under each of the level types.

It’s much closer to the original Knytt than to Knytt Stories: the only differences are that the map now scrolls, that your Knytt is invincible (in fact there’s nothing to hurt him), and that he can float in the air with a balloon (making exploration a lot easier). Unfortunately there’s no music (which is a big part of the Knytt experience for me), but I guess that’ll only add to the atmosphere for some people. I played it with the Silent Hill 2 soundtrack in the background, which worked pretty well, heh.

In summary, nice work, Nicklas! I for one can’t wait to see what you come up with next, regardless of what direction you go in.

NeonPlat 2

By: Derek Yu

On: August 1st, 2010

[This is a guest review by JimmySH. If you’d like to write a guest article for TIGSource, go here.]

White platforms need more neon, so in NeonPlat 2 Platdude takes his neon-painting pants to run and fill the platforms until his own doom. Soon, the screen overflows with baddies. Kinda like this:

It’s a fast, crazy game by Jayenkai.

In a basic level, platforms spawn in waves, and when all the white ones are painted, the next wave appears. Platdude can get several powerups: slow motion, wings, globes to throw on enemies, and more. The game plays like a combo of classic Mario Bros. (climb the platforms), City Connection (paint them, too), Space Invaders (they come in, from above). Combine that with crystal-clear audiovisuals, with simplistic art in salad-colors molten with laser precision.

Read the rest of this entry »

This Is How Bees Work

By: Guest Reviewer

On: January 21st, 2010

[This is a guest review by Cosmic Fool. If you’re interested in writing an article for TIGSource, please go here.]

I think I’m going to have to meet bento_smile.

This Is How Bees Work is from the creative minds of Jasper ‘superflat’ Byrne and bento_smile, and I know right now its a game I’m going to remember. The passive and relaxing gameplay of bento_smile’s games has never failed to bring a smile to my face, and This Is How Bees Work is no exception.

You open the game to be greeted by 2 simple instructions (Move and Plant) and a pleasantly relaxed queen bee resting on quite a comfy looking plant. The contented smile on its face is a sign of things to come.

The joy of growing and harbouring a home for the bees made me feel like a good person. When I would see the first forest I had created on the horizon I felt happy simply to see it from a distance as a measure of my achievement. It also amazes me the sense of reward I got out of subtle graphical changes. When I would spawn a purple tree or begin to collect red bees I began to genuinely feel like I had created something beautiful in this strange and weird magenta land.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not a game for everyone. Its lack of a superobjective and general endlessness might not appeal to those approaching it as a traditional game. Its beauty lies in a desire to excel on your own terms. If you got joy simply out of traversing the new environments in Knytt and Knytt Stories or seeing the new friends appear on your map in Tanaka’s Friendly Adventure, I’m sure you’ll garner some enjoyment out of this game, hampered only the brevity of the experience.

Saira

By: Derek Yu

On: January 6th, 2010

Nifflas, the creator of Knytt, Knytt Stories, and Within a Deep Forest, released a new game at the tail end of 2009. Saira is another platformer in Nifflas’s non-violent, minimalistic style. Unlike his previous games, however, Saira features high-resolution graphics that mix hand-drawn artwork with photographs. Aside from the graphical differences, the game also has a lot more puzzle-solving than Knytt or WaDF, typically in the form of small command consoles that require you to input codes and play minigames. I’m ambivalent about the minigames, which kind of take away from the platforming for me, but it hasn’t been a deal-breaker yet. Partway through the game, and I feel like the story and environments are fun enough to jump through that the game’s small faults do not bring it down too much.

Also, happy birthday, Nifflas! Dude turns 27 today (January 6th)! In celebration, he’s providing a discount to the game. For the next two weeks, the full version of Saira will cost $12 USD, down from $17, and you can also buy a gift code for $1.50 with each purchase. This deal will last until January 20th.

Those of you who are interested in a level editor for the game can find it here, at Nifflas’s support forums.

TIGdb: Entry for Saira

Aquaria Design Tour

By: Derek Yu

On: January 15th, 2009

David Rosen of Wolfire Games posted his 4th design tour almost two weeks ago, and it’s about a game that I’m pretty familiar with – Aquaria! I’ve already mentioned this to David during our email discussions of the game and his tour, but apologies for not posting it sooner. I wanted to make sure that I gave the tour an adequate mindshare before I posted my response to it. (I’m also slightly hesitant to post news about my own games.)

First things first, I have to be honest and say that I was secretly hoping that David would do a tour of Aquaria, but I wasn’t sure if he had played the game or not. So yeah, I am pretty excited about it, considering the caliber of the other games he’s toured (World of Goo, Knytt Stories, and Gish). Thanks, David!

So anyway, my 2 cents (it’s actually more like a nickel) on his 2 cents:

David has a designer’s view of things, so it’s not surprising that a lot of the concepts he brings up during the tour were on our minds when we were working on the game. Chief among these was the idea of accessibility. Specifically, how much prodding should a developer give to the player to push him or her in the “right” direction, and to prevent them from getting stuck. “Getting stuck” has been anathema to game designers for a long time now, and it’s often cited as a chief reason why the classic point-and-click adventure genre died (in the mainstream industry, at least, but not so much in the indie scene). The holy grail of game design, it often seems, is to craft something that every person in the world can eventually get through and feel good about. And that’s not sarcasm at all – I genuinely believe that that goal underpins a lot of the choices that many designers (including myself) are making when they develop commercial games these days, for better or for worse. The fear, of course, is that if someone gets frustrated with your game or can’t get through it, then they will give the game a low score, they will not recommend it to others, or they will just give up before they get to some of the other goodies you spent a lot of time on.

And that’s something we did agonize over while we were working on Aquaria, and designing its puzzles, controls, and so forth, because it is a game we want people to play and experience fully, and yes, also purchase and feel good about purchasing. In actuality, a lot of the features that David mentions as being “hidden” in the tour (the hotkeys, the map, the hints, etc.) were added later on in the development (many of them as a patch Alec worked hard on after the release) to address those worries. As to why they are hiding in the game, rather than being displayed prominently, well… I think one reason is that we would prefer people to spin by spinning their mouse, sing spells note by note, and place each ingredient by hand, rather than using a hotkey to do it, and we would prefer that people get lost, even, rather than use a map hint. I won’t speak for Alec (even though I think he feels similarly), but I kind of wanted people to live in the game, and maybe even feel bad or bored about it occasionally. This is supposed to be Naija’s life, after all, and even though we didn’t want to make you watch her spend 5 minutes pooping after she eats, we did want you to feel (flashes, at least) of what her life is like, even the more mundane parts.

I’ll be the first to admit that it seems questionable to insert features into the game that you’d prefer the player not use, but in our case, I believe it was the right choice. Partly for the simple fact that it DID alleviate our fears with the game at a time when we were definitely worried that players would find the game too hard or too frustrating (i.e. it gave us more confidence in the game), and partly because people do find them and use them, but generally only if they are having trouble. It’s a bit of a fidgety situation, but I think it works pretty okay for the type of game that Aquaria is meant to be (your mileage may vary). I definitely should have added the hotkeys to the documentation, though – that was an oversight on my part that is easily rectified.

The puzzles – not so easy! The “Song Door” puzzle near the beginning of the game confounded us for a long time. If you had trouble with it now, you should have played its earlier incarnations (but I’m glad you didn’t!). I still feel like it’s a pretty simple puzzle, but I realize that that’s a meaningless opinion to anyone who got stuck on it for a long time. And David’s definitely right that, ideally, if a player comes up with a clever solution that should work within the context of the game, then it should work. I agree completely.

I am really glad David mentioned Alec’s level editor and animation editor, which are an amazing set of tools that we included with the game itself. I don’t think they get enough mention in reviews of the game. That the sprites have a slight “paper doll” quality to them is not ideal (we did try to think of ways around it), but it’s a small price to pay for the ease of the game’s creation (without which the game would not have been completed).

I do wish that there had been more mention of the game’s narrative and what was good or bad about how we executed it, because it’s a major part of the game and there were some interesting design decisions involved (like the use of voice over). But David told me that the original video was around 30 minutes long and he had to cut it down, which I understand. Overall, I, like the designers toured by David before me (that sounds slightly wrong!), am impressed with the things he pointed out and how close to home his observations were. In the end, I think we made the right choices with Aquaria, though it is not a perfect game by any means. But that doesn’t invalidate at all any of the things David pointed out.

Whew, okay, I said a lot more than I was originally intending to. That’s all (for now), and hope that it was somewhat elucidating! Thanks again, David. Looking forward to the next one!

2009 IGF Main Competition Finalists!

By: Brandon McCartin (BMcC)

On: January 7th, 2009

‘Tis mighty stupid of me to have ’s Quest: Milestone 2 TIGS post">posted BQ yesterday, completely forgetting the nominations for this year’s Independent Games Festival were coming out today! Oh well, what can ya do:

Seumas McNally Grand Prize:

– Blueberry Garden
– CarneyVale Showtime
– Dyson
– Night Game
– Osmos

Excellence in Visual Art:

– Cletus Clay
– FEIST
– Machinarium
– PixelJunk Eden
– Zeno Clash

Excellence in Audio:

– Blueberry Garden
– BrainPipe
– Musaic Box
– PixelJunk Eden
– Retro/Grade

Excellence in Design:

– Musaic Box
– Night Game
– Osmos
– Retro/Grade
– Snapshot

Innovation Award:

– Between
– Coil
– The Graveyard
– Mightier
– You Have To Burn The Rope

Technical Excellence:

– Cortex Command
– IncrediBots
– The Maw
– Osmos
– PixelJunk Eden

Congrats to the nominees! 30% more entries this year than last year’s huge amount. (Find out more at IGF.com!) Whole lots of awesome, a little bit of WTF?, and my impressions after the jump…

SO MUCH AWESOME:
– Dyson! An entry from Alex “haowan” May into TIGS’ very own Procedurally Generated Content competition. Extra awesome.
– Snapshot! Turns out this one’s actually made by Kyle Pulver, creator of BONESAW and Verge, winner of the recent Commonplace Book Competition.
– Cletus Clay! True creator of Platypus Anthony Flack’s clay-mation magnum opus. (Anthony, I haven’t seen you around in a while! This was such a pleasant surprise.)
– The Graveyard! Another somber and inventive game from TIGS allies Tale of Tales. (And another IGF nomination!)
– Cortex Command! Will this be the year the excellent Cortex Command gets its IGF dues?
– Night Game! Nifflas’ most ambitious project yet. (See also: WADF, Knytt, Knytt Stories)
– Blueberry Garden! This game looks so lovely I almost can’t stand it.

Congrats again! To all the nominees. (I’m sure I’m missing something.)

WTF?:
– PixelJunk Eden? Isn’t that game, like, already out on PSN? I thought that would be against IGF submission rules… or at least the spirit of the competition.
– You Have To Burn The Rope? Hahaha — wait, really?
Update: Check out Kian’s response. I found it genuinely touching. Games like YHTBTR getting nominated may be a blessing in disguise — it means you can work from unadulterated creativity, even on a relatively small scale, and still get noticed. That is a good thing! (Thanks, Simon!)
– Goo!? Mondo Nation? Solar Plexus? Just a few awesome and likely awesome games without a nomination. (I’d venture to say there are at least a couple spots these games could have filled…)

DISCUSS.

Tekkyuuman

By: Terry

On: December 29th, 2007

You’ve probably already seen this on Tim’s new indie games blog, but it’s so wonderful that it really deserves another mention. Tekkyuuman (freeware.remakes.org mirror) is a new game by quirky Japanese developer Ikiki. And it’s one of his best yet.

As usual, you play as an armed naked guy, though this time your weapon is a little unusual – a mace on an elastic chain. There are twelve single screen levels to progress, with bosses every third level. That’s basically it – what really makes it, though, is just how well designed those levels are, and how how much character each of those bosses have. It’s addictive as hell, and quite hard! (If you’re stuck, I’ve got a full video playthrough up on YouTube which might help.)

I was under the impression that Ikiki had given up on game design (earlier this year Ikiki’s site went down and the frontpage was replaced with something suspisiously like a goodbye message – though babelfish insists that it’s got something to do with “Fat bowls”). Speaking as someone who only found out about Ikiki’s existance earlier this year with Xander’s Nikujin post, I really hope that this game is a sign that we can expect to see more from him. (And if so, what a magnificent comeback it is!)

5 Ikikis out of 5!

(Something I wonder about: what’s the Japanese indie gaming scene really like? Is there a Japanese TIGSource, for example? Did Japanese indies get as excited about Knytt Stories (say) as we did about Cave Story? Is there a Japanese version of Derek trawling through all of Cactus’ old games? Definitly something we need to DISCUSS.)

‘Night Game’ — Potential New Project From Nifflas

By: Brandon McCartin (BMcC)

On: September 17th, 2007

Whoa! Shih Tzu was just telling me today about the great Knytt Stories expansions out there, and look what I find on Tim’s blog just now… Concept art for Nifflas’ new project, tentatively called “Night Game.” Could this be a spiritual successor to Within a Deep Forest?

Little is known at this point, but mysterious user “pi” on Tim’s site has pointed out a forum thread on Clickteam’s site where Nifflas seems mighty interested in physics solutions. He even posted some diagrams that bear a striking resemblance to the image above.

It’s quite cool seeing Nifflas explore new graphical and gameplay styles like this. Keep an eye on this one.

(Source: TIM)

The aforementioned diagrams and further description from Nifflas in the extended.

Nifflas’ forum post:

“I want to create a game that takes place in a 2D landscape. The background scenery will contain slopes, but it does not have to be curved like in the demonstration images.

There must be a way to attach several rectangles and spheres to each other, to create more complex objects (four rectangles can become a windmill). There must also be a way to attach a physical object to the background, so it’s X and Y position becomes fixed, but it still begins to rotate realistically if you push it somewhere."