10 months after the release of Super Meat Boy, Edmund McMillen has put out his next game, The Binding of Isaac, a horror-themed top-down shooter that takes its name from the Biblical story where Abraham is asked by God to sacrifice his son. The game features short, randomly-generated levels with 100 items, over 50 monsters, and 20 bosses. The soundtrack is by Danny Baranowsky.
Note: Isaac is not a Team Meat release. The programmer for this one is Florian Himsl, who previously collaborated with Edmund on Cunt and Twin Hobo Rocket. Team Meat has purportedly started work on their next project.
I don’t know how it is where you are, but over here the Christmas tunes have already started creeping out of the tinsel-covered woodwork! In light of this, I thought I’d share some of the things in the world of indie game music that have brought holiday cheer to me recently. It really feels like it’s been a stand-out year for indie game composers, who are doing some amazing things in this community. Have a listen!
Plants vs. Zombies OST – One and half years after the release of Plants vs. Zombies, composer Laura Shigihara has been given permission to put out the game’s soundtrack, which includes both English and Japanese versions of her hit song “Zombies on my Lawn”. Laura is also working on Melolune, an RPG based around the concept of collecting song fragments.
FATHOM, the latest collaboration of Adam “Atomic” Saltsman and Danny “B” Baranowsky, is your standard 2D action-platformer… or is it? The game throws some fun surprises your way, which I don’t want to spoil here, and is definite food for thought. I give it 33 thumbs up!
Like their hit Gravity Hook, FATHOM uses Adam’s Flixel framework for Flash-based 2D games to great effect. (The entire game took about 10 days to make.) Which is cool, because Flixel should see a public release “in a few weeks.” (!) There’s also a bunch of procedural trickery going on in the background which the player may not notice, but I think is worth mentioning in case Adam wants to talk about it more in the forum thread.
Gravity Hook is a new Flash game from Adam (Atomic) Saltsman and Danny Baranowsky. It’s based on a game prototype by Niklas “Arne” Jansson where you climb higher and higher by grappling onto mines and swinging yourself up. The catch is that the mines arm themselves when you’re hooked onto them!
Like Thrustburst, Gravity Hook rewards risky behavior – releasing yourself from a mine when you’re right next to it results in a significantly larger boost. It feels good to catch the wind with a series of dangerous jumps. So good, in fact, that I’d like to see a visual or aural reward when I nail one… perhaps a little spark or a different sound effect?
Another thing I like about the game is how quickly you can retry after dying – your highest score is submitted only when you exit to the title screen. It may seem like a small thing, but for a score-based reflex game like Gravity Hook, every second between death and the next attempt can seem like a freaking eternity. For me, anyway.
Now if only I didn’t suck so hard at it…