Welcome back for the third segment of Sense of Wonder 2011. These three games featured today all celebrate life in a special way. DIYGamer has covered them all in some form, however, it’s intriguing to see the games in motion and hear the developers’ thoughts behind them.

First up, Colin Northway of Northway Games works the Sense of Wonder Night with great enthusiasm when introducing Incredipede to the world for the first time. The developer speaks about his travels around the world and how Honduras inspired Incredipede with life teeming from every crack. The seemingly simple tools that are the building blocks of life are also the building blocks in the game. Players will traverse land and sea by constructing a Quozzle with limbs for swimming, climbing, tree swinging, crawling and more.

Goals seem to be to collect the fruit and reach the yellow goal, while avoiding pits and dangers. In the final version of Incredipede, players can send creatures as a sort of puzzle for others to figure out how to use them. Colin is confident in how Incredipede already exemplifies the “incredible variety in life” and “the sheer joy of life.”

For more Incredipede coverage, check out this extensive two-part interview with Colin.

Next up is the augmented reality puzzle game Reflow for iOS from xymatic. I took notice of Reflow back in July, and I am glad that the judges did, as well. The developers explain the solids from reality show up as white images (notice how hands are black in the video).

The object of the game remains the same: to re-flow the flow to its color-corresponding cup. In other puzzles, players have to change the color of the flow first so that it eventually matches the cup. Be sure to jump to the 6:00 mark to see how the guys draw on a piece of paper to solve a puzzle (including a single finger swipe which inverts the black and white in the image and a tilt of the device which controls gravity).

Omni Systems‘ Eufloria has been covered for quite some time, but PSN users finally get to experience the magic thanks to this upcoming port. In fact, Eufloria arrives on PSN this week: October 4 and 5 in the US and EU, respectively.

In this space-bio-strategy or as developer Rudolf Kremers called it, an “intergalatic gardening” game, players must spread seeds to become new trees in other asteroids to expand their colony. The trees literally sprout new life, in this process called panspermia. As the colonies expand, players learn how to make new forms of life.
Players also face adversity from other lifeforms that threaten to infect their own colonies.

Alex May describes how the graphics in the game are created at run-time using procedural content generation. Alex also describes how the procedural art provides feedback to the players, showing them what’s happening with their colony and others’.

Check out the full explanation and some colorful gameplay in the Eufloria presentation before our review of the PSN version this month:

Make sure you’ve watched the earlier SOWN presentations and stay tuned for the final videos.