Geek Beach recently put a new physics based puzzle game into the App Store. With A Monster Ate My Homework they’ve combined the physics of collision and gravity in a 3D environment that smoothly renders on the playing field.

Mobile gaming is full of physics-based titles. But it’s tough to pull yourself out of the pack and make something both fun and addictive. A Monster Ate My Homework hits both of those qualities and is a solid addition to the App Store.

Have you played Boom Blox? It’s Steven Spielberg’s foray into video games on the Wii and was a largely unnoticed great game. It featured stacked-block puzzles in which you either had to yank pieces off like Jenga or throw balls at towers to knock them over. A Monster Ate My Homework reminds me of that core mechanic in which you need to strategically toss balls at towers to knock the correct piece off of the playing field. With a tap of your finger you send a ball onto the playing field to tackle each puzzle.

The playing field is simple. There are square blocks with monster faces on them surrounding homework blocks, which you must save. So by tossing balls at the monsters, you knock them off the playing field and into the great beyond. By dragging your finger, you can rotate around the playing field to adjust your shot.

Knocking pieces off the playing field is a satisfying experience and some of the level design is quite clever. You’ll work your way through 60 levels across three zones of increasing difficulty. The game doesn’t care how many balls you use to knock the monsters off the playing field, so in that respect some of the levels are overly easy.

As you progress through levels you’ll encounter different types of monsters such as exploding bombs that have a penchant for knocking your homework out of bounds. The levels increase in difficulty as you move through the three world and eventually you’ll encounter levels with switches and important timing in order to succeed. The blocks have cute sound effects as you bounce your attacks off of them and it will take several attempts to get 3 stars on each level. You get 1 star per piece of homework liberated.

The music grows repetitive, but that doesn’t hamper the overall experience. The game is a nice addition to the App Store. It’s simple, fun and harmless. For $0.99, I highly recommend A Monster Ate My Homework to any physics-game fans out there. You can find out more about Geek Beach on their official website as well.

When Chris Park was on Episode 19 of our Podcast, he mentioned a few details about what Arcen Games new title was going to be. But it isn’t until today that we actually get to see an early build of the game in progress (two weeks of implementation, six months of design).

A Valley Without Wind is a complete departure from the AI War series and the puzzle title Tidalis, but with all it has going for it in the ambition and features department it sounds like a worthy addition to the Arcen Games catalog.

Simply described by its creators, A Valley Without Wind is an adventure game “focusing on exploration in a post-ice-age world.” Each world is procedurally generated, meaning that upon each restart the entire landscape and layout will be different. But the intriguing element that the developers describe is that the game is “designed such that you’ll never have an incentive to create more than one world — ever.  Once you start your first world, that’s hopefully also your last, for as long as you play the game.  As new features and content are added, you can simply explore further afield to find them.”

In addition, death is a permanent part of the game. If your character dies, he doesn’t come back. But for the player that just means that you’ll assume to role of another survivor in the wasteland and have access to whatever items the recently deceased had collected along the way. In addition, the game is also built so that characters the dead player had encountered will eventually catch word of their death and reflect and react to it.

Arcen Games anticipates a March public alpha and and at that time players can also preorder and get a demo of the title. You can read more about this title on Arcen’s official site.

Here’s the pre-alpha trailer:

Just a week and a half after launching to the world, 8-Bit Funding has succeeded in fully meeting the goal of its first game. Expedition: The New World is the first title to meet its goal. Initially set with a 56 day window, the title hit its $700 mark in just 10.

The game is a rogue-like exploration title that follows “a Spanish explorer from the end of the XVth Century” as you “found colonies in the name of the crown” in the New World. You can read more about the game on its official page.

Another success story is Cardinal Quest which has raised around $2,936 thus far. You can check out its details at its official page on 8-Bit Funding.

Here’s a trailer showcasing Expedition: The New World:

This is all great news for the new funding site and hopefully a sign of things to come to get indie games funded.

Following up DePaul University’s 2010 entry in the IGF Student Showcase Devil’s Tuning Fork, a team of development students from the school have once again cracked into the lineup of the 2011 Festival. With Octodad, students created a 3D game with unique controls. The tale follows an octopus who is living the secret life of a suburban father, much to the behest of a local sushi chef. You’re tasked with controlling the dad’s eight arms, both with awkward walking and flailing arms in order to continue your ruse in front of your wife and kids. I got a chance to (virtually) discuss the game with the development team and got some great answers full of insight into this unique title.

DIYgamer: Can you introduce yourselves and your roles on Octodad?

Kevin Zuhn: I’m Kevin Zuhn, the project lead and head writer.

John Murphy: I’m John Murphy. I’m the producer.

Greg Mladucky: I’m Greg Mladucky, one of the designers.

Kyle Marks: I’m Kyle Marks, and I am a designer.

Jake Anderson: I’m Jake Anderson, lead designer.

Ben Canfield: My name’s Ben Canfield and I’m the visual design lead.

DIYgamer: Was teaming up part of a class at DePaul or were other factors involved in deciding to work together on Octodad?

John Murphy: A couple of DePaul professors interviewed about fifty students to pick out a team of twenty to create a game to win the IGF Student Showcase. It was an extracurricular project starting in June. When school started back up in September some of the team turned their work on Octodad into a sort of independent study while others continued with it as an extracurricular project. While we didn’t decide to work together, Patrick Curry and Scott Roberts, our advisers, did an incredible job of picking a team full of people with complementary personalities, so it pretty much felt like we we all had come together on our own.

DIYgamer: Can you talk about the early origins of the game and any other interesting premises you ended up not pursuing?

Kyle Marks: So one of the ideas we had during conception came from Seth, our Sound Lead, who pitched a game based on the quantum physics thought experiment of Schrodinger’s cat, in which a cat in a box may be alive or dead based on an earlier random event. From this we created a pitch about a game where the player takes the role of a cat that is represented by four cats, all of which are controlled simultaneously. We had envisioned the screen divided into four quadrants representing different possible realities. If an “eye” in the level spotted a cat, all of the realities would collapse into one. Ultimately we passed on this idea because we had trouble prototyping enough interesting gameplay without adding extra mechanics, and we found several games that were too similar to our design.

Greg Mladucky: Another of the last few ideas we looked into before we settled on Octodad was a side scrolling platformer that gives players the ability to create, move and destroy black holes. The black holes were used to bend, change and distort the level around the player in order to solve puzzles, move objects, and “fling” their character to places they couldn’t normally reach. The prototype turned out fairly well but was not quite unique enough. The Octodad prototype got our team excited and seemed like the unique game we were looking for. With its unprecedented and interesting gameplay, as well as its overall premise, we knew it would be hard for people to miss.

John Murphy: We spent a few weeks pitching ideas and got to a point where we almost decided to go with one of the two ideas that Greg and Kyle mentioned. We did one more round brainstorming in small groups to either flesh out earlier pitches or to come up with something totally new. Nick Esparza (lead artist), Seth Parker (sound designer and composer) and I were becoming frustrated with our ability to make the quantum superposition idea into actual gameplay, so I suggested the dumbest idea I could think of – the idea of a person driving a person with horribly complicated controls. Then Nick goes ‘What if it were an OCTOPUS driving a person? We pulled up a You Tube video of ‘Jurassic Park: Trespasser,’ which we thought was unintentionally hilarious but also compelling. So we brought this ridiculous idea of an octopus driving a person back to the team, and it eventually morphed into the player controlling an octopus with a human family.

DIYgamer: How did you decide on the control scheme? The coordination involved reminds me a little of the flash game Qwop.

Jake Anderson: The initial pitch for the emphasized the slapstick comedy of an Octopus pretending to be human. One of my favorite memories from our concept stage was John flailing his arms around to demonstrate how he visualized the game coming together. To achieve this in game, we recognized that we would probably need a combination of physics and direct manipulation of the tentacles. The mouse was the most organic input for the PC, so we focused on using that for input rather than the more robot-like keyboard.

Strangely, most of the team hadn’t played or seen QWOP until after we released the game and started seeing comparisons in comments. Our earliest demos had a falling system which would cause you to fall down if your legs were too far apart, or if you became “unbalanced,” which was even more similar. During development we looked at other similar games like Envirobear 2000 and Jurrasic Park: Trespasser for inspiration for our controls.

DIYgamer: What early ideas didn’t make it into the final iteration of the game?

Kevin Zuhn: I could write essays on the number of ideas we had to leave out of Octodad, but here are a few of them. We had some funny-sounding scenarios in mind, such as Octodad knocking over display products and slipping on banana peels at a grocery store, filling toner cartridges with his octopus ink at the office, or having a final showdown with the Chef in a construction yard. There were two characters who were cut from the game fairly late in the process, John and Jane, who were Octodad’s normal next-door neighbors. Some of the members of the team often pushed to add a rival character named Squidfather as well…

DIYgamer: What was the most difficult aspect to get a handle on in early builds of the game?

Jake Anderson: At first, I think our idea of what would qualify as a fun challenge was too narrow. On one of the early challenges we created the entire house with pretty much a hide and seek game with small environmental obstacles that the player would have to avoid. That playtest was pretty hard to watch, but we were able to quickly identify the problems in the level and look at future challenges from a different perspective. After that we emphasized the movement over the objective in the design of the game’s challenges, which worked pretty well.

DIYgamer: For each of you, what’s your favorite moment in the game?

John Murphy: Beating that little jerk Tommy at soccer.
Kevin Zuhn: I love the end, when you build the mannequin and then face the dreaded ladder! I feel like it has the most tense and rewarding moments in the game.

Greg Mladucky: That would have to be the cut scenes. The art team did a great job getting those together and it really made a difference to me working on a level to see a new cut scene pop up for the first time. They really brought all of our gameplay, ideas and spaces together, making all of our work seem that much more cohesive and polished.

Kyle Marks: My favorite moment in the game is when Octodad puts his game face on and gets to beat Tommy at his own games.

Jake Anderson: I’ve always enjoying using the arms to throw the dinner suit, banana, and doll onto the mannequin from across the room. Its not an implicit challenge, but its fun just to mess around in the levels to see where potential challenges may be found. That, and making Octodad dance around.

Ben Canfield: I really love in the kids’ room when you’re putzin’ around on the lower level not really sure what to do next – admiring the beautiful vista through the tall windows – when you turn around and there’s 300 spiders coming to destroy your child. It gets me every time!

DIYgamer: What’s the first thing you want to hear people say after playing Octodad for the first time?

Kevin Zuhn: Something along the lines of “Ha ha, what was THAT!?” I want people to be just as bewildered and delighted upon finishing as they were when they first watched the trailer.

Ben Canfield: Even though I’m the Visual Design Lead, and I really do enjoy when people comment on the visuals, I love hearing people laugh. If someone is genuinely having fun playing the game it makes it all worth it.

DIYgamer: With its over / not-over ending, are there more plans for Octodad?

Kevin Zuhn: Absolutely! While we did our best to make Octodad give the player some closure, we’re working on the real end to the story right now, and we hope to have it ready by GDC. Of course, that’s only an end to the story of Octodad’s tenth anniversary. After that, we have plans to delve into all manner of adventures from Octodad’s crazy life!

DIYgamer: What’s next for everyone?

Kevin Zuhn: Seeing as I’ve graduated, I’m working on moving back to Chicago so that I can work on future games with this team, Octodad-related and otherwise.

Greg Mladucky: More Octodad! I’m continuing to work on new llevels and ridiculous gameplay ideas. We still have quite a bit still planned for the loveable and clumsy father.

Kyle Marks: On the side I’m currently working on a MOD for Unreal Tournament 3 which will be in alpha in about two weeks. I’d also like to finish another pet project called “Keyboard Sweeper”. Greg, and I have also been throwing around a few ideas about a joint project. And then our team has some more Octogoodness planned for GDC.

Jake Anderson: Well, we’re still not done with Octodad, there’s a lot of content we have discussed and joked about which could find its way into a game. Personally, I’m looking forward to continuing my senior game development project, which has just started in development.

Ben Canfield: More content for Octodad! I want to design more posters, more cereal boxes, and more items for the player to find when they’re exploring the levels. I love playing games and finding goofy jokes from the devs hidden in the nooks and crannies.

John Murphy: Some of the team wants to move on to work on AAA games, now that they’ve got a project under their belts that shows how talented they are. I’m hoping to use our success to work on a larger commercial sequel to the game and eventually make other innovative, insane games that appeal to a large audience.

DIYgamer: Congratulations on your selection in the IGF Student Showcase and good luck!

Everyone in virtual unison: Thanks!

Octodad is competing for a $2,500 prize as part of the Independent Games Festival 2011 Student Showcase. You can download and fumble around with this cephalopod-centric adventure for free from its official site.

Arcen Games has announced that The Light of the Spire, the latest expansion to AI War, is now available for $10 through arcengames.com. It’ll hit digital distributors soon.

This expansion brings 180 new ships, new AI, new music, new classes and new factions, to name just a few additions. The developers have dubbed it “the game’s biggest expansion ever.”

In addition, AI War has hit version 5.0. Arcen Games remains devoted to their space strategy title with this free update. Here’s the official description of what the update brings:

“Nearly every combat ship in the game has been rebalanced in an effort to integrate all the new units added over the past year. Golems have been completely revamped and the AI have received major intelligence upgrades such as more proactive retreats, a network of core shield generators, and the new “stalking” mechanic where it lies in wait until the player is at their most vulnerable. Players should also be pleased with significant adjustments to overall difficulty and the shortening of the early part of the game — allowing you to “get to the good part” faster. Not to mention tons of performance improvements, as well as more of a general accessibility regardless of what level of player you are.”

Here’s a trailer showcasing the new additions:

With Slam Bolt Scrappers nearing completion, Fire Hose Games now is tweaking and twisting the final elements to make their game the epic downloadable puzzle game it’s destined to be (it’s no secret: all of us at DIY who have played it like it).

But to put some polish on the whole experience and get the community involved, Fire Hose is now asking everyone out there in internet land to drop by their website and vote on a few different names for two in-game characters (pictured left).

You can vote at Fire Hose’s official website. Is it going to be Cumulo, Seraph or Zephyr for the angel? And what about Arc, Brazer, Joule or Torch for the masked man?

Need some more inspiration? Then check out these two character videos that may help make the decision easier (or harder depending on how decisive you are):

If you recall a post I put up in April of last year, Jakub Dvorský of Amanita Design (Machinarium) was working as a production designer on a feature length puppet film with Academy Award-winning director Jan Svěrák.

The film, Kooky (Kuky), has since been completed and they’ve even dubbed an English language version for all to see (soon). Hopefully we’ll be able to nab NTSC copies of the film soon, as you can already order PAL versions from the company’s store on ebay.

You can also find more information on the official website.

Check out the dubbed trailer now!

DrinkBox Studios has just announced that their alien-blob puzzler Tales from Space: About a Blob is hitting Playstation Plus on February 1 and PSN on February 8.

Geoff and I played the game back at PAX and it was shaping up to be a great addition to PSN’s downloadable marketplace. Think Katamari meets platforming. You eat things as a blob and grow bigger and bigger and bigger.

Here’s a new trailer showing off the game in action:

For more information check out the official website.

Here’s where I’m going to talk briefly about my secret addiction to flash physics games. I love them. I love flinging things at things and watching the gravity and motion sort out the rest. They’re fun in browser and they’re fun on mobile platforms.

But today I headed on over to the XBLIG Channel and the first new release that popped up was a little game called Onager!

It features a cartoon catapult on the front and I immediately knew that it fell into that little category of games that satisfies my mildly destructive urges. I quickly downloaded the trial and decided to see how this kind of game would operate with a controller.

My first impression is that it’s exceedingly difficult to operate the game with a controller.

You pull back on the left joystick to choose the power and angle of the shot and hit your action button to release the game. It takes a few second to fully power up your meter that will give you a hard horizontal shot, which makes it really tough on impatient folk who want the destruction to begin.

The physics are solidly executed and towers collapse well, but there’s an annoying hiccup in that every time you kill one of the purple monsters in the game the entire game pauses for just a second in order to load the explosion animation. You’re going to see a few of these in every level.

From the levels in the early game I played I would like to point out that their design is top notch. From improvised teeter-totters to tall collapsables, you’re going to have some fun breaking this world down. But as mentioned, from the first levels the controls take some getting used to.

Please note this brief writeup is only a first-glance preview of the trial version of the game. You can download the trial or full version (80 Microsoft Points) of Onager! from the Xbox Live Marketplace.

Last month UK indie developer Boss Baddie released its latest title out into the universe. After the atmospheric claustrophobia of Wake and the platforming of Lunnye Devitsy, the indie duo turns their talents on he space shooter genre with the challenging and exciting new game Big Sky.

Utilizing many aspects of the genre that have been seen before, Boss Baddie adds one big convention that is something of a game changer for their title. Your ship, equipped with weapons that can shoot in all directions can also change modes into a drill so that you can burrow your way through planets, shields and asteroids along the way. This flip of forms take away your ability to shoot, but heightens your ability to not splat into the sides of giant rock formations. The levels are dynamically generated and use a combination of eleven different enemies and two different bosses to keep things interesting and make each experience unique.

GAMEPLAY

Big Sky is a sidescrolling space shooter that utilizes just three controls. Using a gamepad, the left stick controlled the ship’s position, the right stick controlled the weapons, and the action button controlled the states between shooting and drilling. The title thrives on simplicity and by narrowing down the available functions, makes great use of highscores, multipliers and survival.

As you blast your way through each level, you’ll find yourself drilling through asteroids to survive, gaining multipliers as the number of ships that have died at your hand increases. An errant bullet may take you down, but the game is so smooth and simple that you’ll have no problem clicking start again and taking on the adventure one more time.

With just eleven enemy types and two big bosses, you’re going to see a lot of repeats but at the same time variation in their execution. One of the boss’ weak spot changes from appearance to appearance and another boss randomly decides what to shoot at you. And you’ll encounter multiple versions of the bosses all in a single run. On one of my better runs that cracked 100,000 points I saw one boss appear three different times.

As you tally up higher scores, you can then spend those points on upgrading twelve different traits that will help your ship in future runs. Each trait has a huge number of slots to fill, so in order to max out your ship you’re going to have to earn a lot of points. While I was definitely stronger at the end of all my play sessions, I must say the small increments of upgrades aren’t directly noticeable from game to game. It often felt as though absolutely nothing had changed between runs, though in hindsight it definitely felt as though about halfway through my upgrades I was more powerful than when I had first loaded up the game.

I ran through the game 30 or 40 times to learn its intricacies, tricks and to be honest, try and nab myself a slot on the scoreboard. After all was said and done, I’d say that my biggest complaint is the fact that as my ship exploded there were many many times where I could not pinpoint exactly how I had died. The screen gets so busy at times that it’s nearly impossible to see which projectile, bullet or enemy collided with me.

STYLE

The pulsing explosions rattling through the universe look great and hold that almost digital water color look that Boss Baddie’s earlier game Wake exemplified as well. And switching up environments from the blackness of space to the inside of different planets look spectacular from start to finish.

And the addition of nearby stars really shakes up the playing field. You’ll be blinded by the glowing orbs that take up more size than the playing field itself and fire desperately hoping that there doesn’t happen to be an asteroid waiting for you in front of that glowing giant. The enemies all hold a similar design, the starkest contrasts lying in their coloring.

SOUND

The pulsing techno soundtrack is a nice compliment to the on-screen action and overall the explosions and music combined nicely to provide an excellent experience through and through.

Though after running through the game dozens of times, mainly in succession, I must say that the single track grew slightly repetitive. Though because each run can last as short or long as your particular skills allow, I can understand the necessity of having a universal song throughout.

EVERYTHING ELSE

I’ve openly admitted in the past that I’m not the best candidate to survive long in the Shmup world. From laughable scores in You Will Die to not wanting to recall early experiences with Gradius, Big Sky surprisingly made me feel as though I was making progress with my shooting skills. By upgrading traits and trying over and over again, you definitely gain an understanding of the game world and start to gain a foothold in this new bullet-drill-hell universe.

The oddest thing that happened, on a single non-definitive run was the fact that the procedurally generated level decided to generate…well…nothing. My ship flew safely through space for around five minutes before I finally decided it was time to quit the run because nothing was happening. The game didn’t crash or freeze, it just stopped producing enemies for me to fight. While it was frustrating as I had accrued a decent score, I found this error to not be indicative of the full product.

The game is solid from start to your particular finish (it’s survival, therefore different for everyone). And for the miniscule price Boss Baddie is requesting for the game, I can’t help but recommend it to all Shmup fans or anyone interested in the genre.

You can buy Big Sky from GamersGate for £4.99 and visit Boss Baddie on their official website. Here’s the trailer for the game if you’d like to see further illustration of my points: