We’re going to jump right into the second segment of my awesome talk with this amazing dude pictured above: Colin Northway. If you missed the first part of the Incredipede interview, go digest every yummy murmured morsel Colin said there first. Then come back and join in the fun!

In part two, I particularly LOVE how Colin tells it like it is when it comes to people needing to get “better” at being excited– not just at conferences, but everywhere. I also love hearing about Petri Purho’s “rule of ten” in effect, and the bittersweet nine prototypes that had to die so that Incredipede could be born.

DIY: To clarify from earlier, there will be no procreating with the life-like Quozzles in Incredipede?

Colin: Nope. Evolution is a common thread in other games I’ve tried to design but not in this one. That was one of the big “aha” moments in the game’s design actually. Originally you were playing as “life”. Every level you took evolution’s hand and made a new species to populate a specific niche. As you played you would populate a garden with more and more creatures eventually creating a functioning ecosystem.

That idea died when the nervous system went away. There’s really only so much you can fit into one game and the creature creating took center stage pretty quickly. It’s nice to have such rich material for a potential sequel though.

DIY: Do you find that some games don’t live up to their potential because they have a predetermined finish line? I imagine this could be the case with sequels especially?

Colin: I think a lot of games with budgets and many people working on them have set finish lines. This makes perfect sense when you’re gambling people’s mortgages on the game. I think that makes development easier but it’s not how you get new interesting games.

Unfortunately for new and interesting games Petri Purho’s [Crayon Physics Deluxe developer] “rule of ten” applies. That is, for every ten games you start only one will be good.

It took me two years to get through my ten and find Incredipede.

DIY: So the other 9 are dead dead or parts of them are in Incredipede?

Colin: I spent six months on a game called Clutter. I playtested it and got a lot of feedback from other devs. It even has some art (I can get you a screenshot if you want) In the end I just couldn’t make it go. And in Honduras I abandoned it. Parts of it have made it into Incredipede but there were a lot of good ideas that had to be left behind.

DIY: So, we saw your awesome talk at SOWN. Anything you want to add or share about your experience at SOWN?

Colin: SOWN was an amazing event. For me the best part of indie events like this is the people. There’s such a rich feeling of camaraderie whenever indies get together. Interesting games tend to be made by interesting people and just sitting down and having a beer with that group was inspiring.

I’ve always wished games were a thing you could preform live, like music, but I think SOWN is going to be as close to that as I ever get.

DIY: Any improvements to the SOWN event itself or pavilion you’d suggest?

Colin: I think if anything needs to change it’s us rather than them. The games that were shown at SOWN this year were _fantastic_. Some of them were truly mind-blowing. Yet a lot of the presenters didn’t seem that excited about them. For some reason the kind of people that write games aren’t the kind of people that will get up in front of a crowd
and jump up and down with excitement.

So while they have this amazing game happening behind them they talk about it in this very reserved, intellectual way. We need to get better at being excited. This isn’t just true for SOWN, this is true everywhere.

DIY: Other than trial and error, what skills can people employ to make the “right” creatures?

Colin: Mix and Match. I’ve been reading a lot about the human brain and human problem solving. I even set up some experiments at a collaborative indie workspace in San Francisco. It seems like a lot of problem solving comes down to metaphor. Realizing suddenly that your problem is just like the problem of getting ketchup out of a bottle, or the problem of finding the perfect birthday gift.

So my aim is to provide people with some simple building blocks. “This is one way to get from a to b”. “This is one way to reach a high place”. Then when they have to walk from a to b to reach a high place they aren’t totally in the dark, they have some ideas to build on. Of course if you want to be dropped into the deep end I want to let you do that too. After all, that is how I learned to play it.

DIY: In your blog you said you are “vehemently anti-cloning”?

Colin: Yes! It took me two years of hard work to find Incredipede. It took six months of hard work to make the game fun. It’s not like great games just appear in your head one day fully formed. It might seem that way to outsiders but that isn’t how it works and it’s not ok for some cloner to come along and steal all that hard work.

DIY: You mentioned Andy Moore helped spread the word of Fantastic Contraption. At what size do indies need an “Andy Moore” and what functions does he serve?

Colin: Andy Moore was Fantastic Contraption’s only employee. He did community management, which meant answering emails and moderating/interacting with the forum. He was and is really great at that job. But unfortunately for me he’s gone on to making his own games. He made the wildly popular Steambirds series and is now going back into prototyping mode to bring us some more great and original games.

So my loss of a community manager is a net gain to the world because we get these new cool games that he makes. It does leave me kind of caught out in the spotlight though. People paying attention to your game is very important. Too many great games don’t get the audience they deserve because the creator isn’t willing to engage with the public. But engaging with the public is a scary thing. Scary enough that I ran screaming from it when Fantastic Contraption was released.

This time around I’m determined to get myself out there and engage myself publicly. Just go easy on me internet, go easy!

[I hope our discussion was easy enough on you Colin! Of course, I look to my peers in the fields of journalism, development and the great gray area between to help spread the word of Incredipede! Thanks so much for the interview, and I look forward to sharing soon what the wife, Sarah, has cooking up at Northway Games!]

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.

Our look at the experimental, fascinating games of Sense of Wonder Night 2011 at the Tokyo Game Show continues with three more titles, none of which have been covered here so far. The three titles are KuraKuraMaze by ZacoZaco/Yoshimi Kurihara, Leedmees by Orihara Nagayo, and I’m Gonna Be God of the Forest by Isao.

In Kurakura Maze, which is now freely available on iPhone and iPad, players don’t have to look at the screen in order to understand the play space. As they physically move with an iDevice in hand, the game makes noise to signify when a player runs into a wall or increases the sound as players approach the goal.

Towards the end of the presentation, ZacoZaco shows off what would make for a racing, FPS, hide-in-seek, and battle fighter type of games in the Kurakura sense.

Next we have Leedmees a Lemmings looking full-body action puzzle game that uses Kinect. Whereas many Kinect games are momentary reaction types (think of all the sports minigames), Leedmees is using the whole body as a way to interact with the stage and the characters.

There’s a challenging team mode where the players’ limbs are interchanged on each other’s bodies, taking timing and cooperation to a whole new level. Leedmees is available for on XBLA for 800 MS Points.

In the final game today, we look at I’m Gonna Be the God of the Forest which seems mostly like real-time strategy game. This game world observes a food chain that players must help to flourish. When creatures are killed, they leave behind nutrients (in the form of a blue ball) that combine with others things to spawn different creatures. However, if there are plants around that blue ball, there will be no spawning.

Species of creatures will also die off if there are too many, so players have to keep an eye on that to. The creator notes Natural Selection and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, which both inspired him to create a game where sometimes it is necessary and beneficial to kill your own creatures.

The ultimate goal is to keep the animals respawning to kill the giant enemies of each level.

We’ve now looked at half of the wonder-full games. Be sure to catch up if you missed part 1 of SOWN 2011. The next installment is coming soon.

Tokyo Game Show hosted the fourth annual Sense of Wonder Night last week, allowing experimental games to have their spotlight. Ten titles were given ten minutes each to present what essentially makes them wonderful.

Today I wanted to look at two of the titles. Taplib and Solstice were very innovative titles that I believe at least one will make you shake your virtual piko-piko (the noise makers at the event).

Taplib from Yanagihara Takayuki is a route exploration block puzzle game with highlights on autonomous performance. Each block in the puzzle grid has a diagonal on it that connects to a larger route. The route is explored, or cleared away, as the user taps blocks.

All the other blocks that exist on the route, that is the diagonal path, of that tapped block also disappear.  However, if the tapped block is surrounded by a line, the block’s diagonal is rotated 90 degrees and the block is revived. The game’s autonomous performance comes from the user generating BGM and sound effects from how the game is played.

It’s insane to watch at full speed, and it’s still mind boggling at the 1/4 speed shown in the video. Have a look:

The second game today is Solstice from students at Digipen, some of whom are also working on Nitronic Rush (that crazy neon racing game I showed off last month). Solstice is an Kinect-controlled, music driven, interactive fable combining various creation myths.

It’s interesting to hear the creation themes behind the game, however, the audio from the game didn’t pick up very well to coincide with what the guys were saying. Apparently by waving one’s hands, in addition to controlling the flying aspect, piano sounds play in the game.

The music creation seems both incidental and crucial. It seems the former in accomplishing the game, as players seem to only need to collect fragmented pieces of the sun to win. However, it seems crucial to the overall ambiance, the kinetic and aural experience, that the team is trying to create.

Interested persons can hear Solstice better on the team’s official website. Solstice will eventually be out for PC, since it uses the Microsoft Kinect SDK that was released in June.

That’s it for today. Great presentations from Japan and America! There’s even more sense of wonder ahead, so “let’s pikopiko” again tomorrow!