peng ink

A hotbed of independent developers in the Arizona desert gathered for 72 hours of heated game development, spirits ablaze, their eyes burning with passion. The weather was just fine thank you.

Having migrated to the retail world, I’ve been somewhat lax with my indie work, passing up the TIGSource Demakes Competition for lack of determination. Surprisingly, there don’t seem to be that many people who attempt to straddle both the indie and big budget commercial line, with exception of Rod Humble of course. Somehow he alone has been able to occupy both ends of spectrum, leading the super casual Sims Series and finding time to make art games like the Marriage. My hero.

TIGJam showed up with perfect timing, reinvigorating the indie spirit and squeezing those brain oranges dry for their creative juices. I went with the goal of working on a Gamma3D entry, spending a good amount of time bouncing ideas back and forth with Steve Swink (buy his book!) and others before finally giving up and starting work on Space Harriet in the Third Dimension. In the end, the general consensus seemed to be that anaglyphs, though quite interesting from an aesthetic point of view, tend to lend themselves to gimmicky mechanics with most concepts working just fine without them.

Space Harriet attempts to shoehorn in 3D gameplay by having enemies of different sizes but similar look spawn at distances where the perspective renders them identical (i.e. a big enemy from far away and a small enemy up close). The player then deals with this “depth deception” by using the interocular distance to be the true judge of enemy proximity, and responding with a carefully timed variable range attack. Does it work at all? You be the judge.

DOWNLOAD (Art by Kyle Pulver, Music by Adam Lederer)

Unsurprisingly, Space Harriet wasn’t accepted into the show, but even after playing the final entries, I’ve still yet to be convinced of the viability of the anaglyphic medium. On the other hand, in theory these sort of games have the potential to bring players to a new level of immersion, so maybe that would have been a better focus rather than incorporation into the gameplay mechanics?

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 27th, 2008 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Design, Indie, Releases. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.