A Shot of Orange Juice (the Blog)

So part of my revival into gaming is the idea of indie development. I’d sorta just barely consider myself an indie developer, but not so much as I doubt I’ll have an outpouring of recognition once I decide GSkirm should try to get some attention. But I’m talking about the guys that are out there and actually get published. Whether it be on small digital distribution, or a handful of guys in France distributing on the DS.

The two games I want to talk about right now are Braid and Soul Bubbles. Firstly is Braid, which has already gotten a fair amount of fanfare. Now he deserves everything he’s gotten, I’m almost done with getting all the puzzle pieces, I only need to get two more. And I’m happy with the amount of time I’ve been able to get out of it. Especially since I think I can get my girlfriend into platformers because of it. She loves puzzle games. And this bridges the gap nicely. I convinced her to play after I had gotten to the third stage, and after an hour or two of playing I had to kick her off cause I didn’t want to see any spoilers. She’s still a bit behind me since I was able to figure out a few things that I hadn’t thought of while she played, but I’m still quite excited about it.

The next is Soul Bubbles. You probably haven’t heard about this since it’s not your normal game. Basically you have to move these spirits from bubbles through a move to a safe zone. You collect coins (or rings or whatever this game calls it) along the way, and there are also three secrets every level. If you want to get crazy go looking for all the secrets. My girlfriend spent all of Saturday glued to her DS just playing Soul Bubbles, and she wants to talk to me about it but I said I wasn’t going to talk about it until I caught up with her. I should probably take her cart away so she doesn’t go beating it while I’m coding. Oh well, but kudos to both of these games, I hope that a few guys in a garage can more easily publish, and with XNA it seems like this will be the case. Well, I’m still working on my side project but it’s coming along smoothly and really gotten me into the habit of coding for an hour at night.

Hope everyone is enjoying the Olympics. It’s amazing seeing all countries get together and put their histories aside for some crazy activities. I’m glad the Americans have gotten a few good breaks, especially in the pool, as it makes for exciting evenings.

Posted on August 18th, 2008 by tehdiplomat
Filed under: games, indie, sports, video-games