Blueberry Garden won the Independent Games Festival Grand Prize 2009 at GDC and I had the pleasure of giving away the award to Erik. I was literally jumping up and down of joy when I heard (before the show) that Blueberry Garden had won.

It’s a bit hard to describe Blueberry Garden if you haven’t played it. The experience of soaring through the skies, exploring the beautiful outdoor world all accompanied by the beautiful piano music by Daduk is just (for the lack of an better word) awesome. It’s an exploration platformer game, little in the vein of Knytt, but not really. The best description that I’ve read was by Michael Rose, when he wrote that “Blueberry Garden is like the Moomins as a computer game (minus the dodgey theme tune)”. Btw. Go and read the rest of Michael’s review.

Anyhow big Congrats to Erik for finally releasing Blueberry Garden. And in case you missed here’s the link to the Steam page.

P.S. In case you enjoy Blueberry Garden, spread the word, blog about it, YouTwitFace about it. Let people know, since indie’s don’t really have the luxury of a gigantic marketing budget so the only way to spread the news is word of mouth.

In other news I’ll try to keep this blog updated and start doing monthly games again. I’ve actually done few games but I haven’t released them yet for various reasons. The biggest reason being that I don’t think they are that great games

Jonathan Basseri created a visualizer for 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness. It’s pretty awesome and interesting to watch. There’s all kinds of drama involved with the game.

http://acmserver.cs.ucr.edu/~jbasseri/4_33.htm

This is a game that I created at Nordic Game Jam (during the last day in couple of hours). It’s an experimental art game, that is so going to win the 2010’s IGF award for innovation (Edmund! You better watch out).

The theme of the Nordic Game Jam was

As long as we have each other, we’ll never run out of problems

Additional restrictions included:

• Game session has to last 5 minutes
• Choose one: Developing, Trapped, Falsified
• The game has to language independent

The game won the Innovation award at the Nordic Game Jam!

4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness

Download

4mins33secs.zip (0.4 Mb) (release 1)

Instructions

This section contains SPOILERS (explains what the game is about).

You’ll win the game if you’re the only one playing the game at the moment in the world. The game checks over the internet if there are other people playing it at the moment and it’ll kill the game if someone else is playing it. You have to play the game for 4 minutes and 33 seconds.

It’s an exploration to what actually defines a game. You can win or fail in the game, but there is no user input or interactivity of any kind. I was tempted to leave the graphics out completely, but I figured that the white progress bar is abstract enough.

Credits

Game Design, Code & Gfx: Petri Purho
Inspiration and Music: John Cage
Design: Heather Kelley
Design: Jonatan Söderström

In other news I decided to take the weekend off and travel to Copenhagen for the Nordic Game Jam. I’ll try to post some travel pics