The recent weeks have been hectic for Spaces of Play. In september Spirits was presented at the Sense of Wonder Night Event at the Tokyo Game Show, and recently at the IndieCade in LA Spirits won the award for “Best Aesthetics”. In case you missed our post from few weeks back, Spirits is the new game from Spaces of Play, a game studio based in Berlin. With the Mr. Bounce behind them (we loved it), the team is set to release their new beautiful wonder within 2 weeks. The development kicked off around March this year, a number of months have passed and the team has been hard at work to get their new game out of the door. It’s very exciting as I have been closely following the development and have finally had a chance to play with the “almost” final version due for release in the next few weeks. So, what is Spirits?

Spirits is a Lemmings (wiki) inspired action-puzzle game for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, in which you manipulate wind and ground elements to guide the Spirits towards the goal. This is done with four different actions: Blow or block wind, dig tunnels and grow bridges of leaves. Besides the sound and music which are completely done with orchestral musical instruments, Spirits includes beautifully hand-drawn graphics which give the game a unique poetic feel. If you have seen Limbo, you will know exactly what this means. Foreground and background are played against one another, ie as you pan across your level they move in different speeds giving a sense of depth. Wind is represented using wonderfully light particles emitted both from the environment and spirits you assign this action to, all of this contributing to the beautiful environment to indulge and kill even most precious hours.

The game kicks off with simple few levels introducing you to different actions. Presented one at the time you go through each early levels learning one action after the other. This helps getting to know which action to use to achieve the goal. As you reach level 20 or so, you’ll find that having all the actions available to you just makes it harder to pick which action to use. You tap on a spirit to assign action. The spirit is paused while other spirits continue to do their thing. In some situations you’ll have to act quickly, assigning actions to multiple spirits one after the other. Failure to do it correctly will cost your some lives hoping that you have enough left to complete the level. There is a minimum number of spirits you have to get to the vortex (doors) and should you waste more spirits than you are allowed you’ll not be able to pass the level. The game continues nevertheless allowing you to practice and try new things knowing that next time you play you’ll know where to be more careful. Early levels require maybe 4-5 goes to get it right. Level 29, the one I am currently playing, I think I played over 10 times and still no clue how to complete. The game is getting increasingly more difficult past level 20. Where ways to get to the vortex may have been somewhat easy to resolve in the earlier levels, this is now way more tricky. Too much wind will plummet spirits into their deaths, wrong turn will point them in the wrong direction or hole dug in the wrong place will get your spirits stuck having to use addition spirits to get them out of the problem. There is plenty of variety between the levels to keep you wondering about how to complete it. I am yet to arrive to a level where I may use similar technique. Each one is unique and although I haven’t played them all, I find them all challenging enough and at times somewhat a relief when the solution is easy to find.

The “light” music, together with carefully illustrated environment and beautiful details give Spirits an elegant and light touch feel. Touching ghosts is like dipping you finger in warm milk, careful to each and every one. Spirits are no angry birds and although some of your gosts will die, you will feel sad and emotional wanting to save each and every one. There is so much attention to detail in this game that once you have finished it you will want to play it all over again – just for the looks. Considering there is also a score board, meaning each and every spirit counts towards your overall score (I am currently ranked 4 which I am sure this won’t last once the game is out) this should give you enough info to know how well you are doing. Also counting against your score are the plants you collected. In a lot of situations you’ll be able to complete the level without collecting all the plants so going back and going further will be something you want to do. I have been playing it for few days now, using every occasion I can regardless of whether it is 5 or 30 mins. Because the game is much about strategy as well correct play, every 5 minutes in the game is a step forward. Regardless of whether you are waiting for a bus or on a long journey, Spirits will definitely keep you entertained. If not completing the levels then trying out new strategies.

The game is schedules for submission tomorrow, meaning it will most probably be available in the AppStore within 2 weeks. Spirits will first appear on the iPad, followed by a release for the iPhone with support for iPhone 4 high res screen. We played with the iPhone version and although very similar to the iPad we expect to this be even more awesome on a retina display.

Made with Objective-C and C++.

Spaces of Play is a game studio based in Berlin. We are a group of independent game designers, visual artists and musicians that come together with the goal of creating great games. Our focus is on original ideas, gameplay and polish. We put our heart and soul into what we do, every pixel and sound bit has been hand-picked for your optimal experience. In short, we provide handcrafted independent games for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

For latest updates become a fan on Facebook, or follow on Twitter and of course team’s development blog.

spacesofplay.com/spirits/

Platform: iPad
Version: 1.0
Cost: $4.99
Developer: spacesofplay

Andreas Zecher of pixelate.de and our new guest writer has provided us with few details about the upcoming game Spirits he is working on together with Mattias Ljungström, the programmer and lead game designer who also did the iPhone version of Mr. Bounce. Marek Plichta is also with the team who did the hand-drawn pixel graphics for The Black Forest is responsible for the art (http://marek.monoid.net). Martin Straka (http://www.martinstraka.de) is doing the sound design who also did the music for Mr. Bounce and The Black Forest.

Andreas writes:
The game lends some basic gameplay mechanics from Lemmings-style games, but has a very different graphical style and atmosphere. Players can manipulate the wind in the game world and guide the spirits towards the exit of each level using four different actions: Blow wind, suck in wind, dig tunnels and build bridges.

Spirits will be released under the Spaces Of Play label and we will post updates about the development progress. To follow the development, see also http://www.spacesofplay.com and on Twitter under @spacesofplay.

In case you missed it, Andreas has done a fantastic post on CAN about Flixel, an open source game library for Flash. An in depth tutorial on how to create a defender style game with code examples and source download. If you are interested in creating games Flixel is a great start.

The first of four episodes of Pixelate’s Black Forest series of mini games is now available for download. Pixelate, the team behind Mr. Bounce are bringing a series of tiny, experimental games this month, one episode per week. We have had a little preview of all four and enjoyed them thoroughly. For now, you can enjoy the first of four followed by more in the next few weeks.

All episodes feature a little ghost as the main character, but have completely different game mechanics. The player takes on the ghost’s role who finds himself in unfamiliar, alien environments. There is no tutorial – only five small icons that indicate what keys and buttons the player can use to interact with the game world. Like sketches, every episode deliberately does not aim to be a “complete” game, but is rather an effort to create emotional experiences that are more personal and different from the ones traditional game design has to offer.

Have a play here and  you can follow Andrea Szecher for latest updates/releases on Twitter.

Created by Pixelate, the team behind Mr. Bounce, The Black Forest is a series of tiny, experimental games with the first season of four episodes to be released online this December. Episodes will be released one per week and all feature a little ghost as the main character adopting different game mechanics in each episode.

Pixelate have already explored this area by releasing ‘Understanding Games’: a series of four games explaining the basic concepts of video games which are all a must watch/play. This time around, Pixelate promise to create emotional experiences through a number of mini game experiments in the series which may even see releases in the AppStore.

Season One:
The player takes on the ghost’s role who finds himself in unfamiliar, alien environments. There is no tutorial – only five small icons that indicate what keys and buttons the player can use to interact with the game world. Like sketches, every episode deliberately does not aim to be a “complete” game, but is rather an effort to create emotional experiences that are more personal and different from the ones traditional game design has to offer.

You can find out more by visiting pixelate.de.

Pixelate are Andreas Zecher, Martin Straka and Marek Plichta.