TIGSource has a great write-up about the recent presentation by Jonatan “Cactus” Söderström’s at this year’s Independent Games Summit.

Cactus is a swedish game developer, based in gothenburg, who specializes in developing experimental games. He has reached wide acclaim through his works and is regularly featured on websites, blogs, as well as game and art festivals all over the world. Presentation has been created in GameMaker software and being the game itself is fantastic. It outlines basic principles of game design and includes some great tips. Whether you are a beginner or have been designing games for a while that have not seen much success, this presentation might explain a lot. Whilst some successful game developers address most of the things mentioned here, a lot of them miss many too.

I’ve taken a few screens of the presentation but I strongly recommend you download and have a play. If you are mac only, this might be one of the reasons to install Parallels or BootCamp.

You can download the windows executable (.zip here) before checking out his fantastic development history. To get more insight into the lecture, check out the already mentioned TIGSource’s write-up.

From the grain-filtered 8mm stylings of his shooters to the terrifying Lynch-ian void of his Mondo series to the candy striped sunburst pixels of his upcoming games, he possesses one of the most singular and distinct visions in the scene, and manages to keep that consistent despite the jackrabbit pace with which he takes on new projects. Brandon Boyer on offworld.com