Spaces Of Play

One year ago Spirits for iPad was released on the App Store. To celebrate we’re throwing a little party with friends, cake and … an anniversary sale! It’s 99 cents on iPhone and iPad until November 11 ends. Bring your pals!

Our friends at McSweeney’s asked us to help with the development of the iPad-exclusive comic Touch Sensitive by cartoonist Chris Ware. It’s available today for 99 cents as an in-app purchase inside the latest version of the McSweeney’s app. The app itself is now free and comes with a one-month subscription to the Small Chair, a weekly selection from all branches of the McSweeney’s family.

Here’s what McSweeney’s says about it:

In the briefest of flirtations with non-corporeality in this, his first (and likely final) iPad-only comic strip, our otherwise normally corporeal cartoonist and former McSweeney’s guest-editor Chris Ware attempts to address how, in some relationships, the act of touching seems to shift over time from that of affection to aggression. Chock full of his trademark constipated drawings and strained, overwrought text, the reader will also be pleased not to afterwards find him- or herself laden with a pamphlet or book to discard the next time he or she changes apartments, homes or relationships; like the 99 cents that instantly vanishes from one’s bank account upon purchase, all 14 speedily-swipable digital “pages” with their tucked-away animations and mildly disorienting transitions may easily be wiped from one’s computer’s memory with precisely the opposite degree of difficulty which one simply cannot forget that night of screamed obscenities at one’s (now ex-) girl- or boyfriend. (Please note, however, that all 99 cents and the rights attendant thereto remain, in perpetuity, the sole property of McSweeney’s and its satellite concerns.)

Touch Sensitive is a comic and unlike the other e-books in this store. It was crafted specifically for the McSweeney’s app and is available only in iPad format.

Long time no see! Be in one of the following places to hang out with us for a strong cup of coffee, two bottles of beer or an ad-hoc TRI-TRI-TRIOBELISK tournament. (Disclaimer: Spirits will make the trip to Brazil without parental chaperonage.)

July 18 – August 21 2011
Spirits for iPad will be exhibited at FILE Festival that will take place at the SESI Art Gallery, São Paulo, Brazil.

August 5 – 7 2011
Andreas will attend No More Sweden which this year is happening in his adopted home in Stockholm, Sweden.

August 15 2011
Mattias and Marek will give a presentation at GDC Europe about how visual art influences perception of game mechanics, and how visual design and game design can interact.

September 16 – 18 2011
Mattias and Marek will speak about the importance of having a strong connection between visual art, code and game mechanics at the Resonate New Media Festival in Belgrade. (Backed up by Andreas as best boy electric.)

We’re escaping the cold weather over here in Berlin and Stockholm and take the trip to Las Vegas tomorrow. Why? Because Spirits got selected as a finalist at the Indie Game Challenge! As if that would not be exciting enough, there are some amazing games nominated such as last year’s IGF winner Monaco to name only one. Make sure to check out all finalists and if you want to make us happy, vote for Spirits!

In other news, we’ll also attend GDC this year where Spirits got an IGF honorable mention in the “Best Mobile Game” category. Being 37,5% Scandiavian, we’ll also make a small contribution to the KILL SCREEN VS SCANDINAVIA party during GDC. The party is run by the crazy folks from Copenhagen Game Collective, so you REALLY don’t want to miss it.

If you happen to be at DICE in Las Vegas or at GDC in San Francisco and would like to meet up with us, just write us a mail. We’re looking forward to see you there!

If you are in Berlin come and play Spirits at the A MAZE United exhibition, which takes place at Torstrasse 68 in cooperation with the Transmediale 11. We will be at the gallery on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. The exhibition is open 6 – 10pm from February 2nd – 5th.

From the A MAZE. website:

“By combining courage for experimentation and joy in gaming, A MAZE. celebrates the convergence of computer games and art. A MAZE. plans to unite people via interaction, light and movement. The four-day event A MAZE. United at systM gallery shows an intimate selection of works, which are part of the future playground. In cooperation with Born Digital, an electronic art collective from Utrecht, Ciant the International Centre for Art and New Technologies in Prague, and Ludic Interfaces, a future European Masters programme, it will bring you closer to the magic of video mapping, audio visualisation and playful interaction betwwen knowledge and passion. systM gallery, a well-know venue with a regular changing and interdisciplinary arts programme, will host the event.”

We’ve put Spirits, Spirits for iPad and Mr. Bounce on sale for a limited time period.

Spirits for iPad – $2.99 (regular $4.99)
Spirits – $0.99 (regular $2.99)
Mr. Bounce – $0.99 (regular $1.99)

Grab it while it lasts and tell your friends! 

Sometimes, other people are much better at explaining your work then yourself. Here’s some of our most favorite reviews of Spirits, written by players on the AppStore. (Partially shortened for brevity.)

“Beautiful visuals, a wonderful sound track, and really innovative puzzles combine to make one of the best puzzle apps available on the iTunes store. Fans of Osmos will find the same atmosphere, and the same type of sensibility that made that game so different.”

“Didn’t like the graphics nor the concept at first. But it grew on me. Amazing puzzles. Disorienting at first. Saving spirits? Spirits sacrificing themselves? The beauty of the design becomes apparent as you go on. Challenging. Then it becomes kind of fun saving the little spirits. Hard to put down, as with all great puzzle games. 5 stars.”

“A truly innovative game with clever puzzles and so many beautiful details.”

“Great design and super smooth play, it’s great to see the Spirits make it to the iPad! The game has real grace and gets you really hooked on its little intricate world. Highly recommended!”

“It’s one of those games where you want to hug your iPad. Very atmospheric, great gameplay, unique graphics!”

“This game is currently my favourite. It has a calm, hypnotic elegance that suggests it was a work of real love.”

“You have to think quickly, but this is no twitching reaction type experience and there’s a great feeling of satisfaction seeing your train of spirits make it home. And that’s the payoff: while many puzzles rely on the player suddenly “making a great shot”, here you need a great plan. Your reward is seeing it being carried out.”

“Tricky … yet very peaceful. Extremely well done.”

“A really intriguing game different from all the other games.”

We are happy to get so much positive feedback. Thanks to everyone who wrote a review!

In the last weeks we were busy with getting Spirits on the iPhone and making sure it’s optimized for the device. On Wednesday the 8th of December we will finally release Spirits for iPhone and iPod touch for $2.99. It will be a separate app with all 40 levels from the iPad version, including the same great music and graphics that will look even nicer if you have a Retina Display. Because the screen estate on the iPhone is smaller we have added the ability to zoom out more. This enables you to get an overview of the level you’re playing to plan your strategy, and then zoom in again to see more of the details.

We are extremely happy with how the iPhone version of Spirits came out and think it was well worth the extra work. We’re looking forward to get your impressions!

Everyone who loves the music in Spirits will be happy to hear that the soundtrack composed by Martin Straka is now available on Bandcamp. You’re free to pay whatever you want for it, with a minimum price of $3 for the complete album. As always, you can pick your favorite audio format (MP3, ACC, Ogg, what have you) when downloading the score.

Martin has been quite prolific in the last years creating the soundtrack for various indie games, from Understanding Games to Trauma, which was nominated for the IGF “Excellence in Audio” Award. He’s also up for new game projects, so make sure to get in touch with him if you need music and SFX for your next game.

Today is a special day for us: Our second game Spirits for iPad is available on the AppStore today! It’s yours for USD 4.99 (or 3,99 EUR) and if you ask us, it’s worth every cent. Some people think so as well:

“Striking art and innovative gameplay makes Spirits the belle of the Sense of Wonder Night ball.”
–The Escapist, Fintan Monaghan

“Where Spirits really innovates is in its look and feel. When the wind physics start to do their thing, the experience is pretty magical.”
–TUAW, Mike Schramm

“Spirits is an outstanding blend of puzzle and strategy.”
–DIYgamer, Arsen Nazaryan

“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.”
–CreativeApplications.net, Filip Visnjic

When we started to work on Spirits we somehow thought we can develop the game within one month. Looking at it today after one year of work, we’re more than happy that we gave the game the time it needed. We are immensely proud of the result.

A huge Thank You to our beta testers and everyone who supported us. It’s probably never been a better time to be an independent game developer and we are thankful to be part of such an inspiring community.

Also – Mom & Molly, Happy Birthday!

PS: You can find more information and screenshots for Spirits on our promotional page.

The recent weeks have been extremely hectic for us. In september Spirits was presented at the Sense of Wonder Night Event at the Tokyo Game Show, and last week we returned from IndieCade in LA where Spirits won the award for “Best Aesthetics”!

We had a great time in Tokyo and it was exciting to meet both local developers like the Nigoro team and some of the international crowd that was there, such as Evan Balster (infinite blank), Tyrone Rodriguez (Nicalis), Lea Schönfelder and Gerard Delmas (ulitsa-dimitrova), and Adam McLard (Origo Games).

We showed Spirits in the SOWN booth at the Tokyo Game Show – it was the first time the game was shown in public and we were quite nervous. But people enjoyed the game, and we received tons of feedback that help us improve the play experience even more!

At IndieCade we got the opportunity to meet with some great indie game developers such as The Copenhagen Game Collective (B.U.T.T.O.N), Eddy Boxerman & Andrew Nealen (Osmos), Terry Cavanagh (VVVVVV), Gaijin Games (BIT.TRIP.RUNNER), Steph Thirion (Faraway), Ted Martens, Guy Lima, Jr. (Continuity), Paolo Pedercini (Molleindustria), and many more!

Robin Hunicke from thatgamecompany invited us to play-test their work-in-progress game Journey. The stunning visuals and mystical gameplay made a deep impression on us and kept us talking for days afterwards.

The absolute high point of IndieCade was of course the awards ceremony were Spirits won the award for “Best Aesthetics”. We were extremely honored by this considering the tough competition from titles such as Limbo, BIT.TRIP.RUNNER, Sixteen Tons and A Slow Year.

Overall IndieCade was an incredible festival, and we will be sure to go back there next year!

[On the left, our awesome award. On the right Marek and Mattias in a photo by Mimi Haddon]

Spirits are shy beings. Make a first careful contact with them by saving these wallpapers on the iOS device of your choice. Be nice to them and more Spirits will follow soon.

iPad Lockscreen & Homescreen (1024×1024)

iPhone 4 Retina Lockscreen & Homescreen (640×960)

iPhone Lockscreen & Homescreen (320×480)

If you watched our Sense of Wonder Night or No More Sweden presentations, you already got a glimpse of Spirits in motion. For everyone else, here’s our first teaser video of the game, showing the iPad version. Enjoy!

Mattias and Marek will soon leave Berlin to present Spirits at the Sense of Wonder Night in Tokyo and then later at the IndieCade Festival in Culver City, California. This is the first time we are going to show Spirits to a larger audience, so we’re really excited about this. We feel extremely honored to be selected among so many other creative independent games. Our sound designer Martin even got nominated for two games at IndieCade, the second nomination being for Krystian Majewski’s adventure game Trauma. To round off the news we have made a nice promotional page for Spirits where you can see a handful of new screenshots of the game. Expect a teaser trailer to follow soon.

We already gave you some looks behind the scenes of the development process of Spirits. Today, we’d like to show you some screenshots from the actual game.

Mattias and me attended No More Sweden in Skövde last weekend. The game jam is in it’s third year and this time people where encouraged to give presentations about current projects or things they care about. I really liked the new format – it was great to see what everyone is working on. We gave two talks as well: Mattias shared the game design process of Spirits and I talked a bit about Promotion for Indies (see slide above). The whole game jam including the talks was also live-streamed and can still be watched online if you missed it. We also uploaded some pictures on Flickr.

Between working on the Spirits high-score backend and preparing a demo video for Sense Of Wonder Night, we also managed to make a simple prototypish music puzzle game for the jam, which Martin Jonasson is playing on the photo above. And it won the second place in the Most Interesting Use of Sound/Music category.

Thanks everyone for a great weekend and hope to see you next year!

My friend Andreas asked me in 2006 if I‘d like to compose the music for Understanding Games. At that time I had little experience in producing soundtracks for video games. Even so, the collaboration for this project worked really well and I ended up doing the sound design for two further projects; Mr. Bounce and The Black Forest.

In 2010 I got contacted by Mattias from Spaces Of Play. He asked me if I‘d like to produce the music and sound effects for a new Lemmings-like iPhone game he was working on. I said yes right away.

Our workflow with Spirits looked something like this: Mattias and Marek told me about the ideas they had in mind and gave me some examples to listen to. They also had some first graphical sketches about the game.

We agreed on doing some kind of contemporary instrumental classical score for the game. That sounds a bit diffuse, doesn‘t it? To be more precise, we wanted to create a poetical, melancholic, and slightly spooky atmosphere using orchestral sounds.

Still not clear enough? I know from my own experience that talking about music and atmosphere in music can often be very difficult and unsatisfying. There is a high risk for misunderstanding in talking about music and agreeing on a musical characteristics during the composition process can become tedious. Because of these problems it‘s very pleasant for a Sound Designer if the client trusts his work and judgment. With Spirits I was lucky to receive this kind of trust.

I started to sketch out melodies and harmony patterns on the piano and refined them in Steinberg Cubase 4. For the instrumentation I used the vast (over 33 GB) Komplete 5 library from Native Instruments which allowed me to fine-tune the characteristics of the instruments in a very intuitive way.

Marek provided me with videos of specific scenes in the game which made my work feel like composing for a silent movie: I‘m the conductor and together with the orchestra I‘m watching the scenes and spontaneously set them to music.

I decided to assign the “drummer” in my virtual orchestra for a major part of the sound effects. Every action in the game should be made audible by the sound of a percussion instrument that best matches the characteristic of the action. For example when building a bridge out of leaves, the player can hear the leaves rustling. This sound is created by a rattle shaking. I used a similar approach to sound design with musical instruments in Krystian Majewski‘s Trauma.

I regularly uploaded my music patterns to Basecamp so the other team members could review them and give feedback. Mattias would put the sounds into the game so we could play-test how well the music and sound effects fit. After several iterations we ended up with three nine-minute tracks each consisting of three varied parts which slowly build up.

For the mixing of the tracks I used the UAD-2 Solo Neve DSP card which features an excellent emulation of the Neve 88RS Channel Strip and Neve 33609/SE Compressor. For the mastering of the sounds I went to the studio of Andreas Schorpp in Karlsruhe where he works with high class analog equipment which allows for a much better result compared to home-recording equipment.

Martin Straka works as a sound designer since 2005 and lives in Karlsruhe, Germany. You can listen to his work at his website or follow him on Twitter. Many of his video game soundtracks are also available on Bandcamp.

Watch me paint an art asset for Spirits in this 8 min video. For the very first time you can also hear our game soundtrack in this video. It’s composed by Martin Straka.

»Spirits« is an action-strategy game where you help a tribe of leaf-shaped spirits to reach their final destination. To do this you manipulate the wind or build and destroy elements of the levels. This blog post will explain the decisions and thoughts that lead to the final art style of Spirits, and how this process also influenced parts of the game design.

At our first meeting Mattias showed me an early prototype he had designed. The general idea was a Lemmings-like game with ants walking on leaves and sticks. We both liked the natural setting but wanted to have a more fairy-tale like atmosphere and character. At that time I was still illustrating Andreas’ experimental game series The Black Forest which has a very abstract representation of a ghost as an avatar. It was just a rectangle with two dots as eyes. Initially I wanted to make this abstract character more lively, but it didn’t fit the concept of The Black Forest. Instead I took my ideas and applied them on Spirits.

Before I could start designing the character, we had to decide on the proportions of the characters and the game world. How big should the character be in terms of pixels? Due to technical limitations of the iPhone we initially decided to use a sprite sheet of 512 × 512 pixels. The bigger the character would be, the fewer frames I could use for the character animation. But if I made the character too small the game would loose atmosphere and important details.

I sketched some sizes and we decided on 48 × 48 pixels which looked and felt good. But I proceeded to paint all the character states in 72 × 72 pixels, since it was only slightly more work and gave us more flexibility in case we changed our mind. However, after a while this still felt limiting and we decided to allocate even more graphics memory to the main character.

Already early on, I tried to capture a spooky atmosphere in the sketches. I drew the overall light situation quite dark with a point light source from behind and a weak bounce light hitting the front. This means most of the area beneath the ground is an even dark color, which draws the players attention to the ground surface where the spirits walk.

Later on we added a strongly blurred and colorful background to make the atmosphere feel less dark and more mystical, but the overall style of Spirits is still based on these early sketches and this lightning setup.

After the style and the proportions were roughly set, I began to sketch some more characters. I had the idea that the characters could be sleepwalking. This would explain why they would always wander heedlessly in one direction. At first this seemed great, but after trying it out it felt too artificial and not the direction we wanted to keep working in.

Another idea was born out of my love for insects. There are these amazing insects which mimic leaves and sticks for camouflage. Since the spirits inhabit the forest, I thought about the possibility that they could have adopted to the forest environment and therefore look more like leaves. I sketched this idea down quickly (see the lower right corner).

We further developed this idea and ended up with a character with a big leaf as a head, without arms but having legs. Because of the general ghostlike look of the sketches the character seemed like a spirit, which rises from a fallen leaf. This is what it ultimately became for us.

The character design influenced an important aspect of the game design. We knew from the beginning that we wanted to have a more dynamic component in the game, which influenced the spirits in some way. We were thinking about fluids and gas at first, but the leaf-like spirit character inspired us to use wind instead.

As mentioned before we wanted the atmosphere to feel less dark, so color was added to the backgrounds. I wanted the light to appear as if the viewer looks into the sunset through a dense forest. The viewer wouldn’t see direct sunlight, only bounce light, illuminated fog and trees.

I made a quick sketch to figure out the color values. The bounce light in the foreground was reduced in strength to emphasize the effect of looking directly into the sunset.

Then I made the same thing again with abstract shapes and without distracting details.

The strong orange color in the background makes the overall atmosphere friendly but the dark blue (no it’s not black!) ground color keeps the spooky and dark touch to it. We liked this approach and so we decided to go with it.

Below you can see the final art style we are using for Spirits.

Andreas and Mattias on the way to the coffee break – Photo from Official GDC under Creative Commons

Mattias and me went to GDC last week. It was an intense week with a crazy amount of things going on every day. We met old and new friends. We got very competitive and physical with Copenhagen Game Collective’s B.U.T.T.O.N.. Steph Thirion showed his new game Faraway at the Gamma IV party. Grapefrukt’s awesome one-button RPG Glorg almost made it into the Gamma selection. Krystian Majewski’s game Trauma was nominated at the IGF in three categories, one of them for Excellence in Audio due to our very own sound wiz Martin. Cactus won the Nuovo Award with Tuning and gave a memorable speech around minute 31. Chris Hecker told you to finish your game and was worried about scandinavian kids drinking too much. Ryan from the CO-OP show demanded equal media coverage for all games in his excellent rant. Eskil Steenberg explained why procedural is not randomness. Jonathan Blow did a tech talk about the implementation of the rewind feature in Braid. Semi Secret software announced Flixel for iPhone in their Canabalt postmortem. Superbrother’s Sword & Sworcery looked amazing. Moo business cards with different motifs were the new thing.

Thanks everyone for a great week in San Francisco!

Spirits is our second game we are working on here at Spaces Of Play. While our first game Mr. Bounce was ported over from Flash, Spirits will be an original game design specifically developed for the iPhone and iPod touch.

We are a small team of four people working on the game. You can read more about our backgrounds on the About page. We will post updates of the game development progress here on the blog and on Twitter. We will also try to share some Behind-the-scenes knowledge that we think might be interesting to other developers.

If you happen to be in San Francisco at the GDC next week and would like to try out a preview build of our game, please drop us a mail and we’ll be happy to meet you there.

Welcome and Have Fun!