The festival wants to foster bold and experimental indie games and honors one of the 10 nominees with 5000 EUR (6500 USD) and a terrific looking trophy. In the long run the Indie Connect wants to bring together game developers with all kinds of disciplines and art forms that are related to games like chiptune music, game art, academic research, machinima, writing, media art, game development … and so on.

The festival director Thorsten Wiedemann is known for an interdisciplinary approach to games. He is responsible for heaps of events and festivals that pushed games out of their usual context like the A MAZE. United, A MAZE. Interact, the Global Game Jam Berlin (that took place in a night club) or the provoking Games Culture Circle where fine guests like Eric Zimmerman and Ralph Baer spoke already.

Although the festival is in its first year, the program is already impressive. Keynote speaker Jonatan Söderström (Cactus) opens the conference on Thursday with a talk about the consequences of success for indie games. On Friday developer and researcher Douglas Wilson (best known for his smash hit Johann Sebastian Joust) will ‘sing’ an ode to Proteus, followed by the guys from Vlambeer (Super Crate Box) who will talk about ‘Sensible Nonsense’.

Two days of talks, workshops, a pretty award show and Berlin-style parties are included for an affordable 60 EUR fee (78 USD). You can get your tickets here. See you there!

It still looks gorgeous on whatever Mac you have. And it’s a delight to play. In fact, good game get! named it “one of the best contemporary puzzle games today”.

It’s yours for USD 4.99 or 3,99 EUR only.

Know someone who’d like Spirits? Please share the news.

The last months we have been working on porting Spirits to the Mac, redrawing all graphics to work in practically every display resolution up to an iMac 27″. During that time, we kept hearing the same rumours again and again that the next iPad will feature a Retina Display with double the resolution of the original iPad. So we decided to back-port our new HD graphics from the Mac to the new iPad.

Our goal is to get this Retina update to Spirits for iPad on the App Store as soon as possible. We think it’s going to look pretty neat.

With Spirits being out on the Mac App Store, we made three new desktop wallpapers for you. They are in the standard aspect ratios: 16:9, 16:10 and 4:3 up to a resolution of 2560 x 1440.
Oh and in case you missed it, we still have iPad and iPhone wallpapers in stock.

We have been Mac fans for years, so it’s no wonder we ported Spirits to the Mac first.

One of the things that’s great about the Mac is its ecosystem of native apps that focus on user experience and feature a tremendous attention to detail. Here’s a selection of our favorite apps that help us being productive and getting things done everyday.

Since we work from three different cities we practically live in Campfire. It’s a web-based group chat system that doesn’t get in your way and works great both in real time and asynchronously. Best enjoyed together with Propane, a native OS X client for Campfire.

Whenever we share a screenshot on Twitter or Campfire, we use CloudApp. Drop any file on its toolbar icon and press CMD+V – you just pasted the file url right where you want it. There is no step 3.

From YouTube to iTunes Connect, we literally have dozens of accounts. Wallet makes sure we keep our credentials encrypted in a central place, so we don’t have to use “god” for all our passwords. Syncs between Mac and universal iOS app via Dropbox.

We use Writer to write most of our copy, be it a press release, a submission to a festival, a blog post or our latest newsletter. It works perfectly and distraction-free on Mac and iPad and syncs effortlessly between the two via iCloud.

We go to Transmit to keep our website updated, edit files on the fly, login to S3 to access our database backups and manage file permissions in our WordPress install. Simply the most solid FTP tool out there.

For coding we fire up TextMate – the canonical text editor on Mac. Even though its successor TextMate 2 has been in development limbo forever, the “old” release still excels at coding practically any language with its flexible and elegant bundle system.

If you keep forgetting how you named your files or where you downloaded them to, Fresh is perfect for you. Press a keyboard shortcut and it will show you files that are new, changed, recently opened or stored in Fresh by you.

The first reviews for Spirits on the Mac are in!
Here’s a selection of the ones we liked the most:

“Spirits is a captivating title that is clearly one of the best contemporary puzzle games today, whether it’s on your iOS device or your Mac.”
–Kyle Wallace, goodgameget.com

“Perhaps this is the video game community’s chance to atone for all those lemmings they killed back in the 90s? 85/100”
–Charles Battersby, indiegamemag.com

“The artwork, user interaction and user interface have been scaled to the Mac perfectly. The attention to detail to artwork is immense, but the attention that has been put in to making this a truly great Mac app is even greater. 5/5”
–Jack Griffiths, enoda.co.uk

“Beautiful. Cathartic. Make sure to set an alarm before you play. Much like Osmos, a quick-to-learn game with stunning ambience that players will lose themselves in. 5/5”
–Jigsaw Forte, User review

“Great gameplay, gorgeous artwork, beautiful effects – overall a really immersive game. 5/5”
–hakimel, User review

Lately it has been pretty quiet on this blog. We have been busy getting Spirits ready for the Mac. Being Mac users for years, our aim was to simply do the best port we could. We completely redrew all graphics by hand, so that they adapt to any resolution up to 2560×1440 pixels. Believe us, it will look razor-sharp on whatever Mac you might have. (You won’t even have to go the settings screen.) Add multi-touch trackpad support and native fullscreen in Lion, details you’d normally find in Mac productivity apps. Heck, Spirits is probably the only game that lets you use Mission Control while running.

We think all Mac games should be like that – not second-class ports released years after the PC version.

We’ve also taking your feedback into account and added a fast-forward feature that you can use whenever you want. (We’re looking forward to your speedruns.) And, there is a new feature that let’s you share your level solutions on Twitter.

So, that’s Spirits on the Mac. It’s coming to the Mac App Store on February 15 at an introductory price of USD 7.99 (5.99 €) for the first two weeks. The regular price will be USD 9.99 (7.99 €).

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.

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.)