Student Project

Cantrip is a game from a student team at DADIU, the Danish National Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment. Implemented in Unity, its models are textured with hand-drawn, cross-hatched illustration, which gives it something of the feeling of Tim Burton animation -- appropriate, given its rather macabre story.

You are a small boy; along with your sister, you enter a scrapyard, looking for cans to collect and return for the deposit. Inside it, you find a trolley filled with cans, but before you can take them, a witch appears, calls you thieves, absconds with your sister, and curses you with magnetism. You have to explore and navigate through the scrapyard to rescue your sister.

Because you are magnetic, cans, and other metal objects in the scrapyard, fly toward and adhere to you. As the weight of metal adhering to you increases, your movement speed slows; and in some places, there are sharp metal objects that, if they fly do you, do damage. Weight and health are reported on the HUD.

Find Me a Good One is a student project from a duo at the Parsons School of Design; as with many student projects, it's quite short. It's a sort of puzzle platformer, though the platforming difficulty is minimal, with hand-drawn, surreal graphics depicting a sort of dreamworld.

The backstory is that your brother is asleep and beset by nightmares; you must enter the dream world to find friendly creatures and bring them back to repel the nightmares. If you don't do so, the nightmares apparently abscond with your brother. But you are not required to do this; you can simply explore the world, and there's no "game over" when your brother goes away.

It's pleasant, but more the germ of an idea than a full game.

Find Me a Good One is a 2012 Indiecade nominee.

Pixi has something of the feel of Space Invaders, but with very different and original UI. It is a simple action game in which you control a swarm of pink "pixis," directing them by clicking and dragging on the screen; as you do, arrows appear in the view, representing a vector field, which the pixis follow.

"Boxi" move from the screen top toward the bottom, following somewhat random paths, and attempt to steal your "stars;" if they succeed, you fail the level. As you might expect, additional enemies appear at higher levels, with different capabilities.

It is not a deep game, but charming in its way. Pixi was an IGF Student game nominee for 2012.

The Snowfield is a beautiful and horrifying game. You begin on what was clearly a battlefield not long ago, strewn with corpses, barbed wire, and broken fences, covered in snow. You are huddled and obviously freezing. There are some other soldiers in the area, mostly standing in a daze, shell-shocked; they speak to you (a handful of catch-phrases repeated), in German; evidently, this is the Eastern Front in World War II, though none of the corpses are wearing Russian uniforms. The setting is stark, and emotionally impactful.

Movement is via WASD; some items can be picked up, though only one at a time, and handed to others. In a ruined house nearby is a fire; if you spend too much time away from it, you freeze to death, the view becoming blurry about the edges and what seem like ice cracks appearing in your vision as warning. It's easy to lose your bearings in the snow and freeze to death; the controls are also a bit awkward and you cannot climb even a fairly shallow slope, so you sometimes find it hard to extricate yourself from your current position.

Spoilers below the fold.

One and One Story is a puzzle platformer with a clever approach. There are no enemies, and only one trap (the traditional spike pit), but the characters also die if they fall too far. And there are crates to push, which of course can be used in some circumstances to diminish the fall distance.

So far, so traditional; what's different about One and One Story is that there are two characters, one blue and one pink, and your objective on each level is to get the two of them together. Every few levels, the behavior of the two characters change. In some, you can switch from one to the other; in others, they move in concert; in others they move in opposite directions. The difficulty is that you must ensure that neither character dies, and of course when you're focussing on one, it's sometimes easy to fail to notice the danger in which you're putting the other.

Dust is a beautiful and odd little game, and is, unsurprisingly, a student showcase finalist for the 2012 IGF awards.

It's a sort of sidescroller, in that motion is left-to-right, along a linear path, but the gameplay is not what you'd expect from a typical sidescroller. You are a moth, hovering in the air, and move with WASD; you are trapped in an attic, and can see the moon glowing outside. As you move away from the window, the game teaches you that you can revive dead moths if you get close enough to them; they then follow you about, and can push objects. Sometimes, you need them to do so to move obstacles out of the way; other times, you need them to push an object into a cobweb to clear a path. Movable items are marked with numbers, indicating the number of revived moths you need to move them.

Tiny and Big is a 3D physics puzzler with comic-book like graphics (down to cross hatching on most objects) in which you play a fellow with a laser and a grappling hook, pursuing some gink who has stolen your grandfather's underpants. (Or in other words, the backstory is absurd and largely irrelevant, simply providing an arbitrary motivation.)

Most of the world (but not all) is destroyable and deformable; the puzzles mainly involve cutting up pieces of the environment and moving them around to gain access to the next area you may reach.
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Each level of Toys provides a set of colored blocks arranged in space. You move the mouse to control perspective, circling the arrangement of blocks, which remain at the center of a sphere. It's a perspective puzzle; before you enter the level, the game shows you how the blocks are supposed to appear, and your purpose is simply to find the right angle to view them in so that they appear in this arrangement. As a visual cue, the proper arrangement is displayed at center screen as pastels, while the block themselves are solid color, so that as you alter the view, you can see when some or all are properly arranged.

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In PaperPlane, you control a paper airplane, which emerges from a treehouse on the hill. About it is a fairly drab rural landscape, but sparkles show near certain items in the scene -- a swingset and a tire swing, for instance. When you fly through a sparkly area, two things happen: First, new content unlocks, making the landscape less drab and showing people and animals moving about and enjoying the countryside; and second, for a time your paper airplane gets "jets" that allow it to move faster and regain height.

Ultimate, you repopulate a prettier landscape with life; there's no score, but the implicit goal is to keep flying as long as possible, and unlock everything available.
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Like Minotaur in a China Shop, the gameplay of Octodad is built around the refractory nature of the controls. The game's conceit is that you have been transformed into an octopus, for some reason, but have managed, so far, to keep your new nature a secret from your family. You have to perform a number of tasks in each room of your suburban family dwelling, under the eyes of your wife and children, without causing them to suspect that you are no longer human.