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Indie games developer Tale of Tales has released an iPhone version of its interactive art piece The Graveyard ($1.99).

The Graveyard is a very short cinematic experience in which players guide an old woman through a graveyard. Sit on a bench, and a song plays. Once the song stops, you may exit the graveyard, and the game ends.

“It’s more like an explorable painting than an actual game,” the developer explains. However, the addition of interactivity helps to establish mood and leave a lasting impression on the player. In my opinion, anyway.

The game can be downloaded and played for free, in near-entirety, with The Graveyard Lite. The paid version adds the possibility of the old woman dying at the end of the game.

Tags: art, Free Games, indie, simulation, tale of tales, the graveyard

GDC 2010 organizers have revealed an initial set of Independent Games Summit talks for the March event, including notable lectures by Ron Carmel (World Of Goo) and Randy Smith (Spider).

The summit, now in its fourth year and taking place on March 9th-10th during Game Developers Conference 2010 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, features lectures, postmortems and roundtables from some of the most notable independent game creators — including many former and current Independent Games Festival finalists and winners.

Overall, the 2010 Independent Games Summit “seeks to highlight the brightest and the best of indie development, with discussions ranging from game design philosophy, distribution, business, marketing, and much more.”

Advisors for the Summit include Independent Games Festival chairman Simon Carless and independent developers such as Flashbang Studios founder Matthew Wegner (Off-Road-Velociraptor Safari), as well as colleague Steve Swink (Shadow Physics).

With a final set of lectures to be announced soon, a number of major talks have been revealed on the Summit homepage. Highlights include the following:

- Indies and Publishers: Fixing a System That Never Worked
In IGS 2010′s kickoff talk, 2D Boy co-founder Ron Carmel (World Of Goo) will discuss “the problems with the current model (a tenant farming ecosystem built upon a weak security model), contrast how Valve and Microsoft deal with developers, and propose that creating more transparency in the game industry will give rise to a healthy model for developers and publishers/distributors to work together.”

- Increasing Our Reach: Designing To Grab and Retain Players
During his keynote talk, Looking Glass Studios veteran and Steven Spielberg collaborator Randy Smith (Thief) will talkk about the design concepts behind ‘immediacy with depth’, as applied to his recent iPhone hit Spider: The Secret Of Bryce Manor. He notes: “The indie games movement should be the wellspring of daring and innovative ideas, but we need a sizable and devoted audience to help us realize that potential. How do we reach more players? Is there something we’re doing wrong?”, and vows to look at design solutions.

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Tags: game developers conference, gdc 2010, indie, spider

The original Rope’n Fly was a genuine App Store phenomenon, reaching the #2 sales spot in both the U.S. and the UK shortly after its launch in July, and remaining a top seller worldwide for weeks afterward.

Developer Robert Szeleney’s follow-up, Rope’n Fly 2 ($0.99), adds a number of new features and improvements suggested by Rope’n Fly players. The classic gameplay remains the same — players must tap the screen to attach a rope to a nearby skyscraper, then tap again to release and fly forward — but the game now features ragdoll physics, a 3D scrolling background, and a more realistic physics engine.

A selection of new challenges are also included, for a total of 12 gameplay modes. Rope’n Fly 2 additionally includes OpenFeint integration, an achievement system with 33 unlockable achievements, and global online leaderboards.

Tags: Action, hib, indie, rope'n fly 2

Another one of Kenta Cho’s marvelous independently developed shooters has made its way to the iPhone. Tumiki Fighters ($0.99) joins Cho’s previous games rRootage and Noiz2sa in the iTunes App Store.

Tumiki Fighters is an imaginitive horizontally scrolling shooter in which defeated enemies can be attached to your ship to increase your firepower. A few minutes into the game, you’ll find your once-tiny ship transformed into a screen-filling Death Katamari. It’s awesome.

While attaching dozens of downed enemies to your craft gives you enough firepower to take out pretty much anything that gets in your way, it also makes you a bigger target. Players can retract all attached ships at any point during gameplay, however, adding a degree of strategy.

Tumiki Fighters is one of Cho’s most popular shooters — it saw an upgraded Wii port last year (under the title Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destroy), and remains a fun and worthwhile play for any fan of shoot’em-ups. The original (and free!) PC version is available at Cho’s website, if you’d like to give it a shot before dropping 99 cents on the iPhone version.

Tags: dreamwave, indie, kenta cho, shooter, tumiki fighters

It doesn’t take much to convince me to drop 99 cents on an App Store app. I was sold on Enviro-Bear 2010 ($0.99) even before I finished reading Brandon Boyer’s description at Offworld.

Enviro-Bear 2010 puts players in the role of a bear driving a car. Don’t bother with the Clerks jokes — the author’s already got them covered. As a bear, your mission is to eat as much food as possible before your scheduled winter hibernation.

Since you’re a lazy bear, though, you’ve waited until the last minute to gorge yourself. Winter arrives in five minutes. You have no choice but to commandeer the nearest car and race through the forest, eating any fish and berries that may fall into your vehicle, and driving yourself to a cave before you’re buried in snow.

It’s Enviro-Bear’s execution that really sells it. Bears aren’t the best drivers, see, and you only have one free paw to alternate between steering, accelerating, eating, and tossing the occasional crazed badger through your sunroof.

It’s brilliant, basically. If you’re not completely sold on Enviro-Bear 2010 yet, the gameplay video below (taken from the original PC version) should finish the job.

Tags: Action, bear is driving, enviro-bear 2010, indie, justin smith, port

[In this interview originally posted at FingerGaming sister site Gamasutra, Game Developer editor in chief Brandon Sheffield speaks with Secret Exit's Jani Kahrama and Jetro Lauha about the iPhone, the Finnish games industry, and the challenges indies face in developing for mobile platforms.]

Secret Exit is a Finnish indie game developer known for the iPhone game Zen Bound, which won the Best iPhone Game and Audio Achievement awards at this year’s IGF Mobile Game Awards.

The company was formed out of the ashes of Fathammer games, a 3D-focused mobile game developer and engine provider, formed by Samuli Syvahuoko, who was formerly a Remedy (Max Payne) co-founder and subsequently set up Recoil Games (Earth No More).

Here, we spoke with Secret Exit head of studio Jani Kahrama, as well as co-founder and technical lead Jetro Lauha, both of whom worked together at Fathammer.

Lauha may be familiar to some as the creator of the freeware Dismount and Truck Dismount games from the early 2000s (and in fact, the company has a working version of Dismount on the iPhone, but hasn’t decided what to do with it yet).

In recent months the company has doubled in size – from two to four – and has had breakaway success with Zen Bound that affords the company independence and the ability to work on more original IP.

Here, we discussed the Finnish game industry as it affects indies, the iPhone as a platform, and the rise and troubles of Fathammer, a Finnish game publisher and tech firm that ended up being an allegory for the high-end mobile game industry at large.

How is the Finnish development environment as an independent studio?

Jani Kahrama: For me, I think the good part about being in Finland is that you really find talent in people here. The engineers are top notch, but it’s not just finding good programmers. There is plenty of talent here, engineers who are also very creative game designers, people who really can have a vision about a game and implement it. And having these kind of people in the companies is a tremendous experience.

On the other side… Not even on the other side. It’s a global business to be indie, so from that end, you can be that anywhere. I guess it could be nice to be somewhere warmer and cheaper, but aside from that, Finland is fine.

Are you equally able to get stuff like TEKES funding (government funding of technology R&D, including for games) compared to larger companies?

JK: Yeah.

JL: Yeah, we are able to get TEKES funding, but there’s a certain limit with the small companies or big companies they are supporting. We are kind of just on the limit. If we were just a little bit smaller, it would probably be much harder to actually get support funding because they don’t support the very small companies.

Is that why it was important to double your company in size and get those two other people?

JK: Well, it was a project that facilitated recruiting people. We were just the two of us, and when we pitched the project that we got the funding for, the whole plan was to bring our headcount up by one or two people and get things rolling.

TEKES… The function of TEKES is to facilitate and help the growth of Finnish technology companies, so it wouldn’t make sense for them to just throw money at single-person garage studios who would do nothing but make a single product and kind of try to get rich off that.

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Tags: dismount, indie, mobile, secret exit, zen bound

The independent developers behind six popular iPhone word games have launched Wonderful Word Games Week, a joint marketing campaign to collectively promote their App Store titles. The event is a true cooperative effort, with each developer contributing things like graphic design, website creation, and bandwidth toward the campaign.

Wonderful Word Game Week also drops the prices of many of the best iPhone word games to $0.99:

• Imangi and Imangi Word Squares (Imangi Studios) – Review
• Moxie (Blue Ox)
• Stitch’em Words: Ultimate Edition (Syed Jafri)
• Textropolis (Nimblebit) – Review
• Wordology (Cerebral Gardens)
• Wurdle (Semi Secret Software) – Review

The promotion will run from May 22nd until May 31st, after which all discounted titles will return to their original prices. Also worth noting is that Tag Games’ Car Jack Streets will be $0.99 for the duration of Memorial Day weekend. Good deals all around!

Tags: indie, price drop, Puzzle, textropolis, word game, wordology, wurdle

MSNBC posted up an interesting article regarding the state of independent iPhone development. Ruben & Lullaby and Zen Bound are profiled, and their creators offer insight into current App Store conditions and issues of visibility.

The article reports that App Store attention is a major issue for many developers. “It’s our greatest concern,” says Jani Kahrama of Zen Bound developers Secret Exit.  “Our previously released iPhone game, SPiN, has a 4.5 out of 5 iTunes user review rating, it was selected by IGN Wireless as the Best Puzzle Game of 2008 … and the sales to date since October have covered less than half of the total development costs. So there’s no denying this is a difficult market.”

Ngmoco’s Alan Yu agrees. “Great games will always have an audience,” he says. “Having said that, there are 15,000 applications and every day that goes by it’s harder and harder to get into that top 50 or top 100.”

It’s a great read that gives perspective on the challenges that iPhone developers face as more and more content flows into the App Store. Our resident game reviewer Mathew Kumar gets in a few choice quotes, too. Check it out!

Tags: indie, Industry News

Indie game developer Jason Rohrer makes his iPhone debut with this week’s App Store release of Passage ($0.99). Previously available as a PC freeware title, Passage comes to the iPhone this week as a direct port with a new touch-based control interface.

An extremely brief life simulation game (it takes less than five minutes to play to completion), Passage earned acclaim from both the gaming public and the mainstream press upon its PC release last year. Rohrer’s latest efforts include the arthouse title Gravitation and the multiplayer-only puzzler Between.

Passage’s commercial release on the iPhone is an interesting development in the world of independently developed games. The title earned attention and praise when it debuted as freeware, but how will it fare against the thousands of paid apps already available in the iTunes Store? More specifically, how will iPhone users respond to its short length and simple gameplay? You can bet that more than a few iPhone-curious indie developers will be watching this one closely.

Tags: indie, jason rohrer, passage, simulation