As of yesterday the 2nd installment of the Humble Indie Bundle is out! This is the chance to get 5 super awesome games for a price you name! I already bought the first one and I totally can recommend it. Nice feature besides: you can also buy gift codes such that they make a nice Christmas present…

Here is the trailer:

Now go and buy it! It is more than worth it. Stop smoking and buy it if you have to – the games addictiveness is equally poisoning!

I just finished playing the highly praised game Braid. I really enjoyed playing it, even though at some points I was very tempted to use a guide, as some of the puzzles got me too puzzled. But putting the game down for a few hours (or even some sleep), definitely helped as one easily loses creativity when playing it long. It is very interesting how the brain seems to continue to work on the puzzles, or to get used to the game mechanics, as it seemed to me much easier after a break.

Other than that I was very amazed by the atmosphere it creates, especially the music and the way the story is presented. Very simple, but one always wants to know more. The story itself is quite vague and sometimes even confusing, but fit very well  to the overall game.

Should you like solving puzzles á la Portal and not have played it, then there is no way around this gem!

I just stumbled over a nice blog called the Wolfire Blog from the independent game studio Wolfire Games. They have finished a shareware game called Lugaru HD that is about kung-fu fighting rabbits and currently they are working on the successor Overgrowth. They also started the Humble Indie Bundle which was a successful fund-raising experiment. In in you can pay as much (or little) money as you like for five games (Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD,  Penumbra, and World of Goo) and if you like you can donate parts of the money to charity organizations. You can do this for 3 more days and is very well spent money.

Oh, I almost forgot what I actually wanted to write: their blog and YouTube Channel are a very nice mixture of humour and gamedev related information. Especially the Game Tech category of their blog gives nice visual descriptions on how some effects are created. Seems to me they also have a very nice animation system and rigging looks very simple in their videos.

So much for that. Asteroids is coming a nice way. I was able to fix that evil bug that appeared when firing excessively onto a group of asteroids and it seems pretty stable so far. At least I didn’t have weird crashes for a long time. I added a few more things (loading different levels, highscore list), but I’ll write more details in a separate post someday.