The terms of Apple's developer agreement were leaked in a manner which I'm sure resulted in at least one assasination and the smuggling of at least, by conservative estimates, several dozen Ukranian and Palestinian child slaves - such is the price of evoking the Freedom of Information Act.

Anna Anthropy continues her degradation into commercial work --which began with the tightly-crafted squealer When Pigs Fly -- and I couldn't be happier. With her latest release she moves away from the masochism she's infamous for and instead weaves a tale of a lone space traveler. It's, dare I say it, actually pretty charming. While the lack of bondage is suprising her knack for marvelous game design (which is apparent in her earlier games and level design lessons) is still intact. Selling out hasn't been this well-crafted or fun.

Anthropy has a fine sense for graphical composition; her pixel art has an elegantly clean style to it. The music by Amon26 (of Au Sable and All Our Friends are Dead fame) is also top notch -- I'm actually listening to it as I type. The game's minimalist story echoes Knytt by establishing that the protagonist has lost roughly two dozen gems and must regain them through exploration. Your sole verbs are walking and a low-gravity leap, which ends in a slight bounce if you fall long enough. The game's main mechanic is the dual polarity of red and green platforms; if you touch a red switch, for example, red blocks disappear and green blocks materialize. Like Terry accomplished with V^6, Anna wrung out every conceivable application of this mechanic and the game's three pitfalls of robot, laser, and electric pit. The level design is absolutely stellar. The difficulty is also fairly low-key, the platforming isn't by any means sadistic and save spots are frequent. Playing through Redder and exploring its landscape shows that you can create a mainstream-oriented experience without dumbing it down or diluting it.

Not much else needs to be said, except this: thank you ma'am, may I have another?

I'm leaving for GDC Monday evening. I'll probably be blogging from there, and I have some games in the hopper to post, but it's possible we won't get to our five for the week, for which I trust you'll forgive me.

I'll be speaking Tuesday afternoon, on a panel on pre-production at the Serious Games Summit, with Lynn Sullivan, Rebecca Stoeckle, and Sonny Kirkley. Just a short presentation from me, the title of which is "Prototype More, Suck Less," which I'll post here after I get back.

Decepticolor is a remarkably polished little game, for a 48-hour game jam effort. It's a puzzle game, supposedly for two players (one using WASD and the other the arrow keys), but in fact it can readily be played by a single player manipulating both, although it's sometimes hard to remember which of the squares under your control is controlled by which set of keys this way.

Each player controls a square that contains a simple pattern of 16-bit colors. Somewhere in the game are are two "target" squares. You must move your squares to the target squares in such a way that when they overlie the target squares, the pattern of colors matches.

The keys "flip" your squares -- left or right moves you one square distance and flips the pattern across the vertical axis, while up or down flips across the horizontal axis. In addition, if on player flips his square, or part of his square, atop the other player's square, the underlying square assumes the overlying pattern. Thus, on many of the higher levels, you need to figure out how to strategically flip squares atop part of each other in order to build the target pattern. (In the screenshot above, the target squares are all blue, so the two manueverable squares need to be manipulated to transform each other to an all-blue state.)

The result is quite an interesting set of spatial and logic challenges. Only twelve levels, but then that's pretty good for 48 hours.

Semblante is a Global Game Jam entry from a team at the Catholic University of Paraná. As is typical with GGJ games, it's more of a prototype than a complete experience; just a single level.

What's notable about it is the atmospherics; darkness, an eerie soundscape, shadow enemies gliding in the depths. Periodically, there are overhead lights, and when you pass through the light, you glow for a time and can defeat enemies until the glow fades. Jumping atop them helps you not at all. Consequently, navigating the level is a combination of platforming and using the strategically placed lights to advantage.

Also, you can scream with the X key, but I don't believe this has a game effect.

Ostensibly, your character is named Jung, and you are exploring the recesses of your own mind.

You can see how a fuller treatment might be emotionally effective -- and certainly, the complexities of the human mind and its fears is a motif that lends itself to introducing additional gameplay elements over time.

Despite the generic name, S.H.M.U.P. is not a generic shmup. A finalist at the Chinese IGF, it is indeed a horizontally-scrolling shmup, but with some unusual characteristics.

Killing enemies gives you points you can use to upgrade, a common trope, but upgrades persist the next time you play under the same username, even if you've died. Indeed, it's designed so that you will almost certainly lose the first time you play, but that over time (a few hours of gameplay, at any rate) you will build up enough to be able to persist and triumph even through the higher, and more difficult, levels.

Control is entirely with the mouse; your cluster of ships follow the mouse pointer around. Right-click launches missiles, of which you have a limited supply. There's a boss at the end of each level, but these are not all that impressive.

Behind you are a cluster of squares that you can think of as akin either to the cities of Space Invaders or the points you must protect in a tower-defense game. Ships you fail to kill as they scroll by reduce them, and you can lose either by losing them all or losing all your ships.

However, at higher levels, enemies self-organize into impressive opposing formations -- sometimes taking advantage of combined arms, with defensive ships protecting high-fire but more vulnerable ones, sometimes organizing into megaships, in the fashion of amoebas forming into the cells of a multicellular monstrosity.

Gameplay is not, however, particularly challenging from a traditional shmup perspective; at worst, you simply die a lot, build up points to buy upgrades, and eventually triumph even with a fairly minimal twitch-action skill set. There would seem to be a bit of a casual game influence in this.

High scores can be posted to your Twitter feed, something I haven't seen before.

In general, it is neither the most visually beautiful shmup, in a genre known for its weird psychedelic beauty, nor the most challenging game of its type, but there are some interesting design ideas here.

In a nomenclature reminiscent of George Costanza´s fake charity, "The Human Fund (Money For People)", comes something genuinely good and authentic, the Indie Fund. The creators of some of the most commercially successful, independent games to rake in six-digit unit sales and six-to-seven-digit revenues on console-downloadable platforms (with PC sales often making up a large minority) have banded together and pooled funding in an ostensibly for-profit venture capital fund for independent games. Like a traditional publisher, they will give people cash to spend while developing games, and will benefit from a share of the net revenues on said games, but unlike a publisher they´ll refrain from owning the resulting intellectual property and from holding veto power over creative decisions.

Towlr is a puzzle. Towlr is an art movement. Towlr is an aesthetic with its own manifesto. Sort of. Towlr is frustrating. In Towlr, the cake is not a lie.

Towlr has a + sign in the screen. It has no meaning.

Towlr provides no rules, no tutorial, not even a minimalist statement of goals. You must deduce the goal.

Towlr tells you when you have failed, in a most annoying fashion.

Towlr displays only simple, geometric shapes such as you might see in an Atari 2600 game.

Towlr rewards success with cake.

In Towlr, the appropriate response when you succeed is "Doh!".

Towlr looks simple; but actually, there is a highly refined sensibility at work here, one that could only and can only derive from games. It's a sort of minimalism that rejects almost everything we know, or believe we know, about games. There is no hand-holding, no increment in skill, only a puzzle, with no hints and no support. The purpose of Towlr is to figure out how to play, and once you have, you are done.

And just as stark as its gameplay are its visuals and soundscape.

The first Towlr was created by PoV for a Ludum Dare competition, but a bunch have been created since. They are all available at the Towlr site. Some are web-playable, others are downloads, and the downloads vary in what platforms they support. But you should check them out, if only to experience a remarkably different aesthetic of the game.

Sixteen Thirty Something is a design by Martin Wallace (who also designed Steam) dating to 1995. This version is a redesign by Danny Stevens, and has been released as a free "print and play" game with Wallace's permission.

Although the game has something of the color of the period, it is not, as you might expect, a Thirty Years' War game. Instead, it's a strategy game in which players, theoretically representing large merchant houses, have influence in the various countries which they use to attempt to earn victory points. Wars occur, but are highly abstracted.

At the start of the game, each player receives a number of secret "victory point markers" printed with the names of different countries. At the end of each turn, a player earns victory points for each of these countries, if he has influence there, with the point award being the smaller of the country's current "status" (a measure of prestige and power) and the player's influence in the country. There are multiple markers for each country, so that, say, two players could both be earning for Denmark, or one player earning doubly there. Players calculate their own VP totals, with only the totals revealed each turn, so it may be possible to infer, as the game goes on, what powers each player has VP with, but it is never overtly revealed, at least until game end. This, coupled with card hands, is the main source of uncertainty in the game.

"Influence" is in the form of cards, which players place in front of themselves, with a set of rules governing when new cards can be played, drawn, and so on. The main player conflict is in the form of "lobbying the crown," whereby a player attempts to get a nation to initiate a war with another nation; players vote their influence, with players able to play new influence cards in the process. The victor of a war gains status (and thereby may confer more victory points to players with that country's marker), and the loser loses military power.

The original version of the game had two main flaws; first, random allocation of cards and VP markers made it perhaps too luck-dependent, and second, there's an obvious positive feedback loop in terms of power status that tends to mean that, by midgame, some players are clearly in the lead and others pretty much out of the game, which is not a desirable effect.

Stevens's version redresses the problems and produces a considerably tighter can, at the cost of some additional complexity. Hand limits tighten over time, which makes for tenser play, and a system whereby a player's influence can be in decline (and the player unable to increase it) is added; this provides a negative feedback loop that redresses the positive one. In addition, a system is added to reallocate some cards among players each turn, which helps with the randomness issues.

On the whole, it's quite a good game with some novel mechanics, and worth the effort to assemble a copy to play. Stevens's version is, unfortunately, not particularly attractive from a graphic design perspective, though a fan contributed alternative game board helps. (It's designed for v1, though -- you'll still need the tracks from Stevens's game board).