You may have noticed that the site has had a bit of an overhaul, the layout is now fully responsive and will work on all your mobile devices wonderfully!
I’d also like to take a moment to mention and congratulate our good friend & collaborator, Björn Hurri – he’s just spruced up his website too and it looks fantastic – check out his fantastic artwork by clicking here.
We’ve got some brand new shots from The Other Brothers for you:
One of our users notified me this morning of an article on Gizmodo talking about Apple’s new operating system featuring tilt-controlled gloss on it’s buttons. It’s a lovely little touch and something that we did ourselves back in December as part of our fully 3D interface for Physynth. If you fancy having a read about it there’s a blogpost of ours from back then that might interest you:
http://simiansquared.com/crafting-physynth-a-developer-retrospective/
We are going to be giving away 10 promocodes over the next week to users who tweet @simiansquared regarding #physynth so get on it!
We recently did a fun little interview with NVision that also got featured in their Android app – check it out!
http://www.facebook.com/simiansquared
Give us a Like and keep up to date with the latest crazy goings on at Simian Squared direct to your Newsfeed! We promise we won’t let Chimp near the status updates…
Indie is about to explode. It’s no longer about David and Goliath, with the bedroom coder being jack of all trades and going it alone. Because now the “indie scene” is dominated by giants and ex console developers. The quality bar is just too high.
There’s exceptions which will always sing loudly like minecraft, but these are 1 in 1 million, literally what with development of games now open to anyone who can point and click. So to stack the odds in their favour, indies are now moving to teams to raise that quality and step in the ring with Mohammed Ali.
Indie is now standing toe to toe with the big boys, and this is changing the nature of the old fashioned game industry where you had to get a publisher, you had to go retail and so on. Now anyone can do it, and the competition is boundless.
This means quality for indie titles is now easily on par with AAA, it is just due to time and work restraints, indie titles have to have creative edge to survive. This means like in The Other Brothers, you need to think out of the box and create great AI, and playability to die for… and marry them with a stylistic and iconic retro style. That kind of stuff can only come from really hard working indie developers with prior experience.
There’s been a lot of news circulating around a blog post made by ‘dotBunny’ regarding the ‘cancellation’ of The Other Brothers; Thomas Pasieka addressed this in recent interviews which we thought we’d post here:
Thomas Pasieka: After me and Bjorn designed the game, we looked for a programmer and Matthew Davey (dotBunny) was trialled for that role but his work failed to meet our expectations and so we chose another developer (Simian Squared). (source)
The statements made by dotBunny regarding the ‘cancellation’ of The Other Brothers are untrue and we would like to clarify that dotBunny are in no way affiliated with the game,” stated Pasieka. “Please disregard any statements made by them. (source)
So that clears that up, we’re enjoying development of The Other Brothers and will have more to show you soon!
Back at the start of the year I caught wind of a project called ‘The Other Brothers’, I was blown away by the art quality and fell in love with it instantly. I can now announce that Thomas and Bjorn, the guys behind it have brought Simian Squared onboard to develop the title!
Our friendly neighbourhood ape (Rob) will be programming the game with myself joining Björn on the art side. It is a very exciting time for us and a pleasure to work with such talented people.
Please support us by liking this page:
https://www.facebook.com/theotherbrothersgame
And don’t forget to give us a shout on twitter:
@ChimpSquared (me)
@SquaredApe (Rob)
@thomaspasieka
@bjornhurri
Yours,
Chimp
Physynth has received some fantastic reviews and comments over the last few weeks, here’s a few of them:
Creation Machine:
“Every now and then in a sea of copycats we see something truly new and unique that catches our attention”
http://creationmachine.org/2011/12/19/physynth-amazing-user-interface-design/
Appadvice:
“Overall Physynth is a blast; anyone who appreciates music and enjoys creating it will value the effort the designer’s put into this app.”
http://appadvice.com/appnn/2011/12/quickadvice-physynth
Discchord:
“Physynth is a great example of an experimental music app; offering the control you need to make meaningful experiments with predictable outcomes.”
http://discchord.com/blog/2011/12/16/review-physynth.html
Evolutionary Arts:
“It is gobsmacking and amazing to say the least.”
http://evolutionaryarts.wordpress.com/2011/12/14/sneaky-preview-of-physynth/
Dave Linabury:
Definitely worth the download! Very interesting approach and just damn addictive.
via Wire to the Ear
http://davelinabury.com/
Version 2.0 contains the following additions and changes and additions:
* The Soundscape import and export is available on the files panel, and will export a custom text string of data containing all the information required. The string is not very big, which means you can use it for storing your Soundscapes, posting them on forums, emails, copying other people’s Soundscapes and supporting Physynth in other applications.
So all in all, a pretty great little free update. And more updates are coming.
We hope that you will enjoy this update, and please take the time to give a decent review and rate us as we are doing this purely out of our own pocket, and this will ensure we can give you more free updates, and it would be nice to know the effort is appreciated!