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The giant Indie Game portal Gamasutra was founded in 1997, and its team of editors have cemented their authority in the Game Industry with the winning of a Webby Award in both 2006 and 2007. Last week Gamasutra picked the Kaleidoscope Reef game, developed by Trickysheep indie games of New Zealand, as one of the top free to play, web game highlights.

The heart and soul behind the indie game Kaleidoscope Reef is the creative way real-world issues around the dangers facing coral reefs and a need for a new sustainable awareness to save them, are brought to life in a fun and engaging, inquiry based game world. Gamasutra even go as far to positively compare Kaleidoscope Reef directly with Derek Yu’s work in the IGF grand game prize winner Aquaria. The team here at Trickysheep are thrilled to be placed in this same world class league, and we hope our gaming fans will enjoy the unique game-play and surprising puzzles as they plant and grow a new Kaleidoscope Reef.

Today Trickysheep launched Kaleidoscope Reef, following on from their successful adventure game Anika’s Odyssey. Kaleidoscope Reef is a non-violent game, partly an action game and partly a point and click adventure game. It uses a unique drag & drop game-play mechanism to dynamically engage the user and draw them into a beautiful hand drawn world of an underwater reef scenario.

Kaleidoscope Reef is free to play and is aimed at increasing the public awareness of the pollution affecting coral reefs and the sustainable issues of the ocean environment, through promoting fun, inquiry based learning interaction modes. The world stimulates the user to solve puzzles and participate in overcoming an escalating onslaught of pollution and human sludge, in order to restore a damaged reef back to its former glory.

Kongregate, the leading social networking game portal, is featuring Kaleidoscope Reef as one of the hot games of the month. Within hours of launching, the game was discovered by
IndieGames.com, the recognized expert voice of the independent game industry, and Kaleidoscope Reef is now a game pick on the IndieGames blog.

Experience the underwater beauty of the Kaleidoscope Reef game; relax and enjoy the satisfaction of planting and growing rich colorful corals, but you will need to be creative and think outside the box to solve some of the ocean riddles which you’ll encounter as you attempt to save Kaleidoscope Reef.

Anika’s Odyssey has just gone live on Big Fish Games
and is getting some big time play from online gamers. The morning it launched, there were 43,000 people playing at the same time! That’s an entire AMI Stadium full of gamers, all puzzling together through Anika’s colorful little world! Very cool.

If you’re a fan of Anika and her friends, check out her website at http://www.anikasodyssey.com/ . You can grab desktop wallpapers, read about Anika’s world and download all the music from the game. There’s also a section where you can find some paper crafts featuring your favorite characters. Print them up, color them in, cut’em out, and take a take them out into backyard for a new adventure. If you send in a photo of your creations, we’ll post them on the site!

We attended the 2008 X|Media Lab
in Wellington at the end of May, held at the awesome Te Papa. The Lab had two parts. The Keynote day was attended by anyone interested in hearing digital media veterans discuss the challenge of taking ideas and commercialize them into sustainable businesses, with a focus on export. The second part of the conference was a two day “Lab” where selected companies brought their in-development projects and business ideas to the speakers from the previous day, in one-on-one mentoring sessions.

Trickysheep was chosen to attend the Lab from a pool of over 60 applicants. We focused our questions on our unique brand as a developer of responsible/positive games and the business of gaming. We also spoke to people about our multiplayer game server for mobile phones.

The connections formed at the conference have added the most concrete value to our company. Hanging out with other Lab participants over the long weekend was great, and we have become closer as local industry through the experience.

The inspiration of the lectures gave us a lot to think about and get excited by. Some insight we found valuable was Chris Deering’s various projections of the huge future for mobile devices. The growth of the platform is astounding, and will only continue. Advertising on the platform will continue to grow, so there will a big demand for creative work from people who know how to maximize the unique potential of a device that knows who you are and where you are, all the time. Also interesting was the insight that the “gaming generation” are becoming parents, and they are demanding social responsible gaming for their children, an area that Trickysheep has focused on. There were also some good war stories from several speakers about the challenges of growing a creative company, and preparing to take such a business to the global market.

The advice we gained from the individual mentor sessions was for the most part quite helpful. It was difficult to introduce all issues and background for every question we had in a short session that often moved on to very interesting tangents. Hugh Mason helped us identify the unique and most appealing aspects of the Trickysheep brand (universal appeal, safe, fun, quirkiness) and how we could leverage that for areas even outside of gaming.

Noah Falstein gave great advice about the art of game design, and the challenge of organizing a business around a sometimes unpredictable creative process. He also pointed out that our brand and skills would work well in the industry of serious games and social issues games, and area that we followed up on a session with Chris Adams. Chris has lots of experience with social issues groups, and suggested several ways we’d be able to leverage our skills, and gave us contacts to help us explore that area. Sean Kauppinen also had tons of great contacts for us, and advice on how to focus our brand. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the game industry, and pointed out several key competitors, success stories and possible partners for us to follow up with. Xin Chung gave helpful advice about standing out on the world stage by making the most of our unique position as developers of positive games from tiny New Zealand, whose green image and natural beauty inspires the global imagination.

Overall, the conference was a very positive experience and we would definitely consider participating in future events with this format and quality content.

Thanks to everyone who came to the Christchurch GameDev meeting last Tuesday at the Zodal/Trickysheep offices in New Brighton. It was a great turnout, and there was a ton of exciting discussion going on during and after the presentations. Much pizza was devoured and greasy thumb prints left on Wii-motes during the networking/gaming breakout at the end.

It’s clear that as a community, we all share a strong desire to collaborate, share knowledge and inspire each other. We also recognize the need for a strong voice to represent the highly talented Christchurch game development industry, and we want this group to become that voice.

Each monthly meeting with be hosted by a different company or group who will be responsible for organizing the space and content of the night. The next meeting will be hosted by Stickmen Studios, at their flash new digs on Hereford Street.

The “Make it! Play it!” workshop at the Window gallery went down last Friday night. Huge thanks to everyone who came out and contributed to making a game in 2-hours. We had a loose theme of “rooms in the house” and asked people to draw, paint, cut, paste, whistle, and hum elements that we’d assemble into a simple video game. The game we built is an interactive “diorama”, mimicking the tiny little shoebox worlds I loved creating for the book reports and science projects of my youth.

The drawings, cutouts and collages people made were artful and random, and the resulting game turned out more bizarre than i could have ever hoped for. I think a more structured game framework, a clearer set of instructions for the contributors, and a tighter theme for the evening would give the event a bit more focus, but the goal was creative collaboration & lo-fi fun, so in that regards I feel it was a total success. Like AJ said, “Scattershot but on the mark I think. The evening was crazy compressed fun!”

Most visitors pitched in, drawing characters, backdrops, and recording little sound effects. We had three “stations” going, manned by AJ, Luke D, and myself… the original plan was to create 3 unique games, but it soon became clear that 2 hours wasn’t enough time for one game, much less three so we quickly joined forces. In between runs to the hors d’oeuvres table, we frantically scanned/cropped/copied/animated over 50 handmade drawings and collages. Luke M has put photos, scans of some work, and the final game up on the Window blog.

Tons of thanks to Luke Munn for putting the online show together and organizing an awesome event, Andrew Johnson and Luke Duncalfe for an inspiring few hours of frenzied creativity on a Friday night, Sam & Ash and the other Window folks for making the show happen, and everyone who came and contributed.

On Friday March 28th, the Window gallery in Auckland is hosting the opening of “Make it! Play it!”, sponsored by Trickysheep. It’s a special one-night showcase of unique and innovative video games, and a chance for everyone to experience the excitement of creating of a game and seeing it come to life. The brilliant “Flow”, “Ayiti”, “The Endless Forest”, “Hush”, and others will be running on a suite of computers and game consoles, so it’ll be a great chance to check out the artistic and experimental side of gaming.

Trickysheep Team Lead, Jeff Nusz, will be running a super low-tech game development workshop as part of the evening; he’ll have a pile of arts & crafts supplies, scanners, microphones and a random collection of musical instruments to help everyone contribute their creativity to a video game, and have a chance to play it by the end of the night.

Friday 28 March
7 – 10 pm
http://window.auckland.ac.nz/

Download the Poster

IndieGames.com has named Anika’s Odyssey #3 in their round up of best freeware adventure games of 2007. We’re honored to be in included on this illustrious list of truely awesome games. Anika, a free Flash web game, beat out a slew of incredible games developed for the PC and consoles.

IndieGames.com is the web’s premier site focusing on independent games. It’s part of Think Services, the group that hosts the Game Developers Conference and the Independent Games Festival. They also publish Gamasutra, the online mecca of game development news, articles, and opinions. These guys certainly know games, so to be recognized by them is a huge honor!

Today New Zealand game publisher Trickysheep Publishing released Zodal’s latest adventure game called “Anika’s Odyssey – Land of the Taniwha”.

Anika’s Odyssey is a magical adventure deep into a lush and enchanted land. Be Anika Greenfield and break through reality, to enter a mystical world inspired by Aotearoa, New Zealand. Throughout the adventure, Anika meets wild and curious creatures and exotic Taniwha spirits (New Zealand Maori word for spirits, pronounced ‘tah-nee-fah’) that inhabit this wondrous wilderness.

The game is an enchanting point and click adventure puzzle game, full of myriad surprises and heaps of charm. Help Anika Greenfield explore her colorful landscape as she searches to reclaim her beloved friend.

Anikas Odyssey is a free web game and was released on the internet today and launched through the USA Game portal Kongregate, “the YouTube of Online Gaming”. Kongregate a gaming and social networking website allows its members to chat while playing games and post comments about the games while bookmarking their favorites and rating the digital content.

In the first day alone the Anikas Odyssey – Land of the Taniwha has been played over 10,000 times, and fans are already demanding a sequel, with comments of praise and adoration being continually posted, such as this comment from a community member “superb game play, spot-on sound effects, nice puzzles, and much more make this an excellent game!”