If you’re going to be there and want to try Lovers and meet up with me and the other Asteroid Base-ers, we’ll be in the IGF Pavilion. You can also drop a line at info@asteroidbase.com. Hope to see you there!

- Lovers has been nominated for an IGF Award for Excellence in Visual Art! This is a crazy huge honour, and the three of us at Asteroid Base are super excited to be heading down to San Francisco in March for the IGF. This will be my first time at GDC since the Gesundheit! prototype was in the IGF back in 2008, and since then I’ve met so many folks in indie games–I can’t wait.

- I did an interview with IGN’s Colin Campbell about Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, where we talk indie games, co-op, and Captain Picard.

- Lovers is one of the Telegraph’s top 25 anticipated indie games.

- And finally, I blogged a behind-the-scenes look at our 2.5-D animation techniques in Unity, which ended up on Gamasutra. It has gifs!

Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is being developed by Asteroid Base, and you can follow our production blog here.

We’re writing some development logs as we go along, too:
1. In A Galaxy Far, Far Away – Our origins at Global Game Jam
2. Great Kid, Don’t Get Cocky – Early sketches and design decisions
3. Drawing Inspiration – Our artistic influences for the game
4. Two and a Half D’s – Our GIF-laden character animation process

That’s me camouflaged in the middle. Photo by Ben McEvoy / TAAFI.

And by the way, mega congratulations to Jim Munroe for his and Molleindustria‘s Unmanned, which just won the frickin’ grand jury prize at Indiecade!

Guilded Youth is a text adventure written and designed by Jim Munroe, with artwork by yours truly. We’ve just submitted it to the Interactive Fiction Competition, and you can play it online now.

You play Tony, a fourteen-year old thief who needs some help looting the legendary Oakville Manor. Luckily it’s the 1980s and finding fellow adventurers is just a modem squeal away…

I handled the artwork, much of which was created in AsciiPaint, a terrific (and free) ASCII art program for Windows. The project came to life at TOJam 2012, and we continued to develop and tweak it in the following months. If you’re curious to read more about it, check out Jim’s blog post.

Fight monsters! Solve puzzles! Wipe your nose! Gesundheit! is a booger-flinging action-puzzle game available for iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad. It was designed by yours truly, and developed in collaboration with Revolutionary Concepts. (Also available is the Soundtrack EP.)

Gesundheit! tells the story of little green pig with allergies who narrowly escapes when evil snot-eating monsters invade his village. Finding courage he never knew he had, he sets out to rescue his friends armed with nothing but his runny nose. With hand drawn graphics and an original musical score, Gesundheit! features stealthy arcade-puzzle action as you guide our sniffly hero on his quest across 40 unique and increasingly challenging levels filled with enemies, traps, and lots and lots of snot.

It’s gotten some really swell reviews: 9.5/10 from IGN, 5/5 from TouchArcade, 4.5/5 from TouchGen, 4.5/5 from 148Apps, 8/10 from Eurogamer, and App of the Day on Kotaku.

So where did it come from?

Gesundheit! started as a personal project several years ago. The PC prototype, built with AGS, was showcased at IGF 2008, but since then it’s grown into something much bigger. Published by Konami, the iOS version was developed in collaboration with Revolutionary Concepts–they did the code while I did the art, animation and music, and we collaborated on expanding and reworking the design for touch screen. It was super sweet being able to focus 100% on artsy stuff this time; I got to “remaster” assets in high res, improve the animation, plus there’s a bunch of completely new content.

I’ve done some interviews about the game at IGN and Torontoist, and wrote an old article for Game Developer Magazine in 2008 on designing the PC version.

I painted this wallpaper to celebrate the release of They Bleed Pixels, an awesomely grim blood-soaked PC platform game from pals Spooky Squid. You should play it.

Here are the original watercolour pages, along with some roughs and outtakes…

Underlying property © Spooky Squid Games Inc. 2011