Post I.T. Shooter
Question time: how many of you have used the line ‘I always work better under pressure’ then completely folded when things got a bit tough? I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew many times.
When it comes to the games industry, a studio is under the immense pressure of impending street dates, publisher interests and development hell. It really does show when the final product hits the stores and, if past instances are anything to go by, the gaming communities are usually painfully unforgiving; take John Romero’s famous flop Daikatana for instance.
However, in some cases, pressure can bring out the best in game developers, particularly the consistently brilliant Kloonigames, run in its entirety by gaming visionary Petri Puhro. Perhaps best known for his beautiful and innovative puzzler Crayon Physics Deluxe, Petri has set himself a challenge to develop new titles for the Experimental Gameplay Project, a group of bright independent developers who each create a new game once a month, in just seven days. The results are often inspired and proof that pressure can indeed be a good thing.
His recent offering is the superb Post I.T. Shooter, which swaps pixels and polygons for hundreds of coloured post-it notes, brought to life using some clever stop-frame animation. After your girlfriend gets killed during the destruction of I.T. the gods promise our hero Moss (a nice nod to one of the main characters in Graham Linehan’s I.T. Crowd) that they can bring her back to life once all alien invaders have been destroyed.
The game plays like a side-scrolling Space Invaders, squaring you off against a variety of fiendish aliens, while a madcap tune by Martinibomb plays in the background. It’s incredibly simple, but a joy to play. That a developer can make something this fun in seven days just goes to show that all the big budgets and celebrity endorsements in the world won’t necessarily save your studio’s game from mediocrity. Other developers may want to take note.
Post I.T. Shooter is available to download from the official Kloonigames website now.
