In a press release sent to Gaming Cypher, developer Kong Orange announced that interactive graphic novel Heartbeats is now out on iPhones.
Heartbeats is told one heartbeat at the time. Each heartbeat corresponds with a memory in the mind of an old intergalactic human. He looks back at his life as it draws to an end.
GAMEPLAY
Heartbeats is made for hardcore puzzle gamers. The game is short and tight, but the puzzles are tough in the old school unforgiving sense. It won’t swallow your entire life, because it’s short, but you’ll certainly be fully challenged – all the way up to the brink of total frustration, tears and giving up. Every screen sized page in the game is a puzzle, including the text. Each page unlocks the next. The interaction is simple and we’ve aimed for the absolute minimum of hints.
FREE
You get the first three interactive pages for free and then you pay $0.99 for the final seven puzzles of the game.
LOW BUDGET GAME MAKING DOGMAS
To focus and be effective during the production and still create a quality art experience the three developers created a set of dogmas, left out sound and made a creative short hand solution to game music.
THE RULES OF GRAPHIC PUZZLE
- Each page is the puzzle that unlocks the next
- All puzzles must tell parts of the story
- Text and illustrations must be parts of the puzzle
Subscribing to this genre invention we decided to work with static puzzles, just as a page would be static in a graphic novel. Yet they are still interactive. The dogmas have given us a simple scale on which to measure, what should be in the puzzle and what shouldn’t. Basically the game is very much a puzzle no matter the play of genres and it has clear inspiration from point’n’click adventures. There’s no sound or music for Heartbeats, but inspired by reading experiences, where you put on a great record and read a good book, we supply Spotify playlists for playing Heartbeats.
CURATED SPOTIFY PLAYLIST FOR HEARTBEATS BY:
- Anna Lidell – Electronica artist
- Danny Kreutzfeldt – Doom metal label owner
- Signe Bisgaard – Jazz composer
- All You Read Is Love – London based indie bookshop and cafe
- Cav Bøgelund – Comic book creator & animated film director
- Dreamers’ Circus – Scandinavian folk music band
Here is the Heartbeats teaser trailer:
You can get Heartbeats on iTunes – (the first 3 levels are free and it’s only $ 0,99 in total).
Source: Press Release
I'm a published author and proud US Army veteran who happens to be a gamer, so I decided to combine the two and love every minute of it! Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments and I'll be sure to get back to you.
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