These tees were designed by Marlon Wiebe and feature “frozen horses in the river” – a reference to Guy Maddin’s fantastic film My Winnipeg. (interesting trivia: Roger Ebert included “My Winnipeg” in his Top 10 Films of the Decade. Also, he hates video games!)
In fact – if you were wearing one right now, kitty cats and ladies might find you as cuddly and adorable as local composer Kenley Kristofferson here:
The source code that I wrote for a little game I made with Derek Yu back in 2005-2007 has been released!
Releasing code is hard for me. It’s always imperfect (or in my case, mostly a mess) and it feels extremely personal. Especially with Aquaria – a game that involved a lot of stress and heartbreak over the course of its development. (a significant portion of the code was written while under the influence of Canadian Club Whisky)
Although programming is foremost a technical pursuit, it feels organic to me. Maybe switching between code, music and design frequently enough makes you appreciate how similar these areas of game design are – rather than thinking about how different they could be. That might be why my code is more like a weird tangled evolution of the game, rather than a clean, factory-built design. (there’s even stuff in there from back when the game was an RPG, for example)
In any case, hopefully some people will find the code useful, and hopefully some will manage to improve it.
You can find the details of the code over at Wolfire.com. And much thanks to the amazing Ryan C. Gordon for porting the game to Linux (and Mac again) and organizing the open source release. What a guy.
Also, see this talk for more on the Humble Indie Bundle:
The Aquaria Soundtrack has been released digitally via Bandcamp. Bandcamp is a pretty neat web service that allows users to stream and share music in addition to purchasing it for download.
We’ve also set up a new shop with BigCartel.com. This service doesn’t require users to create a new account to order CDs and it also takes less of a cut from our profits. Let us know how you think it compares to Etsy in the comments! (I’m thinking about writing a comparison article on the pros and cons of each)
Lastly, a big thank you to all those who already bought the CD, many of who left really nice comments for us. While packing and shipping is a lot of work, it kinda feels like being Santa Claus due to all the positive feedback and warm vibes. Thank you!
We’re also looking into an automated way to give everyone who bought the physical CD a free digital download, so stay tuned for that.
