If you don’t know Windosill yet, do yourself a favor and give it a try. It’s a very simple, short and extremely beautiful Flash game.
Stare at the hand, be amazed, repeat. Now that’s what I call the circle of awesome.
Windosill could best be described as a point & click adventure. But the game demonstrates quite nicely that old genres conventions fail at describing modern interactive experiences like this one. It consists of 10 screens. In each screen you need to find a cube and put it in a square hole to open the a door on the right and move a toy wagon (protagonist?) to the next screen. Finding the cube always involves interaction with some of the objects visible on the screen.
But the puzzle of finding the cube is only a starting point. Each screen is full of interactive elements. Not all of them are actually part of the puzzle. So the puzzle is just an invite to explore the game world in a playful manner.
There are two things about Windosill I find remarkable. First, the game is incredibly original. It’s full of wonderful, inspiring fresh ideas. You will struggle to find anything you have seen in any other game before. Instead, one delightful surprise follows another. In a landscape of Flash games about Zombies and farming, Windosill feels like a game from another dimension. A dimension where people still have a heart… and a brain.
Artistic games often succumb to over-ambitious goals that their creators simply can’t back up with their limited technical skills. This is the second remarkable thing about Windosill. It is technologically incredibly well-done. It uses a custom 3D engine, lots of custom physics simulations, ragdoll systems, particles, you name it. Simply watching the hand reconstructing the letters on the second screen blows my mind. I already spend at least an hour watching that hand. I constantly switch from being amazed by the vividly eerie animation to being bewildered about the amount of work and development required to make this element work so flawlessly. The attention to detail is astonishing. The hand will turn over letters that face the wrong way. If they are turned too far, it will turn them a little bit, let them go and repeat. It’s a very natural gesture perfectly captured in an incredibly detailed algorythm.
If you want some information on how the game was created, I found this interview it’s designer Patrick Smith on the blog of interaction designer Riccardo Giraldi. The interview features some links to work in progress material for Windosill and other works by Patrick. Check it out!
I saw that Windosill attempted to get into this year’s IGF and I was surprised not seeing it there. I simply can’t really imagine why it wouldn’t be recognized by the judges. I find this unjust and flat out disturbing.
We can at least make things right by spreading the word about this game and/or playing the 3$ for the full version. I assure you, they are very well-spent!
