Northway Games is an indie studio home to husband and wife developer duo Colin Northway and Sarah Northway. Back in 2008 Colin wrote the successful Flash gameFantastic Contraption while Sarah in 2011, released Rebuild which has since sold over 100,000 copies.
Colin and Sarah are both from BC, Canada and spend every summer there, but in the last three years they ‘ve also lived in Turkey, Malta, Scotland, Honduras, Costa Rica, Japan, the Philippines, Greece and a dozen other countries. Incredipede, the Studio’s latest effort was developed while the duo visited these countries, in collaboration with Thomas Shahan, who later became the artist for Incredipede.
“The idea of Incredipede, could only have come from the jungle. Sarah and I lived in Honduras for two months in a house slung out over the water at the end of a terrible dirt road. We were surrounded (and occasionally invaded) by the natural world and creatures of all sorts.
Fish swam underneath us as hummingbirds visited our balcony, baby boa constrictors and land crabs crawled through the yard, and ants invaded our kitchen. Not to mention the lizards and manta-rays and cuttlefish. It’s impossible not to marvel at the ingenuity of life and with so much of it around Incredipede was inevitable. To give myself (and other people) the chance to play in that world was fantastically enticing. I actually credit this lizard with the game idea”, Colin stated in an interview.
Incredipede was released on October 25th for the PC, then submitted to Steam Greenlight, and was greenlit on January 10, 2013 after being announced as a 2013 IGF finalist nominated Excellence in Visual Art .It may have won the big prize, but that doesn’t mean that its a game that someone can pass it by. Read on to find why.
Sound and Vision
Level design is clever, and the art is surprisingly beautiful, given its basic wood-cut presentation. The detailed sounds for Incredipede were created by Jordan Fehr of Super Meatboy fame, while the music is minimalistic, fading in and out during levels to allow for quiet moments of concentration.
