In Heartbeats you play a sci-fi short story about an old man looking back at his life as it turns to dust. The format is a new game experience labeled Graphic Puzzle – a digital mix between a puzzle game and a graphic novel.
RELEASED for iPhones on App Store: Thursday March 19th 2015.
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, incl. the text. Each puzzle unlocks the next. The interaction is simple and there’s exactly as few hints in text and picture, as we saw fit.
FREE:
You get the first three puzzles for free and then you pay $0.99 for the final seven puzzles of the game.
RAPID GAME MAKING DOGMAS:
To focus and be effective during the short production and still create a full game experience the three developers created a set of dogmas, left out sound and made a creative short hand solution for game music.
Heartbeats is founded on the following three dogmas of a genre we’ve labeled graphic puzzle.
THE RULES OF GRAPHIC PUZZLE:
1. Each page is the puzzle that unlocks the next
2. All puzzles must tell parts of the story
3. Text and illustrations must be parts of the puzzle
The genre and it’s dogmas made us choose to work with static puzzles, just as a page would be static in a graphic novel. On top of that the dogmas gave us a simple scale on which to measure, what should be in the puzzle and what shouldn’t.
MUSIC & SOUND:
As mentioned there’s no sound or music for Heartbeats. We decided to try something new. It is inspired by reading experiences, where you put on a great record and then sit down to read a good book:
We’ve asked people who know about great music, reading or graphics if they would create a Spotify playlist of music they feel fits Heartbeats. Then we simply present these playlists as possible soundtracks for your gaming experience. If you want music, while you play, then you got different curated options you can access from the game.
PLAYLIST LINKS:
ANNA LIDELL – electronica artist
DANNY KREUTZFELDT – doom metal label owner
SIGNE BISGAARD – jazz composer
ALL YOU READ IS LOVE – a pop up book store
CAV BØGELUND – comic book creator & animated film director
DREAMERS’ CIRCUS – scandinavian folk music band
NO ROMANTICS DISCLAIMER:
This is a game we’ve made, because we wanted to, because we could and then we simply did it. We do not believe in the unique genius of an idea, that simply have to be brought to life. We believe in taking an idea, working on it, changing it, finishing up stuff and putting it out!
All the best of luck, despair and cleverness!
Kamila Slocinska – the unique, critically acclaimed and award winning illustrator behind the graphics of Heartbeats
Boris Hansen – programmer and critically acclaimed and award winning author behind tech and story of Heartbeats
Esben Kjær Ravn – Owner, founder and CEO of Kong Orange. Designer and producer of Heartbeats