Hey, guys! Just wanted to drop in and thank everyone for their support, whether you’ve bought the game from our website, or through Steam or Ambrosia. Things may seem quiet right now, but rest assured that Alec and I are always cooking up something game-related. And we couldn’t do it without you, so thanks!

I’ve updated the Community page with four new pieces of fanart, and the Press page with a great review of Aquaria Mac, from the latest issue of Mac|Life. The reviewer, Susie Ochs, gave the game a perfect 5/5 rating, and described it as being “stunningly well crafted with a compelling story, beautiful visuals and music, and hours upon hours of action-adventure.”

I love all the water-related puns that are used with Aquaria. As you can see, even I can’t help myself sometimes.

Ambroisa Software, Aquaria’s Mac distributor, showed off the game again at MacWorld. You can see their setup here, next to Multiwinia:

Looks pretty cool! I like the little cutout enemies.

2008 is coming to an end, and so is Bit-Blot in a sense. Derek and I have both embarked on separate projects - we don’t have any immediate plans to work on a new game together. I’ve formed a new development team called Infinite Ammo, and Derek has been developing an amazing freeware game called “Spelunky”.

“Spelunky” is a randomly generated game in which you play an Indiana Jones-esque explorer. The game has a ton of secrets, beautiful art and moments that make you go “woaah”. Derek did all the art and programming work himself.

The game can be a little difficult to get the hang of at first, but its totally worth it. There’s a ton of depth and gameplay value here, and you can’t beat the price.

Download Spelunky Here

Meanwhile, Infinite Ammo has been working on developing a few projects. Our main concept is “Marian”, which is in part a spiritual successor to “Aquaria”. Above is one of Katie de Sousa’s amazing concept pieces for the game. You can find more information about Marian here.

I update the Infinite Ammo site regularly with behind the scenes info, concept art, music, video blogs - the works. If you’re interested in following my game development exploits beyond the realm of Bit-Blot, IA’s blog is the place to go at it.

This doesn’t mean that Bit-Blot is kaput, however. Derek and I have more planned for Aquaria in the coming months. There’s the long-awaited soundtrack release, and we have another surprise up our sleeves. I’d love to be able to work with Derek on a new game as Bit-Blot again in the future, but only time will tell if that’s in the cards or not.

To all the folks at home, thanks for being part of the journey of developing Aquaria. This isn’t an ending, its just the beginning.

Hey, Alec here - you guys might have noticed this already, but Aquaria is out on Steam! Its also on sale for 20% off until the new year. The Steam version features 27 achievements with new art by Derek and its a steal at $15.99 - so if you haven’t picked up the game yet, now is the perfect time.

Steam also has a really nice gift purchasing service. If you’re stuck thinking of a gift for your friends and relatives, why not give the gift of Aquaria. Odds are, they’ll love the new version.

And last but not least, here’s a little behind the scenes info on the making of the latest HD Aquaria trailer - featuring my ugly mug!

Enjoy!

In case you’re curious why the video says “Infinite Ammo” at the beginning… that’s ’cause it’s my new team! If you guys haven’t heard of it yet, you can learn a lot more at our website. We do a regular video blog and we’re working on a couple really cool 2.5D games.

The new version of Aquaria is here, and now it only costs $19.99!

If you’re new to the Aquaria universe, click here to buy your very own copy.

If you already own Aquaria, visit this thread on the forums for information about how to upgrade your copy to the latest version.

This version of Aquaria includes a lot of new tweaks and improvements over the original; including beautiful widescreen support, a new world map system that allows you to name and drop markers, get hints and more, an improved cooking system that previews recipes, shows recipe effects and is easier to use, an integrated help system, some redesigned puzzles and even more.

To find out more about what’s in Aquaria 1.1.1 and just how awesome it is, check out the last blog post.

Derek and I would like to thank all our fans and customers over the last year for their initial purchase, continuing support and yes, love. I have to give big, individual shout-outs to Robert J. Walker, Kyle Pulver and Tommy Refenes for being instrumental in helping me test this new version of the game. Thanks guys!

And to everyone else, enjoy the game.

(Featured: Kyle Pulver’s Aquaria fan art)

NOTE: Our webstore’s backend is being really slow and unresponsive for me right now. Apologies in advance if I don’t get to your reactivation request right away.

Hi folks, Alec here - as of December 7, Aquaria has been released for a year. We want to thank all the people who chose to buy the game and support us. You’re the reason we’re still around, and we really appreciate it. You’re also the reason why we’ve been able to continue to work on improving the game, and soon you’ll be able to experience the result of those efforts.

This weekend we’ll release the new Windows version of Aquaria, 1.1.1. This version includes widescreen, graphics and audio enhancements, improved puzzles, a new/awesome map system and more. It even improves on the recently released Mac version - and it will be released at a new price.

And last but not least, we’ve made a new trailer to celebrate. This one was made in 1280×720, and looks absolutely gorgeous. The files involved in making it are taking up about 82GB of my hard drive! You can check out the embedded video here at standard def, but head to YouTube or Vimeo for the option to watch it in HD. If you want the original source AVI file, just send me an email (zaphire@gmail.com) and I’ll hook you up.

Happy belated Aquaria anniversary, everybody.

Thank you for your patience, Mac users! Its Alec here, letting you know that Aquaria for Mac has been released today. Go play the demo and buy the Mac version for $30 over here at the Ambrosia website. (Beware, there may be some spoilers in the screenshots on there. They may be spoiler free in a bit though! I’ll update this post when I know.)

But this is not just a straight port of the Windows version, oh no - Aquaria for Mac includes nearly a year of work in new features, bug fixes and improvements - bringing the version number up from 1.0.3 to a big shiny 1.1.0. With new and beautiful wide screen support; a new world map system complete with progress recording, location names, user-created markers and beacons, user-friendly improvements to the cooking system, changes to make puzzles more intuitive, additional graphics, auto updates, a built-in help system - and more! Even some of the music tracks got a bit of polish.

In fact, these features will be exclusive to the Mac version of Aquaria while we put together a beta test of the new Windows patch. I also like to consider this temporary exclusivity a small gift to our patient Mac fans who have waited many months! You folks really deserve it.

But there are more people to thank, specifically some very helpful employees over at Ambrosia software who did a lot to make my workload more manageable. I’d like to single out John Champlin, for testing the game probably a 100 times, demoing it at Macworld and for helping manage the beta list. I’d also like to thank Matt Slot, Mike B. and Rudy Richter who did a lot of the Cocoa programming involved in creating the start-up sequence and GUI launcher for Mac Aquaria, as well as giving me help figuring out how to support older Macs. A huge thank you goes out all the Beta testers who went through the game countless times to be sure that issues were fixed, and for coming up with some good suggestions on how to improve the game. Also, a big thanks to Derek for creating new art for the game, fixing levels for widescreen support, creating a sexy OSX icon and for making the awesome painting you see on this post to celebrate the release!

Its been a crazy ride getting to this point, one filled with a lot of frustration and a feeling I’d like to call “banging your head against the wall”. A lot of that was trying to figure out how to improve the game based on feedback from players, while still keeping true to what works so well in the first version and all the love that Derek and I put into it. Turns out, it was totally worth it. Its not too often you get to sit back and watch your baby go out into the wild, crazy world. This is our second time, and I’m still excited.

P.S. I now use a MacBook Pro for all my game development purposes, and so does Derek.

At The Independent Gaming Source we ran a competition for “demakes” - remakes of games made as though they were running on old consoles. One of the entries was Aquarium, a NES demake by Oracle. Can you guess what game it’s supposed to be?

Although it’s just a short demo, Aquarium is still a wonderful re-envisioning of Aquaria. You gotta love the great pixel graphics and the chiptune version of Alec’s theme song. I’d love to see this finished some day!

So yeah, thanks so much, Oracle! And best wishes.

One of the coolest things about releasing your project to a widespread audience, is that you get a ton of amazing creative feedback. We’ve had some really phenomenal fan art, some fabulous cosplay and even some fan music!

But beyond that - all of the tools we used to create Aquaria are built into the game itself, and any user can make their own Aquaria side story with them.

Bit Blot forum member Danger Mouse recently posted about progress on his mod called “Aquaria: Lost Treasures” - and it looks very promising. He’s been updating a progress thread nearly every day with new details and art.

The game appears to revolve around young Naija, and features completely new areas. There are also plans for a few game play additions to the game, which should help create a fresh experience for those who have already finished the official storyline of Aquaria.

You’re very welcome to drop by the thread and offer words of encouragement - and you may even decide to offer your particular talents to the project. It would be cool to create some original music, or to help out with scripting for example! I know there are some incredibly talented Aquaria fans out there, and I’d be stoked to see what they could create if they got together.

You can find the “Aquaria: Lost Treasures” thread here.

P.S. There’s still time to apply to be on the Aquaria 1.1.0 beta test! You can check out the details here.

A couple days ago I did an hour presentation about Aquaria for the local new media scene here in my home town of Winnipeg (at a pub downtown). It was kind of funny, because I wrote up pages of notes in preparation, but just ended up drinking a beer and winging it instead… and it was awesome!

The game development scene here is small, but its growing in some pretty exciting ways. If you live here, make sure you check out the events that are being organized by New Media Manitoba and Game-On Manitoba.

Let’s make this city an awesome place for game development.