IGF award-winning indie game Devil’s Tuning Fork, inspired by the works of master optical illusionist M.C. Escher and the sonic echolocation abilities of dolphins and whales, is a first-person exploration/puzzle game in which the player must navigate an unknown world using visual sound waves.
The game’s background story is as follows:
“As a mysterious epidemic causes children everywhere to fall into comas, one child wakes up in an alternate reality. It is up to this child, the player, to determine the cause of the epidemic and save the other children trapped here. By way of the devil’s tuning fork, a magical instrument that allows the player to perceive sound waves, the player must find all the children and successfully escape this alternate reality, thereby waking up from the coma.”
But even more interesting is the Cinderella story behind the game and its developers, that goes something like this:
Towards the end of June 2009, a bunch of students at DePaul University in Chicago came together to form a team they called the DePaul Game Elites – a group comprising six programmers, six artists, two designers, and one producer. Under the tutelage of industry veterans that included Alex Seropian, Bill Muehl, Patrick Curry, Joe Linhoff, and Scott Roberts, they were challenged to develop an original game within six months that they would submit for competition at the Independent Games Festival. The finished product was called Devil’s Tuning Fork and went on, in fact, to win the Student Showcase award at the IGF festival.
The best part is that you can not only watch the video trailer for Devil’s Tuning Fork, but you can download and play the full game absolutely free!
