Indie Fund Now Backing Soft Body

This year’s Gamercamp is close on the horizon, with a huge selection of games making their Canadian premiere. We are proud to announce that one of its official selections, Zeke Virant’s Soft Body, is now being supported by Indie Fund. Soft Body is a twin-stick shooter that asks players to split their brains and thumbs, navigating two unique “bodies” through a beautiful, minimalist shoot-em-up space at the same time. Zeke calls it a “bullet heaven,” because the emphasis isn’t on memorizing bullet patterns so much as reacting to them creatively as the arena shifts and changes.

A long-time musician, Virant wanted to create a game analogy for singing and playing an instrument at the same time. Indie Fund partner Ron Carmel explains how this feels to the player: “Human consciousness has, for obvious reasons, evolved around the idea of being in one place and experiencing the world as a single entity. Putting some time into Soft Body led me to feeling more and more like I could split my consciousness for brief periods of time. The minute-to-minute experience was definitely about clearing the levels, but the second-to-second experience for me was all about maintaining a sense of split consciousness for as long as I could."

Soft Body will be Zeke's first major release, but it has already garnered praise for its evolving bullet patterns, the dynamic soundtrack, and its unique way of dividing your input while focusing your attention on a singular task. In his earliest prototypes, Zeke drilled deep on one aspect of his design that he could polish from the start: the game's feel, how the twin bodies move through virtual space and respond to the player's control. This attention to detail has paid off, and recently Soft Body took home an award at the Zurich Games Festival.

We want to congratulate Zeke as he enters the world of full-time indie development with Soft Body. The game will be available in the summer of 2015 for the PS4 and Vita, with a PC release following soon after. If you're in Toronto, you should definitely make the trip out to play Soft Body at Gamercamp. Otherwise, be sure to follow Zeke on Twitter and check out the Soft Body website for ongoing updates on the project.

Soft Body

Developer

Zeke Virant