Would you like to be productive today? Don’t download Cluster

She’s taunting you. This was your personal best, yet you’ve barely made it halfway through.

“Game over,” she says, slapping the words in giant text across the screen to rub it in your face.

Without thinking you push enter.

You explode. Push enter again. Die again. Enter. Die. Again. Die. Again.

Just as you’re starting to get frustrated, you realise that you’re making it through the first few levels much faster than you were initially.

Suddenly you’re on a roll, dodging bombs and boosting through blocks as the rhythm of the music pulsates the shapes on your screen and pushes you ever forward.

“Game over,” she says again.

What does she know? You push enter again, not daring to look up at the clock.

Cluster

Cluster is a two-button game that hearkens back to a simpler time. When games were games for the sake of it and “free” didn’t mean you have to wonder about in-app purchases.

It was developed by Kobus van der Walt after a prototype he called HalvCirkel received very positive feedback on the MakeGamesSA forum.

Soon after the prototype was posted, Julian Pritchard joined Van der Walt to help with the design and marketing of the game.

“At A MAZE Johannesburg 2014 I got to hang out with a bunch of cool artists and ended up making a game with some of them,” Pritchard said.

At one stage during the development of Cluster, Van der Walt said he realised the game needed music.

Pritchard roped in Finnish musician Jukio Kallio – who worked on Nuclear Throne, Luftrausers, and Maverick Bird – to write the music for Cluster.

The game released for Windows, Mac, and Linux on 26 February 2015 and can be downloaded for free.

Cluster screenshot

Disclosure: Jan knows Julian IRL and occasionally hangs out with him at events. Jan and Julian also know a bunch of other game developers and journalists and run into them at events and end up chatting. Why? The industry is relatively small and, you know, we’re not dicks.

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