GameSetWatch sister site GamerBytes.com, which covers console digital download titles, recently conducted interviews with a handful of the industry's most eclectic independent studios, including Twisted Pixel, Radiangames, Ska Studios, and Zen Studios.

These developers have found success in independent development in a variety of ways, from trying new and unusual approaches to classic genres, to blazing trails on emerging platforms.

As part of a series of interviews with developers from across the gaming landscape, GamerBytes spoke with these independent studios about their best and worst experiences while developing their most recent titles, and what lessons the teams will bring into 2011.

The following are excerpts from the interviews with the three independent studios, where the teams discuss their respective projects and their future plans.

Twisted Pixel

Best known for creating quirky titles like 'Splosion Man and Comic Jumper, Twisted Pixel has built a reputation for releasing unusual and quality titles with a distinct, self-aware sense of humor. In this interview, Twisted Pixel's Michael Wilford discusses Comic Jumper's production values and accessibility, as well as what the studio hopes to accomplish with its future projects.

What were you most happy with during the development of your games?

Michael Wilford: We released Comic Jumper in 2010, and we tried something new that we hadn't really done before, which was to bring in writers and professional voice actors to tell a bigger story and hopefully add some spoken comedy. Going into it, we were worried about how it would all come together, but without a doubt I have to say that it's what I am most happy with.

The writers Matt Entin and Ed Kuehnel were fantastic, and the actors went above and beyond to make a downloadable title sound better than a lot of big budget triple-A retail projects. I'm super proud of the game and still laugh when I play it.

What were you least happy with, in retrospect?

MF: With all the audio and writing and the four distinct comic book art styles, we always knew Comic Jumper was going to be a big game, but it ended up being even bigger than we anticipated, so the project took longer to finish than we had hoped.

Also, we set out to make the game play like Gunstar Heroes, but we could have done a better job at making it more accessible to players that don't know what Gunstar Heroes is and how it's different from a lot of shooters today.

What is the biggest lesson you're going to apply to the next game you make?

MF: I want to find a way to make our games something that people can keep coming back to in order to find something new.

Radiangames

Radiangames has come to the Xbox Live Indie Games scene with a blaze of glory. Releasing a game per month since June, Luke Schneider has shows a lot of developers how to bring together gameplay, graphics and sound into one coherent series. Here, Luke discusses his dealings with XNA, and what he plans to work on in the future.

What were you most happy with during the development of your games?

Luke Schneider: I was most happy about being able to create six quality games in such a short time frame. While I didn't hit game-a-month pace until later in the year, I'm happy with how each game turned out and that the response has been very positive overall.

With the seventh and final monthly game (Ballistic) coming out in late January, I think I've accomplished something with this series that's never been done before.

What were you least happy with, in retrospect?

LS: The only thing that really bothers me is having to switch away from XNA and XBLIG in order to make more money so I can keep doing independent development. I really enjoy using XNA and would like to keep doing so and expand into other genres, but the games aren't selling well enough to keep me afloat.

I can't blame anyone but myself though, because I've been too focused on making the games I wanted to make for XBLIG instead of adapting better to what has worked well. Instead of doing very focused arcade-style games for one dollar, I probably should have made somewhat deeper games (like Inferno) with more personality and sold them at three or five dollars.

In terms of my games, I realized too late that the original Crossfire should have had difficulty levels. I added gameplay modifiers to make the game more accessible in an update, but that was too late for most people and not the best solution.

What is the biggest lesson you're going to apply to the next game you make?

LS: Super Crossfire will be coming to lots of platforms with the best parts or Crossfire 1 and 2 all rolled into one, then spiced up with some extra content and polish. I expect it to come to PC and Mac first, with iPhone/iPad versions a little later. I'm very curious to see how the game does on other platforms compared to XBLIG.

As for what I do after Super Crossfire, I'll definitely be going for homeruns from now on instead of a bunch of singles. The monthly games are a bit exhausting to create, and I want to make sure I put out a couple games that really show off what I'm capable of before I have to get a real job again.

I'm hoping Microsoft does something drastic like adding Achievements to XBLIG so that the platform can make money for more people, but it seems unlikely to happen. That's not to say some developers don't make nice money on XBLIG, just that very few people do.

Ska Studios

Ska Studios has tackled multiple fronts on Xbox Live, with The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai on XBLA and ZP2KX - Zombies and Pterodactyls 20XX for XBLIG in 2010. The team is currently working on a follow-up to The Dishwasher, as well as Charlie Murder, which is set for a 2012 release. In this interview, James Silva talks about his experiences in 2010 as he adds new members to his previously one-man operation.

What were you most happy with during the development of your games?

James Silva: 2010 was our first experience of teamwork actually; I brought Dustin on to help get us set up for PAX East 2010, but we ended up being able to put him to work in the mapmaking department as well. He’s made most of the maps in ZP2KX, our XBLIG contribution for 2010.

Speaking of XBLIG in 2010, it again gave us a nice outlet for side projects; while we’re tooling away on The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile obscure bug fixes, it’s great to be able to blow off some steam with a small scale side project where you can really just go nuts creatively.

Of course, the main project we’ve been working on in 2010 is The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, which is in its final stages of development. Like the first game, I’ve stuck with the “I’m doing all the graphics and coding, so I get to do what I want” development methodology, which definitely lends itself to some interesting emergent gameplay.

What were you least happy with, in retrospect?

JS: I still wish I had more copies of myself.

Also, I made some comments about “honor” in game development, where I suggested we should aspire to make games first to make good games, second (if at all) to make money. I ended up taking a little bit of backlash flak over that between the developers I cited as my example of “dishonorable” development and an article that painted those of us in the “make good games” camp as elitists.

What is the biggest lesson you're going to apply to the next game you make?

JS: Make better editors! I’ve discovered that by building more robust, flexible editors, not only does the created content reflect it, but I can actually start expanding this beyond a one human operation.

Zen Studios

Zen Studios has been working on both XBLA and PSN for years, with releases such as Pinball FX, Rocky & Bullwinkle, and The Punisher to name a few, but it has also released a bunch of new titles in 2010, including Pinball FX 2 for XBLA, Planet Minigolf for PSN, and Marvel Pinball for both parties. Here, managing director Zsolt Kigyossy discusses cross platform development, and what's in store next for the Hungarian Studio.

What were you most happy with during the development of your games?

Zsolt Kigyossy: This past year we saw a huge shift across the industry to bring deeper levels of social connectivity between gamers. We were right in the middle of that trend, and for us, the implementation of some great community features such as in game score notifications, Wizard Score & Team Force in Pinball FX2 and Marvel Pinball turned out to be great!

Players have really responded to the competitive modes we have included. There are now thousands of requests in at Microsoft and Sony for friends lists to be expanded from 100!

Those games are probably the best ones we have ever created – our enthusiasm about pinball hopefully shined through – and bringing in new features to such a classic genre in an innovative way makes us really proud. We strive to preserve the history of pinball but also try to keep it fresh so it excites the next generation of players.

What were you least happy with, in retrospect?

ZK: We loved working on Planet Minigolf, but the game turned out to be too challenging for our players. There is a very thin line between challenging and frustrating, and we should have made the game more forgiving.

The learning curve before players can really start to enjoy the game is a bit too long; we need to address this as soon as we can. We think the implementation of the PlayStation Move controls adds a greater dimension of playability to the game and hopefully gamers will give that a shot.

What is the biggest lesson you're going to apply to the next game you make?

ZK: We must lay more weight to prototyping a new idea at the very start of initial development – that is, a fun prototype! Only after this will we start investing in full scale production. The cost to develop downloadable is quickly increasing since players are more demanding higher quality; but the most important element is the fun gameplay!

This was really a banner year for digital titles – Limbo, Super Meat Boy, Bit.Trip.Beat, Joe Danger – I could go on and on. One thing is clear, the bar has been raised and the experience expectation at the 10 to 15 dollar price point is much higher than it was a year ago.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Every week, IndieGames.com: The Weblog co-editor Tim W. will be summing up some of the top free-to-download and commercial indie games from the last seven days on his sister 'state of indie' weblog.]

This week on 'Best Of Indie Games', we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week.

The goodies in this edition include a zombie annihilation game, a Global Game Jam submission featuring an invisible protagonist, a 2D platformer that doesn't allow you to control the main character directly, and a freeware arcade game with exploding fishes and scuba diving robots.

Here's the highlights from the last seven days:

Game Pick: 'Atom Zombie Smasher' (Blendo Games, commercial indie)
"It's zombie outbreak time, and you're the guy who has to get the civilians out and eradicate the threat. Campaigns in Atom Zombie Smasher are procedurally-generated, you can play co-op with up to three other friends, and there's a nuke button."

Game Pick: 'The Sun Always Lies' (TSAL Team, freeware)
"The Sun Always Lies is a short but sweet 2D platformer about an invisible character who must reach the flower in every level for some inexplicable and unexplained reason known only to the developers of the game. Every stage is divided into two parts: if it rains, you'll be able to guess your location by observing the raindrops, and splashing puddles will reveal where the main character is standing when the sun is up and shining."

Game Pick: 'Dash-Da-Dash DX' (Renard Queenston, freeware)
"In Dash-Da-Dash DX you control the hero ship by clicking anywhere in the playing area, making it dash towards your waypoint. The basic idea is to survive while collecting gems along the way. Thing is, you probably won't survive very long, as there's a giant monster at the top of the screen who is constantly spurting out bullets."

Game Pick: 'Come On Rabbit' (kero and satokivi, freeware)
"Come On Rabbit is a 2D platformer with an interesting gimmick - you don't control the titular protagonist directly, but you can point at the next platform that the bunny should jump to with his little feathered friend. Left-clicking calls the energetic rabbit over, but do watch out for the bats because you'll lose a life if you collide with these nocturnal creatures."

Game Pick: 'Katuo Bomb' (Katuo Bomb, freeware)
"Katuo Bomb is a freeware arcade game from Ikiki in which you play as a diver out at sea looking for underwater robots to destroy. You do this by grabbing hold of a fish and guiding them towards a robot, causing both of them to collide and explode into tiny bits of fish meat and metal plates."

Posted by timw at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Mac-owning roguelike fans are living the life right now! Last night, QFC Design finally ported IGF award nominated Desktop Dungeons to OS X, and now Fargoal has released Sword of Fargoal Legends, its iOS remake of Jeff McCord's classic Commodore 64 game, on the Mac App Store!

In this old-school adventure, players explore a randomly generated dungeon (20+ dungeon levels, 100 unique dungeon maps per game), fight 28 different monsters (each with different abilities, weapons, and spells), avoid traps, while trying to retrieve the Sword of Fargoal. 

The game features original music by Daniel Pemberton, animations by Emmy-winning animator Charlie Canfield, the ability to zoom in and out to see the entire dungeon or close-ups of the action, themed maps, episodic adventures, and eventually in-app purchases (e.g. original C64 version tiles).

You can buy Sword of Fargoal Legends on your Mac for $4.99 or your iPad for $2.99. Sword of Fargoal is also available on your iPhone/iPod Touch for $2.99.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

GDC 2011 organizers have revealed the complete Game Career Seminar lineup, spanning Schell Games' Jesse Schell, Epic's Cliff Bleszinski and notable Xbox Live Indie Games creators at the one-day student event this March.

This special one-day program -- taking place on Friday, March 4 during Game Developers Conference 2011 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco -- offers a series of talks and presentations to help students and prospective developers make their way into the industry.

Attendees, who are eligible for special reduced-price passes if they are students, will get the opportunity to view lectures, network with industry professionals, meet with HR representatives from a number of leading game companies and gain insight from industry experts.

A number of talks are featured on the Seminar's homepage and the Game Career Seminar section of GDC's Schedule Builder. Highlights include the following:

- In 'From Student to Start Up: Case Studies,' Schell Games' Jesse Schell provides an in-depth look at student projects that successfully made a name for themselves in the industry.

From Portal to Fl0w, Schell will provide examples of how to best make the transition from school to professional development, as well as note some examples of how the process can go awry.

- In the a panel on Xbox Live Indie Games, industry professionals and independent develops will discuss pricing, visibility, and other methods to help ensure success on the console-based indie platform. With Game Developer magazine's Brandon Sheffield moderating, panelists include representatives from Mommy's Best Games (Weapon Of Choice), MagicalTimeBean (Soulcaster), Ska Studios (I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1NIT!!!1), and Zeboyd Games (Breath Of Death VII).

- The 'Killer Portfolio or Portfolio Killer' panel, which is broken into 'Advice from Industry Artists' and 'Portfolio Review' sections, will see artists from Firaxis, Blizzard, Valve, Epic, and Irrational Games discussing what it takes to make an artist's portfolio stand out from the crowd. The speakers will examine common mistakes, and attendees can sign up for one-on-one portfolio review sessions with each of the panelists.

- Finally, 'Breaking into AAA Game development: Ask the Pros' brings a number of the industry's biggest creative names together to discuss what major studios look for when hiring new talent.

Speakers including LucasArts' Clint Hocking, Microsoft's Chris Charla, Zynga's Brian Reynolds, Thatgamecompany's Robin Hunicke and Epic Games' Cliff Bleszinski will share their insight and advice for breaking in to the industry's biggest studios.

Others sessions within the Game Career Seminar include a talk from WB Games' Christopher Allen on networking tips, and a lecture by Fire Hose Games' Jeff Ward on how to best transition from college to the game industry.

In addition to these sessions, Student Pass attendees can visit the Career Pavilion on Friday, a job fair that will feature representatives from over 40 companies, including Ubisoft, Naughty Dog, Crytek, Zenimax Media and more.

The Game Career Seminar will take place during the Game Developers Conference 2011, which will be held February 28 to March 4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. For more information on the Game Career Seminar, which is open to all GDC attendees, including Student Pass holders, please visit the official GDC website.

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you attended the Heavenly Symphony show where they debuted or visited Babycastles' Manhattan location any time since then, you might have seen two especially awesome custom cabinets installed at the indie games. Now here's your chance to own them!

The two machines -- one designed by Hilari Florido and inspired by '80s shoujo manga, and the other decorated by Dave Mauro and inspired by '80s beat'em up side-scrollers/Manhattan -- are now for sale to anyone who's willing to part with $1,200 (each!) for them.

Heavenly Symphony co-curator and GSW contributor Matthew Hawkins has put up more details and photos of the machines on his site, calling them "centerpieces from a watershed moment in New York City’s game-oriented history".

You can check out a couple shots of them and descriptions after the break, too:

“Babycastles no Fukushuu: Manhattan Fury” by David Mauro

"The style for this cabinet was inspired by a mixture of the popular video game genres of the beat ‘em up side-scroller (think Double Dragon, 1987) and horror platformers (Ghosts and Goblins, 1985). I tried to capture the ominous looming from the horror games and the urban dystopia often popular in beat ‘em ups. The Manhattan setting is in honor of Babycastles having a temporary space in Manhattan, instead of its usual Queens setting. The title, which literally translates to “Babycastles’ Revenge”, grew out of that Manhattan setting as I imagined a sequel to a game in which the players square off against an evil Dr. Babycastles. This time he’s out for Revenge and he’ll destroy all of Manhattan if the players don’t stop him.

As an arcade cabinet owner, and an avid player of video games and watcher of films, I love exploring these recurring themes and how they pervade through various mediums and end up portrayed in places as unlikely as the side of an arcade cabinet."

"This cabinet is a refection on the depiction of women in the Japanese shoujo manga (comics aimed at girls) of the 70’s and 80’s and the current trend of the of women shown in Japanese comics today. The prior of these focused on the an almost hyper sense of the lovely and feminine, while many of today’s women characters epitomize naive preadolescence figure. Moe, a popular slang word in Japanese, characterizes this current focus on young girl characters in comics and anime that and helplessly sweet and elicit the need to be protected.

As a comic creator, manga reader, and woman, I often find myself at odds with these depictions. I am attracted to the intricate beauty in the detailed illustrations of the ’70’s and 80’s comics and charmed with sugary sweetness of the characters of today. However, I also long for these female characters to have more agency and to be more proactive.

In painting this cabinet, I sought to approach this issue by employing my own take on the traditional shoujo illustration style of the 70’s and 80’s, while giving each character a piece of empowering/self help reading material both as an act of irony and a hope for future change."

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In a busy week for new job postings, Gamasutra's jobs board plays host to roles across the world and in every major discipline, including opportunities at Bethesda Softworks, LOLapps, Insomniac Games, and more.

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted this week include:

- Bethesda Softworks: PR Manager:
"The PR manger will create and drive programs which generate positive editorial coverage for the group’s business activities, initiatives and policies through multiple communication vehicles including: media relations, conferences and events. The PR manger’s responsibilities will include development of press releases, web site content, interviews, story pitch and placement, media relations, community management, press tours, and game conventions."

- LOLapps: Lead Game Designer:
"LOLapps, a high profile social game company who is pushing the boundaries of web based social games is looking for a top lead game designer with proven game experience shipping multiple hit titles. We are looking for some who is excited about iterating quickly and deploying our games to millions of users within a short span of time."

- Digital Extremes: Gameplay/AI Programmer:
"Located in the heart of South-Western Ontario, Digital Extremes is dedicated to making AAA quality, successful games, with the best and brightest talent available. Digital Extremes prides itself on providing a warm, inviting, creative work environment for its team and has been named as one of 'Canada's Top 100 Employers'. Competitive salaries, profit sharing, stock options, retirement matching, ample vacation and free daily homemade lunches are just a few of the many perks our employees enjoy."

- Insomniac Games: Engine Programmer:
"Insomniac Games is an independent videogame developer with award-winning hits for the PS, PS2 and PS3. We created the first three Spyro the Dragon games, and the Ratchet and Clank franchise. We are also the team behind Resistance: Fall of Man, Resistance 2, and Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time! If that's not enough, we've also have been named one of the Best Small Companies to work for! Come check us out!"

- Havok: Software Engineer:
"Havok prides ourselves on delivering the most highly regarded middleware software solutions to the best known companies in gaming and special effects. We are looking for a highly motivated, independent, engineer with a passion for gaming tools and technology. This is a unique opportunity to work with the best in the video game industry helping to shape the development of the next generation of games. Havok has software engineering positions in Dublin, IE; Munich, DE; Copenhagen, DK; as well as developer support engineer in SF, CA; Dublin; IE and Tokyo; JP."

To browse hundreds of similar jobs, and for more information on searching, responding to, or posting game industry-relevant jobs to the top source for jobs in the business, please visit Gamasutra's job board now.

Posted by Tom Curtis at 1:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[As part of a series of "Road to the IGF" interviews with 2011 IGF finalists, Gamasutra speaks with the team at Monobanda about Bohm, a Nuovo Award-nominated "poetic experience" centered around a procedurally-generated tree.]

Described by its developer as a game "you want to play before you go to bed," Monobanda's Bohm ignores competitive themes and win/loss scenarios in order to evoke a more abstract, poetic experience.

With no clear goals or gameplay explanation in Bohm, players control the growth of a tree in real time while the virtual plant and accompanying music evolve according to the player's actions.

The game is up for a 2011 Independent Game Festival Nuovo Award, which recognizes more esoteric "art game" titles. Monobanda's young five-person team is made up of Sjoerd Wennekes, Mathijs Konings, Liselore Goedhart, Simon van der Linden and Niki Smit.

Here, The Netherlands-based team at Monobanda tells Gamasutra about the creation of Bohm, and how the game spawned from a lunchtime joke.

What background do you have making games?

All five of us at Monobanda graduated with a degree in Design for Virtual Theatre and Games at the Utrecht School of the Arts. This course trained us in looking at game design from different perspectives.

We were educated in things like traditional storytelling, theatre, play, performances, social interaction, etc. After our graduation we wanted to continue our findings and experiences and start our own creative company.

At Monobanda we make games that combine interactive, digital elements with the real world. Pervasive gaming, augmented reality, that kind of stuff. Bohm is currently our only game that does not feature a crossover to the real world. It's our first foray into "real" games (i.e. screen and joypad) and we liked the process a lot.

What development tools did you use?

We collaborated with Cannibal Game studios, based in Delft. They produced a custom-made engine for us, called the Cannibal Engine, which runs on a PC. They enabled us to work with this engine without having to delve into the code too deeply ourselves.

How long has your team been working on the game?

We have been working on and off on Bohm for roughly one-and-a-half years. However, this wasn't full time. It was our passion project on the side and we worked on it in between other projects.

How did you come up with the concept for Bohm?

The five of us we're joking around at lunch, talking about fun concepts for games. Someone suggested a game about reincarnation -- a game that puts you in a different animal every time you die. We talked about how interesting it would be to jump from animal to animal, finding out how to control it as you go along.

Then came the inevitable joke: "Wouldn't it be funny if you suddenly came back as a tree? So your jump button doesn't work anymore, you can't seem to move with the 3D stick and you slowly realize you're essentially stuck."

When that idea came up we just stopped, and thought about it. Making a game that appears to have no interaction, but then letting the player slowly discover that they can take control is actually a very interesting concept. Coupled with our long kept desire to make slow and dreamlike experiences, and our love for the often overlooked beauty in nature, it all just clicked together.

Within five minutes, a simple joke turned into a fully fledged concept we knew we just had to make.

Would you like to see more games that focus more on creation rather than win/loss scenarios?

It's nice to see so many different experiments happen. Not only in the indie games scene, but also with some of the big blockbusters like LittleBigPlanet.

I don't necessarily think more games should focus on creation, but I do think it's good to move away from competitive scenarios more often. Because when you think about it, competition is the tried and tested motivator to play. So if you take that away, designers are forced to come up with new, different ways to motivate and compel a player. And we are very excited and curious about what all those brilliant game-designers out there will come up with.

You say the game is meant to be a "poetic experience." What do you mean by that?

One of my biggest overall inspirations is the work of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. He made movies that were deliberately slow. Very slow. But he made them in a way that gave the audience space to drift off into their own associations.

Tarkovsky compared his way of filming to a Japanese poem, a haiku. The poem is divided into three minimal sentences, which describe a simple scene. But when you read the haiku, the most beautiful thing happens. Your own imagination kicks in, and you will associate and make it bigger than just those three sentences.

A poem reserves space between its sentences for imagination. Which is a very respectful way to treat your audience.

We wanted to adapt this way of thinking to game design. We tried, like a haiku, to condense the bare minimals into a working package, and create as much room as possible to drift away around that. Following this dogma, energy bars, blinking parts, tutorials and even title screens had to go. Who needs them?

So poetic, in this case, means trying to create a very open ended experience that aims to give its audience space.

What was the inspiration behind the game's art style?

The art style was an ongoing experiment and battle against frame rate drops. But we wanted to create a scene that felt soothing and zen-like. We were inspired by the look of Polaroid pictures, depth of field, macro views, saturated colors and the play of light. Other inspirations were artists like Hayao Miyazaki and Roger Dean and Japanese ukiyo-e artists Hokusai and Hiroshige.

Have you played any of the other IGF finalists? Any games you've particularly enjoyed?

We all played Super Crate Box and Dinner Date, created by our fellow Dutch game designers. We also enjoyed playing Minecraft, Cave Story and Bit.Trip Runner.

What do you think of the current state of the indie scene?

Well, there's no denying it's booming. And of course that's a good and healthy reaction to the big, monolithic mainstream industry.

But I would like to see even more experimentation. I love a good retro style game, but there's so much more to discover in terms of gameplay than making another side-scrolling platformer with a twist (in spite of their brilliance!)

This is in no way critique, as I absolutely love all those games (e.g. looking forward to Fez!). I just wish entertainment wasn't always the main goal of a game. Surely there are other experiences out there to surprise us.

[Previous 2011 'Road To The IGF' interviews have covered Markus Persson's Minecraft, The Copenhagen Game Collective's B.U.T.T.O.N., Alexander Bruce's Hazard: The Journey of Life, Nicolai Troshinsky's Loop Raccord, Chris Hecker's Spy Party and Frictional Games' Amnesia.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Arcen Games, the independent developer behind well-received strategy game AI War: Fleet Command, have announced a very different game for its next Windows/Mac project: A Valley Without Wind, a "procedurally-generated action-adventure game that focuses on exploration and survival in a continuously expanding world".

The game is set in a post-ice-age world in the distant future, and players take on the role of a survivor scavenging, crafting, forming settlements, building shelters, and fighting enemies in that harsh environment. They'll be able to help other survivors to gain their help, or kill everyone in sight if they prefer (which will naturally have consequences).

It also handles death in a unique way:

"While death for your characters is permanent, weapons, loot, levels and anything else you've earned while playing will always exist. If one character dies, the player simply assumes a new survivor and the world continues on from there. Not as if nothing happened, though.

Those who came in contact with the now-deceased will eventually catch word of their passing, and may share feelings on the departed, for better or worse. Current characters can even pay their respects by visiting the player's own personal graveyard which will contain each and every deceased character played."

Pre-alpha footage for A Valley Without Wind:

Pre-alpha screenshots for A Valley Without Wind:

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Indie developer Stegersaurus Games just announced the release of Baby Maker Extreme 2, its sequel to popular "birthing simulation"/baby launcher on Xbox Live Indie Games last year -- apparently the original saw 800,000 downloads and 120,000 purchases!

This follow-up features a brand new graphics engine, new places to explore, new items to crash into, new outfits, and "super power babies" that offer new ways to control the infants flying across stages. Yeah, we're playing/looking at a lot of odd games this morning...

The concept for Baby Maker Extreme 2, which doesn't actually involve the baby making act, hasn't changed: try to send your bouncing baby as far across the 2D stage as possible, knocking into different objects and people for extra points/messages.

You can buy Baby Maker Extreme 2 for just 80 points (or grab a free demo) now.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jonatan "Cactus" Söderström and Mark "Doomlaser" Johns have collaborated to released Hot Throttle, very bizarre but still very entertaining racer over at Adult Swim Flash gaming portal.

Unlike typical racing games, in which you drive a car or some other kind of vehicle, Hot Throttle has you playing as a sweaty pink man who is wearing nothing except for purple underwear and  thinks he is a car.

It takes a while to figure out what's going on (move with the arrow-keys, pick-up garbage bags for power-ups, then hit x to use those power-ups) and even longer to master the layout of the different courses so you don't get lost.

It's all worth it for the strange and usually NSFW cutscenes! Oh, and the sound effects your guy makes while pretending to be a car are hilarious, too. You almost don't mind that you're in last place every time!

[Via IndieGames.com]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us a fresh roundup of links compiled by Ben Abraham, on topics including subtle morality systems, self-imposed permanent death systems and games as art.]

One of the more interesting pieces I read this week was from Paul Mason at the BBC’s Idle Scrawl blog (courtesy RPS’ Sunday Papers) who finds strategy videogame Heats of Iron III provides a refutation of revisionist scenarios surrounding the outbreak and direction of World War II.

While we’re visiting the big news outlets, The Atlantic has a piece by Alexis Madrigal on ‘The Geopolitics of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?’ looking at, well, just that. Interestingly, he notes that, “as far as I can tell, not a single academic paper has been written about the boom in edutainment games in the 1980s and 1990s. Not one!”

Michael Abbott at The Brainy Gamer blog wrote this week about Metro 2033 and its understated morality system, comparing the near-invisible system to a baseball pitcher with a wickedly disguised cutter.

Courtney Stanton at KirbyBits continues her "Here is a Game" series with a look at Deadly Premonition. And while we’re on the subject, JP Grant has finished expounding on his SEVEN blog-post-length reasons for choosing Deadly Premonition as his Game of the Year. check em all out here. They’re all remarkably critical.

In addition, Matthew Burns of the Magical Wasteland blog has gotten around to writing a response to last year’s second-most notorious “Games are not Art” piece by the N+1 editors (the first being, naturally, Roger Ebert) and Burns thinks they’ve been looking for art “In all the wrong places”. It’s a solid argument.

Good things seem to be coming in pairs this week as the misleadingly named Game Design Forum has also been thinking about the same subject. “Can videogames be art?” And at the Border House this week they’ve highlighted the words of Halo: Reach writer Tom Abernathy who, simply put, said that “We’re not serving half our audience,” specifically the female half.

Our own Denis Farr, also of the Vorpal Bunny Ranch blog, has been writing about characters from Half-Life 2 this week: first was Alex and Eli Vance, then came Dr Breen and G-Man’s turn.

This week David Banahan at Bitmob begins a piece by talking about his wife’s relationship with Fallout 3, and the ability to save/reload at will, and ends up meditating on what the game would be like without that ability. Funnily enough, I have a little bit of insight into what that would be like as well.

Speaking of permadeath, at Destructoid, blogger AwesomeExMachina is playing Fallout: New Vegas with self-imposed Permadeath as well as a raft of other self-imposed requirements. Food and water, it seemed, were the least of his worries, however, as it was the lack of HUD-based information that changed the game most significantly:

"Early on, I foolishly rounded a hilltop without caution and spotted what seemed like a lone wasteland savage, standing stoically in leather, spiked armor and touting an assault rifle. I took my advantage and opened fire on the target from the safety of my hilltop. He went down quick and I strolled up to search his cargo for some much needed supplies. It was only then I discovered the kindly wasteland merchant he was guarding cowered behind the burnt husk of an old car, previously obscured by a fallen billboard."

Jordan Magnuson, normally featured via his blog ‘Necessary Games’, has been busy ‘Game Trekking’ the past few weeks (months?). This seems to be about attempting to make games that reproduce something of the experience of trekking around the world. And at Edge Online, N’Gai Croal has written about ‘Drowning by Numbers, talking about that ubiquitous issue that seems less to afflict all digital consumers after a long enough time: having too many games/mp3s/files/fodlers/etc to handle. And on top of all that, how do we find things we don’t even know we like yet?

At the Spectacle Rock blog Joel Haddock has written about ‘The Experience’ of games, thinking about the importance of the physical environment we play our games in, as well as the people we share stories about those play experiences with.

The Buddhist Geeks podcast has a promisingly named episode out this week, with a discussion of “Gaming as Spiritual Practice” featuring Jane McGonigal. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it all yet, but I’ve heard great things! ANd over at The Escapist, the now regular ‘Extra Credits’ video series takes on “Amnesia and Story Structure” talking mostly about three-act structure.

At Groping the Elephant, Justin Keverne returns to his long running series of map-analysis meets walkthrough ‘Groping the Map’. In this, the fourth instalment looking at the tenth level from Thief 2, Keverne uses his intimate knowledge of the game to tell us things like this:

"What’s not visible from this rooftop is the doorway behind the servant, and the guard waiting in the room beyond. Exploration will provide an alternate means of entry into that very room, and this one encounter is an example of Thief level design in microcosm: the obvious route if rife with concealed dangers, exploration is power."

Three pieces here this week make an interesting trio! Eric at The Elder Game blog asserted first that, in a fight between ‘Classes vs. Open Skill Systems’ in an MMO, classes would win out for a bunch of very practical reasons. Then, an author at the Stylish Corpse blog says “My first reaction was Noooooo! Do not say this! Do not want to hear it! Lalalala! But common sense generally recognises itself…”.

And lastly, Brian Green counters at the Psychochild blog: "One of the big frustrations in discussing game design is imprecise terminology. What is a “class”? In MtG, as Tesh refers to in a comment on Stylish Corpse, is “Blue” a “class”? Well, if we’re going to shoehorn that game into the MMO paradigm, then it would be. …But, is that distinction useful for discussion? Not really, because the term “class” has a lot of emotional baggage with it. By advocating classes Eric is obfuscating his message and potentially harming those immature designers he is trying to warn since they’ll see “classes” and make a whole host of default assumptions."

On to Paste Magazine where Kirk Hamilton has written one of the stronger pieces of the week, roaming across various big-ticket discussion topics that regularly get a play in critical circles.

Gus Mastrapa writing at Joystick Division says we ought to forget about the Citizen Kane of videogames, responding to Richard Clark’s expressed concerns at Gamasutra regarding the upcoming Bulletstorm. Instead, Mastrapa says he'd be " fine with a Starship Troopers of video games. Not a heady work of art, but a viciously satirical piece of trash."

And finally for the week, at The Last Metaphor blog the author discusses ‘Red Dead Redemption: misogyny as a male performance enhancer’ with a great run-on sentence of an opener: "Red Dead Redemption is a sexist video game that beds its “you know you want it” game play, its pervasive “hey what are you, stuck up?” artistic coercion and its penetrating thematic thrusts on the prone backs of women’s equality and respect. And what’s more, it’s a better game for it – once it leaves before morning."

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

StarQuail's Michael Stearns, who you might remember from Xbox Live Indie Games release <em>Astroman late last year, has put out another platformer called Tiny Barbarian, releasing it for free on PC. While he only worked on the (awesome) art for Astroman, Stearns programmed this project by himself in Game Maker.

The game follows "a love-struck barbarian [chasing] a mysterious woman who does not reciprocate his feelings", and is inspired by R.E.Howard's Conan the Barbarian short story "The Frost Giant's Daughter". Stearns says he was also inspired by another retro-style platformer, Alastair John Jack's Arvoesine.

You can download Tiny Barbarian for free here -- if you have trouble with the boss, make sure to check out the Counselor's Corner scan linked on that page!

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If, like me, you're a fan of roguelikes and were disappointed that one of the genre's most interesting titles as of late, Desktop Dungeons, was available for only Windows PCs, sulk no more! QFC Design has finally brought the streamlined roguelike to Macs!

"Yup, after battling with [Game Maker] for OSX on and off, we’ve managed to reach a reasonably stable point," says QCF's Danny "Dislekcia" Day. "It’s basically the same version of the alpha that’s available for PC, but now you can play it on your Mac doohickeys!"

For those unfamiliar with Desktop Dungeons, which is a finalist for the Independent Games Festival's Seamus McNally Grand Prize and Excellence in Design Awards, here's a quick description:

"Desktop Dungeons is a ten-minute 'dungeon crawl' adventure that distills the roguelike genre to its most basic components, turning it into a single-screen puzzle adventure comparable to the likes of Oasis and Tower of the Sorcerer.

Using absolutely every resource at their disposal, players need to balance dungeon exploration and treasure looting against frequent combat and divine requests."

[Via @Capy_Nathan]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[In the latest in our "Road to the IGF" series of interviews with 2011 IGF finalists, Kris Graft speaks with Alexander Bruce about his 2011 IGF Nuovo Award nomination for Hazard: The Journey of Life.]

Known around game conferences for his charismatic presentations and a blinding pink suit, Alexander "Demruth" Bruce's enthusiasm for game development is particularly clear when he talks about his self-described "art game," Hazard: The Journey of Life.

The game is a finalist in the 2011 Independent Games Festival Nuovo Award category and powered by Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3. But players would be hard-pressed to recognize that this is the same engine used in mainstream games like Gears of War and Mass Effect.

There are no space marines, no aliens; just the player, a multipurpose "gun" and challenging puzzles that Bruce uses to convey philosophical ideas. Hazard's unique art style values simplicity and stark color contrasts over the hyper-detailed realism that the engine is capable of producing.

A regular in video game competitions, Bruce's game has already won accolades at contests including Epic's Make Something Unreal contest, IndiePubGames' competition, Sense of Wonder Night, IGF China and other shows.

Here, Melbourne, Australia-based Bruce explains some of the background behind the creation of Hazard, which he humorously bills as an "MAWPFPSPEPAG," or a "multiple award-winning philosophical first-person single-player exploration puzzle art game" -- a completely unnecessary acronym that's also a pretty accurate description.

What background do you have making games?

My commercial record from working at studios is pretty awesome: two cancelled titles, one game that was top of the charts in the UK for a while, one game that reviewed horribly and caused the studio to close and a sprint cars game.

I maintain that I caused none of that to happen though. Outside of that, I don't have a long history of making games. Chris Hecker said he started making games back in 1996? I started making my own cereal back in 1996.

What development tools did you use?

Visual Studio, PhotoShop and Unreal Engine 3. Some people complain that Unreal is limited, because you only get access to UnrealScript (with the UDK), and they've read that it's 20 times slower than native C++, etc., etc. But, I'm pretty sure they're either lying about how much they actually know about Unreal, or were hellbent on rolling their own code anyway.

Sure, creating a game like Super Meat Boy in Unreal Engine 3 would probably seem limiting, but I don't know why anyone would attempt that in the first place. Find the tools that best suit your needs, or write everything yourself.

I've created this game as a single person, entirely in script, and the game is nothing like what Unreal was designed for. If anything, it's even more interesting that I've managed to make this game using only UnrealScript, given that people don't have any idea how a bunch of the technical stuff in it was done at all. Having this big commercial engine to work with gave me a whole lot of things to break, without having to code any of it from scratch.

How long have you been working on the game?

Oh man, too long. I had concepts and ideas that I wanted to get out of my head since 2006, and was just chipping away at them over the years. I spent six months working on Hazard in my spare time in 2009, and I spent all of 2010 working on it full time.

The whole time, I was convinced that it was "only a couple of months away from release." I'm happy to say that it's now "only a couple of months away from release"!

How did you come up with the concept for Hazard?

I wanted to make Snake, and I apparently failed at that -- a really strange implementation of Snake turned into a multiplayer arena combat game about destroying the world, which turned into a single player puzzle game, which then became a game about life, exploration, psychology, non-Euclidean space and manipulable geometry.

It's all been a very iterative process of solving one design problem with a very unconventional solution, seeing the ramifications of that, then solving further problems with even more unconventional solutions. I wanted to know where doing that would take me, and I kept finding interesting things along the way that became part of the core experience.

Are you some kind of philosopher? Why so interested in philosophy with Hazard? Also, let's see some official philosopher credentials.

You know, this is an interesting question, because I don't actually think that Chris Hecker is a spy, or that Notch is a miner. So I'm sad to say it, but I don't have a doctorate in philosophy either.

When coming up with puzzles for the game, did they start with a philosophical idea, or did they start with a gameplay idea that led to a philosophical concept?

Both. In some instances I had a really weird puzzle that I needed to write a message for, and in other instances I had messages I wanted to communicate, and therefore needed to build puzzles around them. I was really struggling with some of the puzzle designs before I latched onto the philosophy idea.

What was the inspiration behind the game's art style?

Half technical reasons, half wanting to not look like every other Unreal game out there, and half wanting to know what an inverse lighting system would look like. Before you say that you can't have three halves, you should go experience how space works in Hazard.

Do you expect players to learn something about themselves by playing Hazard? Do you encourage them to really analyze the "purpose" behind the puzzles?

Not really. I've had some people tell me that they didn't think the messages were very insightful, and I've had others tell me that it was a great game to play when they were depressed, because the whole game was about positive reinforcement to overcoming challenges.

The more important thing is that [the challenges] make the game personal for the player. People interpret them differently, and therefore get different things out of the game. Not everyone can relate to being Futuristic Space Hulk Marine #2097, but they can relate to trying to make the right choices, unforeseen consequences, finding something difficult and then searching for the meaning behind it, etc.

Have you played any of the other IGF finalists? Any games you've particularly enjoyed?

I haven't played as many as I'd have liked, but I'll rectify that at the GDC. I want SpyParty to win though. When I first played that, I was like, "holy hell this is difficult and I have no idea how I'm supposed to get good at it," but that's what makes it so great.

You really have to throw away everything that normally makes you seem skillful in other competitive games (speed, accuracy, maneuverability, etc.), as acting like that in SpyParty will instantly get you killed. I'm a big fan of games that ask you to start over and learn how to play again, not through bad interfaces, but through exceptional design.

What do you think of the current state of the indie scene?

I'm glad I don't have to mail physical copies of the game to people, like Tim Sweeney did when he started Epic MegaGames. That would be the worst!

What are your thoughts on the commercial appeal of Hazard?

People used to ask this question a lot. Whether I was concerned about whether or not people would want to buy this thing, given that it was a bit weird and that it was about philosophy. But I get fewer questions about that now, once people understand that there's actually far more to it than that, even from just a games perspective.

There's always the issue of the game being so different, so out there, that it's hard to know how to market it by comparison to anything else, but that's what also makes it appealing. There isn't anything out there that you can really compare this to.

It's pretty much like Vegemite, which tastes weird and can't be consumed in large quantities unless you want to make yourself sick. If you were trying to sell that by comparing it to chocolate, you'd have utterly failed at making a good spread, but they don't do that. People buy it because it's Vegemite, and there's nothing out there like it.

What's this I hear about porcupines in urban settings and cereal boxes?

I guess you'll just have to hang out with me at the GDC to know what this means. This can't be explained, only experienced.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nintendo of Europe continues to find interesting ways to promote Art Academy, its DSiWare-turned-retail application that teaches drawing and painting techniques. I suppose its willingness to explore uncommon marketing opportunities partially explains how the game has so far sold over 1.5 million copies around the world!

As part of its latest promotion for the three-month-old software, the company partnered with the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium to offer a free workshop last weekend that took participants through a tour of its famous works and provided a personal painting course with copies of Art Academy on Nintendo DSi XLs.

The museum and photographer Lawrence Schoonbroodt captured a bunch of images from the event, which you can see in this Flickr set. I've also included some shots of attendees re-creating paintings on the provided DSi XLs after the break:

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Organizers of GDC 2011 are highlighting a first-ever public lecture from Cave Story creator Pixel, plus talks on Playdead's acclaimed Limbo and Chris Crawford on gaming's 'days of yore'.

As the overall session list for the February/March event expands further, following the announcement of the classic postmortems series and a keynote from Nintendo's Satoru Iwata, new lectures continue to be showcased.

These new talks are part of GDC 2011's Main Conference, which takes place at the Moscone Center from Wednesday March 2nd to Friday March 4th, 2011 during the pre-eminent, San Francisco-based event.

The GDC 2011 Main Conference features discipline-specific Tracks dedicated to programming, design, art, audio, business and management, and production.

These additions to the GDC 2011 roster, highlighted for the first time here, include the following lectures:

- In his first-ever public speech and Western appearance regarding much-beloved 2D indie title Cave Story, Japanese 'dojin' game developer Daisuke 'Pixel' Amaya will discuss his creative process in making the PC freeware title that debuted in 2004.

The evocative retro-themed game -- a 2D platform adventure with genuine emotion, depth, and an intriguing story -- which took 5 years to complete, is an IGF finalist this year in its enhanced WiiWare version, and Amaya will talk about what went both right and wrong in creating a game that turned out completely unlike what he initially had in mind.

- Presenting a lecture called 'Designing Limbo's Puzzles', Playdead's lead gameplay designer Jeppe Carlsen discusses design takeaways from the most-nominated game in this year's prestigious Game Developers Choice Awards.

The talk will discuss "puzzle design principles and the creative, iterative process of going from early puzzle idea to a polished puzzle in the shipped game", including an in-editor "live, carefully commented creation of a rudimentary puzzle", and joins a second lecture from the firm's Martin Stig Andersen on 'The Environment is the Orchestra: Soundscape Composition in Limbo'.

- As part of the special lectures around the 25th GDC show, original CGDC founder and Balance Of Power creator Chris Crawford will present a session called 'In Days Of Yore', explaining how "the earliest days of computer games were times of technological swashbuckling, shoestring budgets, amateur designers, amateurish products, and wild experimentation. "

As Crawford's description explains: "Nobody knew what the hell they were doing, but everybody knew that we were creating a new medium and a new industry. Come back to the Wild West days of game design, when games were created by individuals and sold in zip-loc bags. You'll be amazed by the differences -- and stunned by the similarities."

Other notable lectures not yet highlighted include Magic: The Gathering-related designer Skaff Elias on 'What Can Video Games Learn from CCGs?', as well as Naughty Dog's John Bellomy on animating NPCs in the Uncharted franchise, and Red Storm's Richard Dansky on 'The Player-Shaped Hole: Allowing for Both Narrative and Story'.

Game Developers Conference 2011 -- the 25th iteration of the industry-leading show -- will be held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from February 28th to March 4th, and pre-show registration is open until February 27th. For more information on all aspects of the show, visit the official GDC 2011 website.

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Atari and Killspace Entertainment have given us our first glimpse for its upcoming PC/Xbox360/PS3 revival of Yars' Revenge, offering a concept art-filled trailer of the game's Hayao Miyazaki- and Avatar-inspired environments.

Here you'll see how the companies have modernized the original release's characters (Yar now looks like some kind of anime-ish robot/girl hybrid instead of a strange insect sprite) and gameplay, turning it into a Sin & Punishment-esque on-rails shooter.

So, yeah, it looks pretty much nothing like the early '80s Atari 2600 game you remember, but at least it looks like a fun shooter?

[Via Big Download]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Def Jam Rapstar publisher Autumn Games announced that it will release Skullgirls, a fast-paced 2D fighter from new indie developer Reverge Labs (headed by former Pandemic lead designer Richard Wyckoff), to "high-definition" home consoles later this year. 

The game features a bizarre cast of girls all fighting to acquire an artifact known as the Skull Heart, which will grant its owner a single wish. If the owner's heart is impure, though, her wish and body will be "twisted my malice", transforming her into a monstrous Skullgirl with immense power.

Skullgirl's official site has revealed eight characters so far, like the purple-haired female above:

"Filia is a young schoolgirl whose memories were devoured by the parasite Samson. Now attached to the back of her head, he has become her only source of guidance. The beast offers to help recover her memories in exchange for granting him a wish using the Skull Heart."

The interesting character designs are courtesy of director Alex Ahad, whose work has previously appeared in Scott Pilgrim and Lava Punch. More than a dozen other talented artists/animators are also working on the game, including Mariel Cartwright and Eric Muentes.

"We're aiming to create a new take on fighting games, drawing on our own experience as competitive gamers to combine the best elements of classic fighters into something with intense action, an engaging story and the most advanced 2D fighting engine ever created," says Reverge's Wyckoff

The CEO adds, "Autumn Games is quickly making a name for itself in the industry as a publisher of fresh and exciting games and a true partner to independent game developers, and they were the ideal choice for us to partner with on Skullgirls."

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[In this analysis piece, our own Leigh Alexander looks at recent gaming interface trends, suggesting audiences always want the most abstract route possible -- with notable implications for social media and gamification.]

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Or, that's what people say, generally when they mean that the most direct way to solve a problem is ideal.

Although the 1980s gave us novelty power gloves and game pads, the most popular games were the ones that required a D-pad; press A to do this, B to do that. Simple. And yet the direct route isn't always very exciting.

We want to know where the flying cars are, of course. We were supposed to have our flying cars, despite the fact that their introduction onto the landscape would cause absolute logistical nightmares for existing cars, roads, trains, air travel, you name it.

So we play with interfaces. We're preoccupied with ways to make real life more exciting, to use technology to make our behaviors feel magical. So while pressing B is probably the most efficient way to jump, the past several years have seen a surge in simulated interfaces -- ones where the inputs are imitations of real behaviors.

These include plastic guitars; motion-control wands that let you "hold" tennis rackets, golf clubs and, naturally, wands; or virtual spaces navigated by an avatar.

The latest frontier, camera-controlled gaming as pioneered by Microsoft's Kinect, removes abstraction almost entirely, in favor of letting the player use his or her own body to literally simulate behaviors that will be acted out in the game.

Getting your average person -- one not particularly versed in gaming, for example -- to understand that a hand wave translates to an in-game behavior might be easier than asking them to learn a controller button combination that has the same effect. But while literal simulation may be more immediately comprehensible, the idea that it's more efficient in terms of interface is largely fallacious.

The '3D Web' Fad

For recent years' most obvious example, look at the sharp rise and sudden implosion of the "virtual worlds" craze as it was represented as recently as five years ago. Second Life makes magazine covers, an entire industry springs up around "virtual events", and there are entire schools of thought that envision a "3D Web" in the immediate future.

According to that vision, nobody would simply open a web browser and click around boring web pages anymore. Stores, media sites and social utilities would be represented as 3D virtual spaces that users would navigate with an avatar.

There would no longer be "walled garden" virtual worlds; everything would be interconnected, with a "universal avatar" that could freely wander the web, meeting other avatars, creating art and merchandise. Your avatar strolls into a bustling virtual marketplace, purchases a T-shirt, and dons the virtual version while the real version gets shipped to your home for you to wear.

It sounds exciting, and even logical. As people became more and more entrenched, from commerce to personal social behavior, with the internet, it makes sense to assume they'd want to make the experience ever more lifelike, ever more immersive.

But as it turns out, the only real market for virtual worlds was those early adopters -- futurists and consumers of science fiction who enjoyed playing with the concepts they could only read about as kids. There might have been a rush of excitement, but the virtual world phenomenon never grew as big as was expected.

As it turned out, that's because your average web user doesn't want to enter a virtual environment, create a customizable avatar, walk through a virtual plaza and interact with the avatar of a shopkeeper in order to make a purchase. Instead, they can just type in "Amazon.com", click what they want, and be done. All of that simulation just complicates things; an abstracted "shop" is much easier.

So virtual environments remained constrained to that limited audience of enthusiasts or people who had found very individualized, specific applications for the concept. The Second Life craze passed by; people flocked to Facebook, where a largely text-based interface that was essentially a network of interconnected, glorified bulletin boards turned out to be more accessible and more effective.

Waving At The Games Space

If we look at the video game industry, products that use simulated rather than abstracted interfaces have largely proven to be fads too, as in the case of instrument-based music games. Or at best, the addressable audience turns out to be much smaller than initial reception suggests.

There's no denying that the Wii reached an unprecedented userbase and revolutionized gaming by attracting brand-new audiences that had previously been unreachable, providing a huge market to explore new game design ideas.

But the hardware falloff has been steep once the Wii reached market saturation, and software sales have been challenging, particularly as concerns the most active market of gamers. Although it's impossible to prove, the theory that some good chunk of Wii buyers bought the console as a toy or fitness promise and then let it gather dust once the novelty wore off is at least viable.

Even developers and publishers that have thrived in the casual software market now feel there's less opportunity on the Wii platform these days. Aside from Nintendo's own Wii Sports, sports titles sell less briskly; the music craze appears officially over. It's arguable that Ubisoft stumbled on such an enormous hit with its Just Dance brand because that particular category had not yet been explored.

Even in the absence of data it's evident that literal-interface products follow a quick spike and fall-off pattern. It starts with a curiosity that gains strong initial attention, but then loses it once people realize that it's much easier to push a button than it is to swing their arms around.

Social Media And Gamifiers Take Heed

Now that social media's migration from the province of the tech-savvy to everyman phenomenon is well underway, lessons in the way that mainstream audiences naturally gravitate toward abstract, not literal interfaces become especially important.

Numerous new companies are popping up hoping to find exciting, engaging ways of using frameworks like Twitter, Facebook and mobile networks to engage audiences in play and commerce. But unless they can keep the abstraction concept in mind, it's going to be tough to permanently engage anyone on a meaningful scale.

Because socialization is basic. The most direct way to engage with your friend is to turn to her and talk. Some of your friends will be interested in gaming or digital culture and some won't.

Even if you're with someone from the former group, will it genuinely enrich your interaction with them to play a geolocation game where you have to complete "challenges" against each other in public to win digital badges or whatever? Me, I'd say, "uh, let's just go see the movie, dude."

And your friend who's less plugged in? Will he appreciate that you're not really present for his conversation over lunch because you're trying to check in on FourSquare to let everyone know that you're at this restaurant having lunch with him?

Ultimately, these interfaces aren't "social", as much as it sounds like they are in presentations to venture capital firms. And if it's simpler to connect with someone directly, people are going to want to do that -- to abstract the interface -- rather than to use these tools.

Sometimes the digital world looms too large in our minds. We live, work in and love this space, and we forget that as interconnected as it's becoming with our lives, it's not our whole lives. Game design concepts engage and motivate people when they've chosen to take time to sit down and play.

But try to implement them all over a person's working and personal life, install ideas of achievement, reward and connectivity all over everything, and people will naturally start to resist. There are a lot of ways to engage people, but creating or elaborating interfaces where none are needed creates a product or trend that's fun in concept, but has surprisingly little staying power in practice.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Despite all the attention it received from gaming blogs in the West, the Radiant Silvergun Xbox 360 arcade stick announced last December won't be seeing a release -- Japanese accessory manufacturer Hori notified consumers who put in a reservation for one that it cancelled production due to a lack of preorders.

The Real Arcade Pro EX RS-1 was modeled after the control panel of Radiant Silvergun's original 1998 Japanese arcade control panel (with extra buttons to match the standard Xbox 360 pad), and was supposed to release in Japan alongside Treasure's re-release of the shoot'em up to Xbox Live Arcade this year.

It's not surprising that Hori didn't receive many reservations, as I imagine the number of fans who like the cult game enough to spend ¥13,500, or $165, on a special arcade stick is likely very low (NCSX, which appears to still be taking pre-orders, was asking for $289 due to "special arrangements to import the joysticks to North America").

It didn't help that the window for putting in a reservation for the limited edition stick, December 17 to January 04, was too short to permit a substantial amount of preorders.

[Via MechaDamashii]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

While you wait for Monaco, the multiple Independent Games Festival award-winning (Seamus McNally Grand Prize, Excellence In Design) co-op action stealth title, to finally release, why not pass the time by reading the game's original design document, which Andy Schatz wrote way back in 2003 and posted on Facebook earlier today?

Schatz points out that the game as it is today is "remarkably similar" to the original planned project, offering the same premise of "low-level game mechanics of Pac-Man married with the stealth features of Hitman." He also provides some context for Monaco's birth, dreamed up in between projects while he worked as a programmer at TKO Software.

The document outlines Monaco's basic concepts, character creation and customization, mission flow, assets, and more. It also describes RPG elements that were eventually cut after Schatz decided "it would be easier to balance set characters [without them], and because it's easier to establish personality when the characters are set."

"For some reason, this doc is missing some of the social features that I remember being in that version," says Schatz. "I actually think this doc must have been revised at some point, as you can see by the reference to Casino Royale. I'll detail what the missing features were in the next post, and include a revised doc that I made in order to pitch the game in 2008."

[Via @thesimplicity]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[In this latest Road to the IGF interview with 2011 IGF finalists, Mike Rose speaks with Nicolai Troshinsky about Nuovo-nominated experimental visual/audio mash-up Loop Raccord.]

A finalist in this year's Nuovo Award category, Nicolai Troshinsky's Loop Raccord sees the player manipulating a series of video clips in order to create a continuous movement -- as if each clip is passing an invisible ball around the screen.

Troshinsky has also recently made unconventional titles including innovative iOS title UFO On Tape and the even more bizarre Raccord Sniper, which involves shooting mysteriously cloaked household objects.

Talking to us, he describes his background in illustration, his concept inspirations and his issues with finding the perfect clips to use in Loop Raccord, which is free to download for Windows.

What is your background in making games?

I studied illustration and animation filmmaking. I've been working as a children's book illustrator for five years and I've been teaching storytelling in an animation school since 2009.

I have never learned programming and I have no specific game-making training at all... and I don't want to.

For me, making games, movies, comics or illustrated books is all the same thing. You want to create an experience for somebody to communicate an idea and you have a set of tools to achieve that. Each of those mediums offer a different set of tools with their own particular advantages and disadvantages.

I see storytelling as a game: whenever I am making a film, a book or a comic, I set a series of rules for myself and I try to play with them to reach their limits. Watching a movie or reading a book is not a passive experience.

The viewer/reader can perceive those rules if he feels that they are set for him, and he can play with you, trying to decode them to anticipate the author, and be surprised and amused whenever he cannot.

So in many senses, even if I have no specific game-making background, I feel like I've been making games for a while.

What development tools did you use?

I use Multimedia Fusion 2. It's the thing that seemed the easiest to use without programming knowledge and I'm really happy with how it works. I'm still a newbie, but I kind of like being a poor programmer. It forces me to find weird solutions for things that are probably very easy to do but seem very complicated to me.

How did you come up with the concept for Loop Raccord?

My main inspirations came from Peter Greenaway's experiments such as 'The Tulse Luper Suitcases' or animation shorts like Virgil Wildrich's 'Fast Film'. But it's also self-inspired -- movement raccord is a cinematographic effect that I'm quite familiar with and which I explored in my own short films.

With this game I simply tried to use what I learned in film-making and apply pure cinematographic rules as gameplay.

How difficult was it to find video clips that could be 'synchronized'?

It was quite difficult, actually. I dug into archive.org for institutional films and commercials, but having a shot with a clear movement that crosses the screen is quite rare. Sometimes a forty-minute film had only one shot that I could use, and taking in account that I needed different shots for each combination of directions and the fact that I wanted to keep the original framings made it a hard task.

Some directions, like a movement going from the upper to the right part of the frame, proved to be extremely rare. I would have loved to have even more and better shots, but they were simply too hard to find.

Some people have complained that in certain cases it is not very clear how a movement should be synchronized. The fact is that certain shots simply don't have a very clear movement, but I just couldn't find anything better.

If you could start the project over again, what would you do differently?

Nothing. I'm pretty happy with the game as it is, and making it was a pretty interesting experience. Some people have complained about the sound, as the effect is rather violent when there are a lot of clips looping together.

I hesitated to do something about that, but in the end I see it as a natural way of increasing the difficulty as you progress in the level: the more sounds are looping at the same time, the more difficult it is to concentrate on your task.

How long did you work on the game?

It was a submission for the Experimental Gameplay Project and I spent a week to complete it, just as was intended to be for this challenge. Without programming knowledge, the longest thing was to make the random level generation system -- I'm still amazed that it works. Later on, I spent a couple of afternoons to fix some bugs and add some more shots to the game for more variety.

Were there any elements that you experimented with that just flat out didn't work with your vision?

The first thing I tried to do is just a straight line of shots. You should be raccording a simple and continuous movement from left to right, and as you reached the last frame everything should have scrolled unlocking new shots.

I just couldn't get the scrolling to work properly and it felt quite boring anyways so I changed the display to a 4x3 fullscreen grid really quick.

Have you played any of the other IGF finalists? Any games you particularly enjoyed?

I played and enjoyed very much A House in California -- I'm really interested in the games Jake Elliott is making. I also played the other freeware ones: Desktop Dungeons, Super Crate Box and Hazard.

I played the demo for Amnesia, but I just couldn't finish it as it made me too nervous. I was particularly impressed by the sound work on that game. It's an amazing game overall, but I won't buy it simply because I know I won't play it. I have Penumbra and I played maybe three hours in five months.

The game I am the most excited about is Spy Party. It's the one that I feel closer to the kind of things I would like to do with my games. It's a simply brilliant concept, and I can't wait to play it. I hope it wins!

What do you think of the current state of the indie scene?

I am really excited about it. It's very alive, everybody is trying different stuff and nobody seems to know where they are going, but everything seems possible. I feel a lot of enthusiasm and passion and you can see it evolve and define itself in front of your eyes.

It's the most exciting moment to be part of this, as experimental games are still incredibly rare. If you check the 400 entries for the IGF, you'll see that the ones that are selected for the Nuovo award are almost the only ones that seem to be experimental in some sense.

The only thing that annoys me is this endless debate about games as art. It surprises me that everybody has an opinion, but almost nobody seem to have a clear idea of what's a 'game' and what is 'art'.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

German publisher BitComposer Games announced a new name for its "totally revamped version" of beloved tactical RPG Jagged Alliance 2, retitling it from Jagged Alliance 2: Reloaded to now Jagged Alliance: Back in Action.

The company intends to publish the game in European countries like Russia and Poland, but it's also struck a global distribution and marketing agreement with Kalypso Media  (Tropico 3) to release the game in North America, Asia, and other English-speaking export countries.

Kalypso will also publish the title through its extensive digital distribution channels. BitComposer's managing director Wolfgang Duhr says, "We are very confident, that with such a capable partner, we can fulfill the high expectations associated with the revival of the Jagged Alliance brand."

Announced last August, the Jagged Alliance 2 remake features new 3D graphics, a real-time "Plan & Go" system that replaces the original's turn-based combat and "fog of war"/line-of-sight system, and other changes.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Waxy.org's Andy Baio has posted a fantastic list of metagames -- that is, playable games about video games -- offering a resource for titles that "comment on game design, mechanics, or culture".

"Since I couldn't find an exhaustive list (this TV Tropes guide to 'Deconstruction Games' is the closest), I thought I'd try to pull one together along with some gameplay videos," he explains. 

The collection breaks the metagames into five categories: Abusive Games (Desert Bus), Minimalist Games (You Have to Burn the Rope), Game Mechanics Gone Wild (You Only Live Once), Violent Games (Super Columbine Massacre RPG), and Gaming Culture (Segagaga).

Baio says the list posted so far is just a starting point and invites readers to send him suggested additions. I see at least one metagame that needs a mention: Bokura no TV Game Kentei, a Japan-only video game trainer for the DS featuring microgames based on classic Namco Bandai titles.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While last year was the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man, 2011 is the 30th birthday of another Namco Bandai franchise: Galaga. Celebrating both, the company announced a new release, Pac-Man & Galaga Dimensions, coming on a single cartridge to the Nintendo 3DS.

Shown off in the latest issue of Japanese magazine Famitsu, the game will consist of two 3D adaptations called Galaga 3D Impact and Pac-Man Tilt. The former transforms space-shooting arcade game to a 3D shooter from the perspective of the ship's cockpit.

Andriasang, which translated details from the magazine, says, "The action is on rails, with your ship flying automatically through a fixed course. You'll have to simply look around and aim. This is done via gyro controls, where you physically move the system around to turn your viewpoint."

Pac-Man Tilt is less like the traditional maze games most are familiar with, dropping the yellow mascot into a side-scrolling game in which you jump and swing through stages filled with gimmick obstacles (e.g. tilting the 3DS to swing a platform Pac-Man is standing on, sending him flying into the air).

Namco Bandai hasn't yet announced a release date for Pac-Man & Galaga Dimensions. Judging by the initial screenshots and concepts, I wouldn't be surprised if non stereoscopic 3D versions of these ended up on the iPhone soon.

[Via Tkzun]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Missus Raroo heads down memory lane with a look at the Sega Dreamcast's beloved Phantasy Star Online in honor of its ten year birthday. If it wasn't for Phantasy Star Online, the Raroos might not be married with kids today! Mister Raroo contributed illustrations, making this a true husband and wife team effort.]

A Whole New World

Time flies! Mister Raroo just informed me that we recently passed the tenth anniversary of Phantasy Star Online’s release. This, then, also marks ten years from when we were deep in the courting phase of our relationship, meeting up for virtual “dates” in the world of Ragol. Before you jump to any conclusions that we met online, please know that our love story did not have any game-related roots.

We actually met in a teacher education course when we were both working toward our credentials. Our professor grouped us in teams to discuss children’s books and we bonded over the literary work: Shaq and the Beanstalk.

I honestly can’t remember when I figured out that Mister Raroo was a gamer. I was such a complete non-gamer, having been raised in a household without video game systems of any sort, that the concept of gaming and gamers did not even exist for me.

So how exactly did I go from being a gaming virgin to meeting up nightly to down some monsters in the forests and caves of PSO? Part of it had to do with the fact that I fell into the trappings of young love, eager to show interest in the hobbies of my boyfriend. I like to think I wasn’t too pathetic about it since it wasn’t like I pretended to have any firsthand knowledge—I was simply open to learning about games. Furthermore, it wasn’t like I blindly fell for all of Mister Raroo’s interests. I never, for instance, became a metalhead even though the Raroo likes to rock.

All the same, as an empty vessel, Mister Raroo quickly educated me about video game systems from the then-current Dreamcast and Neo Geo Pocket Color to older systems like the NES and Sega Saturn. If you have ever noticed Mister Raroo’s enthusiasm about video games bleed through in his writing, you can only imagine how powerful it comes across in person.

While not made of salesman stock, he is passionate when he believes in something, and he has a way of convincing you that it is indeed the “best thing ever.” With my self-admitted naiveté, I fell for that line more than once in our early years. When he told me multiple times that “The Dreamcast is the best system ever,” I was swayed into bidding on one off of eBay. Being new to games, I was at first drawn to Raroo-recommended games with cute, colorful graphics such as Chu Chu Rocket! and Space Channel 5.

While Mister Raroo would do his best to convince me that Chu Chu Rocket! was the best game ever, I decided it was much too hard for me, because I’m not good at keeping up with the frenetic pace. Similarly, while he tried to convince me that Space Channel 5 was also the best game ever, I realized that I unfortunately have no rhythm. Both of these games were certainly girl-friendly in appearance, but they weren’t matches for me. It wasn’t until Mister Raroo bought me Phantasy Star Online for Valentine’s Day of 2001 that I discovered my true gaming affinity was for dungeon crawls and role playing games.

Back in the Day

For any of you younger gamers out there, you have to realize that online gaming a decade ago was much different from the online gaming of today. Back in those days, we played online with one another via a high tech 56K modem connection. While some of you may scoff at the primitive connectivity, there was certainly a charming innocence to the online experiences that we participated in back then.

Mister Raroo would log in from his mom’s home where he lived while I logged in from my parents’ home where I lived. We would meet up in a lobby as “Jeurja,” a Ranger with a giant green afro and “Akemi,” a smaller statured Ranger with pink pigtails. Many times we would also meet up with Mister Raroo’s online friend “substance j,” and together the three of us would venture out on missions to slay everything from the annoying Rag Rappies to the overshadowing Dragon.

Since there wasn’t voice chatting, we typed messages back and forth using our Dreamcast keyboards. Some of the messages we would share in speech bubbles with all players in our party, but even more fun were the times Mister Raroo and I would exchange private messages unbeknownst to the others.

Private messaging came in handy especially when we ended up playing with a random fourth player who had less-than-gentlemanly manners. One easy indication of a player’s character, for instance, is how they handle the loot held within the treasure boxes scattered across the game world. Mister Raroo and I always felt it was good manners to try to equitably share in the items that we came across. If there were four boxes that each contained in-game currency meseta and other items, it made sense that each player would get some.

But, of course, there are always people out there who believe it’s “all about me.” They would run ahead of the group, shoot up the boxes, and quickly snatch up all of the money and items without pause. At times like this, Mister Raroo and I would certainly start privately messaging about that fourth player. I can remember us corroborating our stories to quit playing just so that we could disband the party and then log on again in avoidance of the greedy hog of the day.

In an even worse case, we once got stuck with a plain old bully who had no patience for playing with a “little girl” like me. At that point, Mister Raroo’s chivalrous nature came to surface as he stood up for me, green afro held high and all.

It was early evidence of what I’ve come to call his Papa Bear side--Mister Raroo is a peaceful teddy bear in most cases, but if anyone ever dares to mess with his family, Papa Bear comes out and he is fierce. He not only stood up to bullies in the virtual world of PSO, but has been known to transform into Papa Bear in the real world as well. Just ask the homeless guy who made the mistake of sexually harassing me while we were at the dog park one day!

Of course, in the case of PSO, it is ridiculous when you remember that it’s not as if we were confronted with the bully face-to-face in a park filled with live dogs, but we were instead standing in a virtual forest filled with virtual wolves. And, instead of puffing up his chest in real life, Mister Raroo could impress his superiority only by flaunting his virtual armaments.

The Further Adventures

Perhaps this Valentine’s Day, a decade since Mister Raroo first presented me with my very own copy of Phantasy Star Online, we should celebrate the occasion by powering on the old Dreamcast once again. It’ll be like time traveling to the younger, more carefree versions of ourselves, to a time in our lives when we could spend hours a night meeting up in an imaginary world where we embarked on adventures and had the power to slay monsters without worrying about getting our kids to sleep or balancing our bank accounts.

Then again, even though we may not have the luxury to venture to Ragol each night, we still team up daily to tackle a couple of other monsters, namely our two little kids. Actually, calling them monsters doesn’t feel quite right. I guess I’d like to think of them instead as two Rangers-in-training that have arrived in our lives to complete our party. Adventure awaits!

[Missus Raroo doesn't consider herself to be a "real" gamer, but between listening to her husband excitedly talk about games on a regular basis and trying her hand at a select few titles herself, she knows a thing or two about video games. She served as the co-editor-in-chief of the Game Time With Mister Raroo print zine and was called the "heart and soul" of the publication by readers. She lives in El Cajon, CA with her husband, son, daughter, and pets. You may reach Missus Raroo at koopaboo@yahoo.com. For all your Game Time With Mister Raroo needs, visit Club Raroo!]