DOUBLE FINE RELEASE ‘MONSTER HUNTER MEETS HARRYHAUSEN’ ONLINE ACTION PROTOTYPE, BRAZEN

In an effort to brace their ongoing campaign to help fund and hone the latest round of two-week ‘Amnesia Fortnight’ prototyping, Double Fine has just announced that anyone that donates to the cause at a higher-than-average price will receive Brazen, 4-player co-op online action game created for an earlier Fortnight round.

Designer Brad Muir — best known as the lead on Double Fine’s recent online action/defense game Iron Brigade (nee Trenched) — calls the game not just a tribute to Capcom’s Monster Hunter, but even more an homage to Ray Harryhausen — the classic stop-motion movie monster animator behind films like Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, and the original Clash of the Titans.

The prototype — awesomely called a “Fynamation production” (in tribute to Harryhausen’s ‘Dynamation’ process), and given a second round of polish past the original Amnesia build — will allow players “choose from three character classes: the stout defensive Stalwart, the agile and versatile Waracle, or the drunkenly unhinged Beerzerker” to “do battle against the Gorgoth, a mythical two headed creature with an insatiable appetite for mankind.”

Head over to the Amnesia Fortnight page to claim your own Brazen copy, and vote on the rest of the contenders for this round of prototyping — the four leads of which I’ll include below the fold.

Hack ‘n Slash, by The Cave & Double Fine Adventure senior programmer Brandon Dillon: “A young elf uses her hacking skills to cheat her way through a classic action adventure.”

Spacebase DF-9, by former BioShock designer JP LeBreton, currently working on The Cave: “Build a space base where aliens can live and work, and watch interesting stories emerge from their simulated lives.”

The White Birch, from The Cave art director Andy Wood: “An ambient platform game (in the style of Ico or Journey) in which a young girl climbs a tower to escape a dark, hazardous forest.”

Autonomous, from Stacking lead & Brutal Legend art director Lee Petty: “Lost in a new-wave futuristic junk yard world, you must build self-directed automatons from found primitives to both explore and survive the hazardous environment.”