It’s probably no coincidence that the weekend PopCap “does a Peggle” (in the parlance of our times) and drops the price for the iPhone version of its wordgame Bookworm from $4.99 to $0.99 (which is still active for a few more days [App Store link]), Flashbang head Matthew Wegner drops this: an automated OCR program to beat the ‘worm at his own game:
I still have a hard time increasing my mental lookup times for bizarre letter combinations. I don’t like the feeling of floundering at a task that I know is more well-suited to a computer. So I thought: Why not have a computer do the actual work?
Head over to his blog to see the process in action, about which he enticingly adds:
I may launch it as a service, actually. It would be amusing to unleash this on the hardcore Bookworm fans. You would take a screenshot, email it to some address, and get your best words emailed back in a minute or two. I wonder if people would actually use that? Only one way to find out…
The above illustration of PaRappa and Lammy jamming (umjamming?), rendered on a page from a music book, is part of a series of prints available for sale at Fort Awesome’s Etsy Shop. The illustrations of the various videogame characters are cute on their own, but their juxtapositions on vintage book pages elevate them to tongue-in-cheek whimsy.
Even without Rogers’ overlying explanation, there’s a lot to be gleaned from the slides, from Disney’s use of ‘weenies’ — distant landmarks to orient and draw the player into your world — storytelling via your environment, and building anticipation through landscape lulls.
A bizarre climax to the short-lived Game Boy Comics series sees the inhabitants of Super Mario Landseek revenge on an unsuspecting player. [via retronauts, via Christian Nutt]
Project Q as it’s currently known, is a new game from Nifflas that’s every bit vector/photo[sur-]real to the blotted pixels of his most famous indie work, Knytt, but which carries over every ounce of ambient exploration that gained Knytt its renown.
In the accompanying IGN interview, Nicalis’s Tyrone Rodrigues and Nygren reveal that the game surely shares some resemblance to Knytt — and may indeed “take part in the same universe.”
But they say that Q, which stars a female protagonist and features new music from Yann ‘Nurykabe‘ van Derr Cruyssen (who helped create music for Knytt Stories [.zip] and the WiiWare Cave Story), sees its main character hopping from planet to planet non-violently finding pieces of a broken transporter, and will feature gameplay involving “a camera to document information and capture the environments.”
Nicalis say the studio “certainly [has] WiiWare in mind” for the game, but that it “could be WiiWare, Wii disc or even PSN, XBLA and PC.”
Harlan is the ‘boxpunx’ creator whose My Virtual Memory line I featured back in March: a paper series dedicated to his favorite gaming memories. He’s been dutifully cranking out model after model since: see especially his ‘Innocence and Rainbows’ lineup of retro-inspired mods/swingers/hippies/disco-freaks/blaxploitation models, and, more on the gaming tip, his (Persona sister spinoff series) Devil Summoner meets Darkstalkers line.
My to-do list for the weekend already included having a look at Minigore [App Store link] — the just debuted iPhone game from Finnish developer Mountain Sheep — but I think that just got bumped straight up to now as friend of Offworld Doc Pop writes in to note a forthcoming cameo that’s truly after my one true heart.
When I suggested we stick a rabbit ship in GSB to see how it could work, I didn’t need to get my lawyer to talk to Wolfire’s lawyer. I didn’t need a strategic planning meeting with the head of corporate strategy, or have to justify to shareholders why we should help out what they would see as our competitors…
This is what I like about the Indie attitude. Indie devs often share tips on game coding, getting decent contract work done, promoting websites and running forums, even the financial side of the best payment providers and who knows a decent accountant etc.
Can you imagine the head of EA giving the head of Activision tips on how to save on their bandwidth bill?
This is the indie attitude, and the indie advantage. We tend to take it for granted, because at the end of the day, me and Jeff are two guys who love games and love making games. Somewhere along the line, the mainstream industry forgot that.
It’s been several months since we last checked in with Hugo Smits and his forthcoming DSiWare downloadable puzzle game Flipper, and since then he’s moved forward with his home-grown voxel engine that ensures nothing stands in the path between the main character and his titular goldfish.
In addition to the new trailer at top, Smits has just announced the hiring of pixel artist Paul Veer who’s entirely recreated your hero, “because nobody (including us – me and Paul) seemed to love the nerd-character.”
