[Every Friday on Venus Patrol, designer Dominique ‘Dom2D‘ Ferland presents TIGSource DevLog Magazine, a visual guide to the newest & most interesting in-development games making the rounds on the invaluable TIGSource forums. Looking for inspiration, or just the very first look at the amazing games we’ll be talking about in the future? Click any image to learn more, and come back each Friday for the latest picks!]
As the month of November ends, we see the Sports game competition nearing completion. Blood Ball, Flog, Home Run and Unicorrida all seem pretty much finished, and we can’t wait to try them out. A surprising addition to the compo roster is Spelunky‘s creator and TIGSource guru Derek Yu’s own entry – a funky tennis game called Boogie Tennis.
Poor old ‘Frosty Balls’ – hosted on the now defunct gamejacket site, which means all the sites that hosted it get blankity blank rather than a game. So Hey – I’ve re-uploaded it and added a moustache and a wolly hat for posterity !
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/606867
I made the snow sounds on this by twisting sheet polysyrene into the mic ! #foliofailio
And the other new development I’ve had in store for this week: introducing Slayers, a new multiplayer (or single-player vs. AI!) game set in the God of Blades universe that creators White Whale Games have released as a free PC/Mac download, in partnership with Venus Patrol.
As you can see on the new Slayers site, White Whale describe the game as the love-child of Robert E. Howard, football, and Bushido Blade, where two players take the role of God of Blades‘ enemy Champions, sending out a stock of foot-soldiers in to do battle “on a desolate bridge for the favor of their blasphemous gods.”
With subtle hints of Nidhogg, Slayers is a deadly tug-of-war to reach your opponent’s side of the bridge — when you do, you can immediately call out your opponent’s Champion (negating any remaining foot-soldier stock), or defeat all of their soldiers to do the same — and face-off, Champion to Champion, for victory.
Even better, when you successfully complete the game, Slayers generates an amazing 70s pulp-fantasty-esque magazine cover, showcasing your victory. We’ve run tournaments of the game both at an earlier meeting of JUEGOS RANCHEROS, and at the most recent Fantastic Arcade, and it’s always gone over amazingly with the crowd, both players and spectators.
This is the first, but definitely not the last, partnership of this kind to release games to Venus Patrol’s members and readers — I’ve got a couple more surprises like this lined up through the new year. I look forward to you, as readers, letting us know what you think, and, as developers, if there’s a game you’d like to partner with the site to release like this, drop me a line and we can talk about it more!
As I previously hinted at earlier in the week and have finally polished to near-perfection, you’ll find a few new additions to the Venus Patrol family have just gone live. The first, pictured above (and teased in the top bar since the site started rolling), is Venus Patrol B-Side.
Think of B-Side as just that: a selection of only quasi-game-related findings I dig up on a daily basis through my trawls across the way-too-many-thousands of sites in my Google Reader. You’ll find music, art, animation, motion graphics, illustration, comics and a whole bunch more, from a wide variety of insanely talented people.
I often get asked if I know any artists or musicians who might be willing to jump in and give a new indie game an aesthetic overhaul to set it a step above the rest, almost as often as I get asked by artists if they know any developers who might need a hand with the same: B-Side‘s one way that I hope to bring both of those worlds together more formally.
I totally don’t expect that you’ll love absolutely everything there, but it’s a way to highlight more of that ‘greater culture sandwich’ Capy’s Kris Piotrowski promised in the Venus Patrol Kickstarter video. It may not be for everyone, but it might just be for you.
The other new branch of the tree is Venus Patrol Micro. When I first launched Venus Patrol, a surprising amount of you requested that the site figure out a way to work its way into Tumblr more formally, as the Dashboard there was one of their main daily sources of keeping abreast of what’s going on.
The only thing holding me back was that just weeks before Venus Patrol launched, the top cross-posting plugin, Tumblrize, had just fallen prey to new API changes at Tumblr, and it looked like there was no hope in sight. Enter Ari Velazquez, who, over the past couple weeks, has been invaluable at updating the plugin so that everything that gets posted here gets ported to Tumblr in micro-form. It’s perfect!
As always, if you have anything you’d like to see featured on either Micro or B-Side, or have any feedback on how it all works now, don’t hesitate to get in touch!
Nottingham-based filmmaker Matthew Taylor got in touch with this video he shot at this year’s GameCity of ‘Wild Proteus‘, the live & improvised concert-type playthrough of Ed Key & David Kanaga’s game that I supplied some honestly not super great iPhone footage of a month or so ago.
Taylor ups the ante considerably, as you can see above, and captures a number of magic moments, like a.) the guy so lulled by the lullaby ambiance that he literally nods off, and, on the opposite side of the spectrum, b.) Fez creator Phil Fish, captivated and wide-eyed, drinking in the scenery along with his coffee.
As if you needed any more enticement to get on the bandwagon for Japan’s games-fashion label King of Games, the company has just revealed that any orders placed between now and December 22nd will receive a copy of a limited King of Games 10th Anniversary Special CD, featuring a nice lineup of music, chip & otherwise, including musician & Sound Shapes producer Jason ‘6955‘ Degroot.
You can stream clips of each of the songs above, and order via King of Games, who will also be giving a randomly selected number of orders a bonus, special edition silver-printed version of their ROLY-POLY HERO Kirby tribute shirt. There’s no word yet on whether the CD will see digital release following the promotion, but I’m on the hunt to find out more.
A fantastically and appropriately chaotic version of the transformations at the heart of under-dog (wolf?) arcade classic Altered Beast by Rory ‘Puppytube‘ Morris, a special color version of her submission for the previously-mentioned Sega-tribute art-zine coming from Ted Martens, Paul Veer, Corey Lewis & Ashley Davis.
While further submissions have now been closed, I mention it here because it’s sneak peeks like these that’ve got me super-hyped for the final product — keep your eyes on the SegaZine tumblr for more information on its eventual release.
For me personally, Christmas and Flash gaming go together like Dempsey and Makepeace. Way back in my freelance days I used to go into overdrive during December, partially because there was a lot more demand for branded seasonal games on people sites, but also because I’ve been nuts for drawing snowmen, elves and The Fat Red Man since I could bite crayons.
So sitting on the loo recently I’ve been banging out some of the things I’d be probably be making now if I wasn’t drawing football boots (and probably be getting bid of up to 75 pound a pop for on FGL :P )
this would be a lot like my Advent game from last year (linked downstairs) but MUCH MUCH harder to make. Like the angled shooting on this one anyway..
I like this guy’s one-piece, and would enjoy animating all the birds on this one.
Came very close to actually making this – I’d like the joke that when you opened door 24, the only difference would be that TWO elves fell to their death. ho Ho Ho
I bet someone’s already done this. Easy money !
This would be a cock to code, but christmas trees are nice to draw, and what is more festive than bomb disposal ? And now a little tale to get you in the mood for December…
Here’s the link to last years GameToilet xmas game – which probably doesn’t know what month it is so you’ll get ALL TEH LAZERS. What a mess !
There’s not much more to add than I’ve previously said over here, but, as promised, Terry Cavanagh’s super vital space-disco arcade game Super Hexagon has officially landed on PC & Mac following its iPhone debut, and can now be found on Steam at a discounted price, with a special dual-pack option so you can instantly start a leaderboard rivalry with a friend.
Well, actually, there is the good news that Cavanagh’s seen fit to include the game’s “arcade mode” as an option — which adds local leaderboard entries so you can use the build for exhibitions and your own public tournaments — and that he’s gotten away with one of the best tongue-in-cheek game descriptions on Steam, which you can spot here on your way to purchasing your copy.
