Fantastic news for current backers and also the yet-unconvinced: not only has Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward thrown his weight behind the frequently-featuredKickstarter for LA Game Space — the would-be local/online cultural center and residency space for pushing the medium of games — with the amazingly earnest animated appeal above, you guys, but…
In turn, the LA Game Space folk have opened up a new entry-level $5 tier if you only want Takahashi’s contribution, and have also added it to all upper levels, including the now (including Silly) 31-game pack for $15, alongside games like the previously featured Inputting.
Latest release on his Funny Games label :P Watched this last night and was unnerved enough to draw this to distract me from it’s slightly too gripping moments. It was either that or the ‘knee in front of face’ which I’ve been doing since Darth sliced Ben Kenobi’s head off in star wars.
for more of this sort of thing see numbers 89 & 445
Great news for all the iPhone-less: creator Terry Cavanagh has just announced that his super essential & frequently-featured arcade game Super Hexagon will be releasing for Windows & Mac on Steam next Tuesday.
The home computer builds won’t be ones you’ve potentially played at festivals and parties in the past: Cavanagh explains that he’s re-written the entire game from the ground up, with the added benefit of running “at a higher resolution than the iOS version, and runs fast and silky smooth on every machine I’ve been able to get my hands on – a very important thing for a game like this.”
If you haven’t yet experienced it, track a copy down as quickly as you can: not only is it one of that generation’s best 3D adventures, but, as the comic does a masterful job of expressing, it’s got one of the most cutely tragic portrayals of domestic turmoil under-pinning the entire game, a fantastic and trademark humanistic touch from director Kenichi ‘Route24‘ Nishii.
Friend of the site & comic artist extraordinaire James ‘American Elf‘ Kochalka finds himself with entirely unique day-one quad-arbor Wii U troubles. Those especially concerned will be pleased to learn that a replacement is on its way & should be received by the beginning of next week.
He used the opportunity to reprise a fantastic speech he gave back in 2006 for GDC’s Game Design Challenge — the theme that year was designing a game that could win the Nobel Peace Prize (which went on to be won by Dishonored designer Harvey Smith, as I covered in this interview with Smith, back in a former life) — but then moved on to cover a wide variety of topics, all revolving around the central idea of spreading peace & love through videogames.
Below the fold you’ll find the entirety of Takahashi’s talk, including musings on the aesthetics of the controller & re-framing the environment around us with play (and with Kokoromi co-founder & designer Heather Kelley‘s glasses), presented here on Venus Patrol with high hopes that it’ll inspire a little more peace and love from designers and players alike.
It’s the process that would spawn Costume Quest, Stacking and the Sesame Street licensed Kinect game Once Upon A Monster, and, for the first time, they’re letting the public in to guide the process. By visiting the just launched Amnesia Fortnight page, you can watch over twenty short and extremely broad pitch videos, which, by donating any amount, you can then vote on, to whittle the selection down to just four.
When those four have been chosen, 2 Player Productions, the same video house that have been doing an amazing job of documenting the Double Fine Adventure process, will be filming daily updates of the progress of all the games, and Double Fine will deliver the final prototypes to all backers at the end of the campaign.
Everyone who donates also gets two prototypes from earlier Fortnights: the original Costume Quest demo, as well as Happy Song, the game that would become Once Upon A Monster. Visit the Amnesia Fortnight site to learn more and to help kick off the process.
[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!]
This week, game makers are still working hard on the Sports game making competition, and the list of participants keeps growing. We now have incredibly wide variety in the competition: strategy football (or “Footbrawl”), cake fighting, parkour platforming, rabbits and bees (sic)…
We’re also quite intrigued by some non-sports games on the forums, like Fran Bow, a brutally dark point and click adventure, and Papers, Please, described by its designer as a “dystopian document thriller”.
The team, now joined by musician Ryan Henwood & officially re-grouped as Asteroid Base, haven’t stopped there: they’ve taken the past year to prepare the game — in which two players frantically ward off waves of enemy attack by manning various battle-stations on their cross-sectioned ship — for commercial release next year.
Even though I haven’t had a chance to play with another human, I’m more or less instantly crazy charmed by Christian ‘Reduktion‘ Schnellmann’s Human Aerobics, which there’s little other way to describe than a mashup between Dance Dance Revolution & Chris Hecker’s SpyParty.
The strictly 2-player game takes the latter’s “reverse Turing” mechanics, where one player tries to sniff out which is the human in a line-up of computer-controlled players, and sets it in a retro-jazzercize studio, where the other is frantically trying to keep their cool with a standard pattern-matching rhythm game.
