[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!]
A new game making competition has begun on the TIGSource forums and the theme is SPORTS! Don’t expect the usual football and hockey games from indie developers though! A month from now, we will be playing a crazy series of sports games, from the hyperviolent (Dodgefist, By the Law of Blades) to the hilarious (Limbolympic).
It’s been a good year and a half since it was first announced that Katamari Damacy & Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi would be joining Tiny Speck — the company behind upstart web MMO Glitch — and in all that time, I hadn’t really been able to suss out exactly what he’d be contributing to the project, but then the answer came today, and the answer was dinosaur butts.
Detailed today in a blog post for the game, Takahashi has added a new transportation system to the game in the form of six sleeping dinosaurs scattered throughout its massive land, whose mouths can be crawled to travel to “Shim Shiri”, a decidedly Keita-like area that serves as an exchange where you can get sucked into the opposite ends of each of the dinosaurs and be instantly whisked to your next destination.
From what I have gleaned, Glitch players have given the area the colloquial name ‘Asslandia’ — for his part, Takahashi, says Tiny Speck, offered this new mode of travel simply because it would be “more fun and more crazy” than the game’s existing traditional subway.
A late contender for web game of the year squeaking in under the wire, but with an amazingly strong showing, comes Save The Day, from Scottish indies Denki, who you may recall as the creators of the fantastic strategy word game Quarrel (previously profiled here in 2009 and released this year for both XBLA and iOS), or even further back with the under-sung Game Boy Advance gem Go! Go! Beckham! (which is so much better than any David Beckham-license game has any right to be).
Save The Day‘s their debut for upstart HTML5 platform Turbulenz, and likely will serve as its new flagship title: a fantastically frenetic and compelling arcade game that gives you just minutes to pilot your rescue helicopter through a volcanic disaster, rescuing hapless citizens who, collectively, grant access to more perilous sections buried deeper within its world.
You’ll note traces of Choplifter, H.E.R.O. and maybe, more recently, PixelJunk Shooter, but what puts Save The Day over the top is its reliance on time & score, rather than environmental damage and enemy attack, and its constant blare of super satisfying information overload, that makes it a perfect, replayable three minute morsel.
Denki have confessed to but not elaborated on “grand plans for the game”, and it’s certainly something I wouldn’t mind being able to play away from the desk, but you’ll be very happy to have gotten in on the ground floor now by spending the rest of your day playing on Turbulenz right here.
As the previously-mentionedFuck This Jam — a weeklong global game jam dedicated to making a new game in a genre you hate — kicks off right around just now, the organizers, Vlambeer‘s Rami Ismail & Panoramical creator Fernando Ramallo, have just released the jam keynote.
The video features Spelltower creator Zach Gage and Cow Clicker developer Ian Bogost, the two most prominent developers to have found surprising success tackling word- and Facebook-games originally mostly somewhat out of spite.
It’s highly worth watching the two wax nicely philosophical about why the process was ultimately intellectually fruitful and the underlying love in even the most biting of satire, even if you’re not about to embark on the journey yourself. If you would like to, though, you can still sign up for the jam — which will run from today to the end of Saturday, November 17th, at its new Beautiful Mess Organizer installation here.
Another piece for the Fangamer VERSUS Attract Mode art show, Mare Odomo‘s more autobiographical ‘DS Club‘ piece illustrates a time where “we spent our lunches playing Mario Kart, having math battles in Brain Age, and pictochatting the things that teenagers pictochat. It was the best.”
Says Courtney of his piece “Thy Next Foe is…” for the recent Fangamer VERSUS Attract Mode art show, “making a game that’s just sixteen boss fights in a row sounds like the work of a madman. Turning it into one of the greatest games of all time is the work of a genius.”
And now, the news people have been asking for for over a year: Die Gute Fabrik, Noah Sasso, Ramiro Corbetta and Bennett Foddy have just announced Sportsfriends, a four game collection for PC, Mac and PlayStation 3 that will see the combined release of Hokra, BaraBariBall, an updated version of Foddy’s Pole Riders, and — finally! — a full-featured version of Johann Sebastian Joust.
The four developers have taken to Kickstarter to bring the games to PlayStation 3 (and help port each game around to the various platforms they don’t already exist on), where $15 will net you a copy of the collection on its release sometime in Autumn of 2013, along with a bonus copy of Tennnes, created by Vlambeer’s JW Nijman.
For twice that you get early beta access to all the games in the collection far sooner than the projected release date, and twice that will also get you bonus games from Sasso, Corbetta and Foddy. Higher-level backers can get a Joust ‘starter-kit’ with seven PlayStation Move controllers and custom “charms” (see above for an illustrated example of the Ink-It Labs product) to clasp to & identify your own set, a package of pre-configured Mega GIRP dance mats, or the ultra rare 18-player version of Joust.
At the highest level, you can even get two real-live actual trampolines to play Foddy’s Get On Top, recently featured at the Venus Patrol Training Facility, alongside, totally not-coincidentally, all of the Sportsfriends games. As you might have guessed, the Training Facility was my way to help introduce the games that would eventually make its way into this campaign to a wider audience.
Do game devs also go through ‘periods’ like Picasso’s ‘blue’? If so, Martin ‘grapefrukt‘ Jonasson seems to be making the most of his ‘Tetris period’, first with Jesus vs Dinosaurs, his brilliantly hectic multiplayer arcade game collab with Petri Purho, and now — on the opposite end of the spectrum — the quiet & contemplative RYMDKAPSEL, coming soon to iOS, Android, the web and, just newly announced, the PlayStation Vita.
A resource-management strategy game at its core, the gorgeously ambient and understated RYMDKAPSEL starts you with the barest of space stations and sees you expanding outward into the surrounding star system, brick by straight-up Tetris brick.
Your progress is hampered not just by the selection of bricks you’re able to choose from to plan your next expansion — which, performed poorly, can block off (no pun) the passageways that connect all rooms — but also by waves of enemy ships that appear at regular, and increasingly rapid intervals, forcing your crew to drop everything they’re attending to and scramble to defense rooms to shoot them down.
For all its soft-synth and simple-shape simplicity, Jonasson’s manage to eke out a ton of life and character from the world, and the game’s nicely forming into a fantastically addictive whole — an early build of RYMDKAPSEL accompanied me on my flight home from GameCity and refused to unhook me until my iPad battery ran dry.
The game is expected to be released on all platforms in early 2013 — you can sign up to be updated on its progress via its home page.
If you haven’t yet played the game, a brief introduction: coming from the same team that brought you the recently-mentionedSpider: The Secret of Bryce Manor, Tiger Style’s taken that same approach to incredibly intuitive and approachable touch mechanics (or, in the PC/Mac case, mouse/keyboard & new controller support) and created a complex adventure that takes place under the surface of Mars, where protagonist Liang has just discovered new life.
Your goal in the game is to continue to restore that life to the cave system, in effect, well, “waking” the planet, by creating biological/botanical “machines” that self-sustain its areas: plants watering and seeding new life, and its fauna feeding off of and reproducing based on those flora.
Waking Mars is at its best when it gives you just enough control to creatively construct those “machines”, engendering a strange sense of personal pride, and while its story isn’t as playfully subversive & “below the surface” as in Spider, it’s still an incredibly compelling ride throughout.
The show kicks off next Tuesday at 8pm — visit The Prince of Arcade site for videos of all the included games and more information, and click below the fold to see the fully amazing alternate lo-poly version of the show poster, which is too good to resist including here.
