So I’d noted this as early as last Wednesday via my infinitely-more-artsy/designy-than-Offworld tumblr (in a fit of jealous pique for not being anywhere near the west coast), but seeing as how Poketo wrote in specifically to see if it’d be of interest to Offworld, I can’t help but see how it’s not.
This Friday, art/apparel/decor design shop Poketo will be hosting Bang! Bang! Draw! at their Los Angeles studio, an event that will bring together live music by Offworld favorite solo orchestral-sampled pop outfit Her Space Holiday with visuals done in collaboration with Tokyo artist Heisuke ‘PCP’ Kitazawa.
On top of that, Kitazawa — who will also be exhibiting his art in a post-music gallery show at the studio — was one of the select artists Nintendo and FM802 curated for their 2004 “ART MEETS GAMES” exhibit (now sadly offline and obliterated by the wayback machine), which attempted to show off the dual-screen potential of their then-upcoming DS by getting illustrators to do wall-size faux-DS artwork.
But either way, you should go not for its games-relatedness, but because both are fantastic artists in their own right. Hear Her Space Holiday’s Forever & A Day below for a sample, or try his My Boyfriend’s Girlfriend, as well.
Bang! Bang! Draw! will be held at Poketo Studio at 510 South Hewitt Street, #506 (5th floor) in LA on Friday, April 24th. The Her Space Holiday set will run from 7:00 PM – 7:30 PM, with a moderated q&a session, and will be followed from 7:30 PM – 10PM by PCP’s art show and party. Poketo will be releasing two signature wallets, a mug, and a T-shirt all designed by Kitazawa at the show. Head over to their blog for more details.
[Guest blogger Tom Armitage can usually be found writing at Infovore, about games, design, software, and whatever else takes his fancy. By day, he works as a maker and writer, most of the time for Schulze & Webb; by night, he’s a Tauren Hunter, a passable Abel, a shoddy Cammy, and slayer of thousands of zombies.]
Steve Gaynor’s latest post on Fullbright is a lovely analysis of one of the parallels between level design and architecture. Using BioShock as an example, Steve considers the problems facing a level designer wanting to keep players oriented and making progress within the game.
That’s not too hard if you’re on a strictly linear ride. In a game like BioShock, though, a degree of freedom is important to the player’s experience of a game (and in this particular example, you could argue it’s essential). And that freedom is often delivered through much less linear kinds of level design.
“How does the designer keep the player oriented, and give them the information they need to easily navigate from one side of the level to the other?” That’s the question Steve sets out to answer. The parallels with real-world architecture he draws are interesting. This, for instance:
minor spaces are always closer to major spaces than they are to other minor spaces– the player always passes through the hub to get to another spoke.
seems like as important a maxim for real buildings as it does for the fictional ones of Andrew Ryan’s Rapture.
It reminds me a lot of Matthew Frederick’s 101 Things I Learned In Architecture School – which is, if you’ve not read it, a delightful and very readable book that serves as a nice crash course in some maxims of architecture. It’s not going to qualify you to build skyscrapers, but as a series of notes on the construction of spaces to be experienced by humans, it’s well worth a read, and has all manner of interesting crossovers with many forms of design.
It’s a good post, anyhow, and well worth your time – as is Steve’s blog, if you’re interested in all things game design. Although Fullbright is his personal blog, Steve’s a designer at 2K Marin – who are currently working on BioShock 2 – and whilst he openly admits that this post, is “personal observations having spent a lot of time examining the levels from BioShock, and not any kind official process or information”, it’s always nice to know that there’s a certain kind of thoughtfulness going into the games you’re looking forward to playing.
Not to be shown up by the Super Mario-singing laser cutter, an Atari 800XL, a TI-99/4a (my first gaming PC!), an 8″ floppy disk drive, a 3.5″ hard drive, and an HP ScanJet 3C walked into a bar… and there is no joke: they sang Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody together and it was beautiful.
Coming not even an hour after reports that developer Bethesda had registered new trademarks for both Fallout-related movies and TV series, the studio has made a surprise announcement at a London event that a new game in the franchise — Fallout: New Vegas — is due for release on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in 2010.
The title will be developed by Knights of the Old Republic II/Neverwinter Nights 2 creators Obsidian, and while no overt details were announced, Gamasutra quotes Bethesda PR Pete Hines as saying:
It’s not Fallout Tactics — it’s not Brotherhood Of Steel. It’s another Fallout game. It has no impact on what [Bethesda director] Todd Howard and his guys are planning.
With rumors floating for nearly two years now and yet no official word, developer Introversion has made a surprise announcement this morning that they do indeed have an essentially finished version of their global thermonuclear wargame Defcon ready and aimed for the Nintendo DS, but are now in need of a publishing partner.
Introversion — whom Offworld recently spoke to at great length on their past projects and future developments — has recently re-acquired the rights to the game after a deal went south with former partner Pinnacle and is hoping to bring the game to store shelves by autumn 2009, given a new deal can be struck.
Newly uploaded by Reformat the Planet producers 2 Player Productions: extended and gorgeously shot video from BlipFest 2007, including the happy chirps of Virt above, Polytron’s Jason ‘6955’ DeGroot doing an even shoe-gazier deconstructed version of his Fez theme song (below, see the first here), and more from Loud Objects and Huoratron.
Whirring away since early November — and apparently unrelated to the previously mentioned open-source level editor — is GooFans, a repository of third party hacks, mods and new themes for 2D Boy’s PC version of World of Goo.
The site is integrated with an app called GooTool (with Mac and Linux versions also available), which lets you “build a custom World of Goo based on your preferences and selected add-ins” all downloadable from the GooFans site.
Though Darius Kazemi’s still the unspoken champ of Evil Mad Scientist’s 8×8 LED portable Meggy Jr. RGB (having actually laid hands on and fallen a little in love with his Tiny Rogue during GDC [and made it further into its glorious glitched-out program-error netherworld than anyone apparently had before]), the newest heavyweight contender is Steven Read with his 1×1 sprite platformer Super Monkey Kong.
Wonderfully interpretive and surprisingly readable for a series of flashing lights, Super Monkey Kong is an 8×8 vertically-scrolling version of Donkey Kong, which completely sells itself with that giant purple Kong at the top of the level.
Head over to Steven Read’s site for the (unfortunately unembeddable) video to take in the full new-retro splendor.
Hey, here’s a sentence I never thought I’d be typing: PlayStation Network (and YouTube) user fluxlasers has set out to re-interpret the entirety of Matthew Barney’s cinema arthouse series Cremaster as a set of LittleBigPlanet levels.
Above, the Goodyear blimps and football stadium choreography of Cremaster 1, and below, fluxlasers’ rendition of the motorcycle sidecar races (and an appearance by Barney himself as the The Loughton Candidate) of Cremaster 4.
Fluxlaser Paul told the Cremaster Fanatics blog that he “plans to create levels based on all five Cremaster films. Once completed, he will incorporate all the levels into an area called The Cremaster Cycle where you start with Cremaster 4 and complete and unlock the levels in the same order the films were released. On the Cremaster 3 level there will be a hidden key which will unlock ‘The Order’ level.”
Says IDEO Labs of EON Reality’s immersive 3D ‘cave’ (which renders polarized stereoscopic imagery based on the position of the wearer’s glasses):
A simple, featherweight headset, a 10′ x 10′ x 10′ white room, and $600,000 worth of projector and computer equipment, combined with the smarts of the folks at Eon Reality, results in one insanely real experience.
Who knew once the future we were all waiting for finally got here it’d be so unbelievably disorienting? I get a little touch of motion sickness just watching him try and baby-step shuffle down the stairs. Where’s the power fantasy in that?
