Super intrigued, at least aesthetically, by the latest alpha footage of NOWHERE, an upcoming “surreal creative defense game” from German husband-and-wife studio Duangle.
The new trailer was awesomely spotted by Martin ‘grapefrukt‘ Jonasson in response to a recent soapbox session from Metanet‘s Raigan Burns, where he called for more technical experimentation in modeling and rendering games, using demoscene hits like quite’s cdak (seriously, watch that, it’s only 4KB of code!).
There’s a ton more NOWHERE to be found via Duangle’s YouTube channel showing the game’s more traditional building and defense mechanics (I’m quite taken with the alarming reverberations that kick in around 1:30 of the video above), much of which hews closer to FRACT-esque flat poly constructions.
Duangle says the game will be done “when it’s done”, but ultimately promise that NOWHERE players will “witness the unraveling of a visual acid trip through IMPOSSISPACE, filled with exotic shapes, geometric patterns and appropriate soundscapes” on its release, which, I suppose I honestly couldn’t ask for much more.
A quick and very happy note here to let you know that we’ve officially launched a new responsive version of the site to make mobile browsing — particularly on the iPhone — less of a squinty chore. There are no new URLs to visit or cookies to set: just visit Venus Patrol on your iPhone (or squish your browser window in real tight) to see the new design.
The conversion was masterfully handled by Cory ‘cr0ybot‘ Hughart, who even managed to get Dom2D’s TIGSource Devlogs fully functional in their bite-sized form. For this first iteration, we’re primarily targeting the iPhone — I felt like iPad browsing the full site was still totally acceptable, and while this should theoretically work for most other mobile browsers, you may see some hitches on certain Android devices that we didn’t have lying around to test on.
Any feedback, suggestions & reports of particular problems are warmly welcomed at brandon@venuspatrol.com.
Every month, as part of the regular monthly meetings of the Austin, TX independent game community JUEGOS RANCHEROS, we do a very casual & chatty rundown of the ten or so games from the previous month for the audience, to give people — especially those curious onlookers from outside the indie community itself — a look at what they may have missed. The featured games are both local and global, and both indie and, on occasion, a bit-bigger-budget — what binds them together is simply that they’re all amazing.
In keeping with the tongue-in-tobacco-packed-cheek tone, we call these run-downs A Fistful of Indies, which are presented here on Venus Patrol for your reference, each fully-annotated, -linked, and off-the-cuff blurbed, in addition to their home on the JUEGOS RANCHEROS site.
An awesome bit of experimentation via Darius Kazemi, who idly wondered why Drop7, and not Drop-any-other-number? and thus set up this entirely flexible web-playable version of the game that runs from drop-3 to drop-14 (or, for the brave of heart, an order of magnitude higher, with drop-49), as well as options to change the number of drops before each new row.
If you’re lost on why this is even an interesting experiment to begin with, you clearly haven’t yet experienced area/code’s brilliant iPhone original — one of Offworld’s first, most-highly-recommended iPhone games — as the middle-ground sliver between Those Who Are Obsessed With Drop7 and Those Who Haven’t Played It Yet is so thin it’s essentially non-existent.
Saltsman adds some choice quotes on the Left 4 Dead inspired genesis of not just this latest project, but more on Canabalt‘s aquatic origins, as well (which I’d never before heard!):
Canabalt, for example, was inspired by Super Mario 1 and Sonic the Hedgehog but the game I really wanted to make was a game where you’re a guy running through a city being chased by water. It’s like Escape from New York. There’s a horrible flood, and some particle physics, [you’re] surfing on flotsam and jumping up and parkouring off buildings and rooftops. But it would have been so hard, and especially back then, I had absolutely no patience for projects of that scope. So the slimmed down version of that is Canabalt. I had to take out the water, take out climbing up ledges, and focus on something else.
I always wanted to make a game — that was not even a game. The game would just be: you’re an astronaut on a space walk and your tether breaks. You’re doing an EVA [extravehicular activity] and now you’re floating through space, and that’s it. There’s nothing to do. You would be in first-person view, you would see gloves, and the astronaut control box on your chest, and you can look around. It would just be that until you ran out of oxygen. For like four hours. It would be the worst game, but a little bit of that ended up expressing itself in Capsule. You’re out of fuel, and the consequences of that are not that you die, but that you have to listen to yourself die, which is horrifying and uncomfortable.
A PSA that there’s only one day remaining to pick up the launch-special combo of Culty’s ‘Monster Hunter Beginner’s Guide‘, a 50+ page self-published and gorgeously-illustrated guide to the admittedly pretty initially daunting world of Monster Hunter.
