– “Games your grandchildren will play when not fighting off Mutant Hordes from their decaying biodome” Done for a talk by Alex from Hide&Seek on ‘imaginary future arcade games’ last week – I enjoyed drawing these immensely as the Heath-Robinson-of-the-Future theme is always cocaine-covered catnip to me.
If anyone else wants their powerpoint presentation infantalized – message me up @kbsgametoilet
oh yes, and these were all drawn either in the bath,on the edge of the bath (while it was running), or on the TOILET :P
One of the core tenets of Venus Patrol, and Offworld before it, and really basically all my work over the past several years is that bringing in artists of all stripes not traditionally immersed in the world of games can (and has) only ever resulted in some of the most sublime work videogames can offer.
That’s only one sliver of why I think Honeyslug‘s Vita minigame collection Frobisher Says is so brilliant — there’s also its self-awareness, and its irreverence, and its holistic approach to wringing out basically every absurd interaction you can manage with Sony’s hardware — but it’s a very non-trivial sliver.
For as much as I’ve been a fan of the art Honeyslug and cohort Dick Hogg have produced — going back to their 2010 Gamma IV contribution Poto & Cabenga (and going back even further to some of Hogg’s work for UK design house Airside), and their gorgeous and still in-progress adventure game Hohokum — Honeyslug themselves have as voracious appetite for amazing art, something that shines through blindingly with the dream team of illustrators they assembled for each minigame in Frobisher Says.
And so, to get a better sense of how they hand-picked their lineup, I asked designer and programmer Ricky Haggett (above, right) and Hogg (above, left) to go game-by-minigame to give us the whos and hows and whys behind every artist chosen for what’s become, hands-down, one of Sony’s “coolest” games — in that old, original PlayStation Designers-Republic-doing-art-for-Wipeout sense of “cool”.
[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!]
In this issue, there’s a new simulation RPG called Avant-Garde about life as a painter in Paris. You read that right! Speaking of art, we get concept illustrations for Soulstrand and Burden, plus some nice fan art for The Walled Garden, and other artists showing off their shiny new art in Alienoid Core, Ritus and Aeon.
This latest fan-subbed installment of GCCX seems slightly more fair game, as it’s a 15 minute installment of Nintendo’s brilliant Iwata Asks series featuring the banana-beholder himself visiting the show for a cross-interview chat, and a mini-challenge where GCCX’s Arino takes on Balloon Fight, the first game Iwata programmed and designed for Nintendo in 1984.
It seems like as perfect an introduction to the series as any, and a good segue to remind you that the previously-featured DVD box set, released stateside as ‘Retro Game Master’ with 14 full-length episodes, has now officially been released and is 100% the best way you can spend a quiet weekend at home.
In an atypically open move, Q-Games have just poured a large can of concept art all over their site, giving us a very early look at their yet-untitled next game in the much-beloved art/game series PixelJunk. Due for release in 2013, and moving away from the PlayStation 3 for the first time to instead target an initial launch on Steam, the only non-visual details the developers have let leak is that the game will primarily be co-op oriented, for “at least” four players.
Well, that, and an apparent deep fixation on the secrets of the soup being produced and possibly used as currency by the in-game “RoboExec” corporation. Q-Games have promised to keep progress on the game, which began over a year ago as a side-project by PixelJunk 4AM producer Rowan Parker, entirely in the public eye as it continues to evolve. In the meantime, below the fold is a handful more bits of concept art, all of which is too beautiful & funny to not feature now.
Described by the devs as a cross between “real-time strategy, an adventure game and a stealth action game”, the new videos and screenshots reveal its multi-touch RTS controls with the metal-harvesting ‘MagTrucks’ in the video above, and scripted environmental effects with its ‘right on the tick’ rain engine below.
That still leaves a ton yet to be revealed, but you can follow the newly founded twitter account where Big Bucket promise more regular updates on the game’s progress, in addition to posting longer updates to anyone who signs up for their mailer on the official Space Age website.
The game, being developed in part by former Offworld columnist Jim Rossignol (find an archive of his contributions here), features a world where “robots meet and drink tea in abandoned villages, poachers lurk in reed-beds, and red-eyed hounds patrol the moor”, with a primary focus on “exploration, non-linearity, AI interaction, survival, robots, sinister butlers, and hot drinks.”
Spelunky creator Derek Yu scratches an itch and does justice to a super-real version of Pimple, the (originally) unplayable third member of the team in Rare’s infamously brutal but still ultra-beloved NES classic Battletoads.
It seems everyone (apart from its developers) is of the mind that an MMO is the logical next step for Nintendo’s most inflexible franchise, but I am totally completely eye-to-eye with this concept fan-art by ‘zenmai‘ (just one of actually a fewsimilarly alluringdrawings), that posits an ideal future where Pokemon is meshed with Monster Hunter’s humanistic, drawn-out battle mechanics. [via exp.]
If you’ve seen White Whale’s iPhone adventure game God of Blades mentioned anywhere — including here — over the past several weeks since its debut, you’ve no doubt seen it mentioned in the same breath as the pulp fantasy that inspired it, and to which it pays deep, reverent respect.
Names like Roger Dean & Michael Moorcock frequently bubble up to the surface in any discussion of the game, and, not having been immersed as deeply in the fantasy world as the White Whales clearly were, I thought I’d give the team an opportunity to go into greater detail about the place God of Blades was born, as much for my education as anyone’s.
Below the fold, then, artist Jason Rosenstock (above, right) and designer & writer George Royer (above, left) list their five top visual and literary inspirations for the game, which you can learn more about at the White Whales’ site, or find on the App Store here, in advance of its imminent PC/Mac debut.
