Here’s what we already knew, thanks to maybe the happiest hunch I’ll ever have in my life: Ed Key & David Kanaga’s musical exploration game Proteus is able to transform any space it enters into a fantastic dreamscape, proven out at its chill-out room installation at the Wild Rumpus/One Life Left/Venus Patrol party we collectively threw last March during the Game Developers Conference. There, a few dozen people at a time sat back & blissed out, engrossed in nothing more than someone slowly wending their way around its dynamic landscape.
Here’s what I couldn’t have known until it was quietly revealed as a feature of this year’s GameCity: performed live, as in, again controlled by a single person, but with more power of its progression put back into the hands of creator Key & with direct (rather than procedural) accompaniment by Kanaga on keys, it’s even more sublime than probably anyone would have imagined.
The ‘concert’ lasted for the better part of a full hour, with Key & Kanaga happy to give just enough freedom to the player to lend the performance an air of improvisation, while retaining an amount of control (see Key’s god-mode crib-sheet above, which I spy-cam-snapped only to discover later that his handwriting rendered the espionage more or less an impenetrable wash) to ensure that the game wouldn’t “end” until they were ready for it to.
With any luck, this won’t be the only time a performance like this occurs, as it’s not really an overstatement to say that it left the audience struck somewhat dumb — in the meantime, do your own best bootleg facsimile by picking up the game here if you haven’t already, and join us all in discovering why it’s truly one of 2012’s greatest.
The low-bit Glorkbot was originally meant to merely be a power-up found in the fully hand-drawn & -animated Glorkian Warrior — a pocket-sized sidekick that’d go on pixelated side-quests in the main game (as in the original concept art above) — but, as the scale of the latter game grew, the team decided to give that side-quest setup its own full bonus game, to work toward a more easily grasped goal as they made enhancements to the 2D engine that’ll eventually power both.
Pixeljam are promising a full release of the spin-off game — which they describe as “the platforming of Sonic, the exploration and adventure of Metroid and the shooting action of Galaga rolled into a single enormous level” — for PC/Mac/Linux before the end of the year, with a potential iPad counterpart possibly coming shortly thereafter, tiding us over until the full magnum opus finds its way to the finish line.
Back just before I’d left for GameCity I posted this preview of A.J. Hateley’s “Gaming Luggage Labels”, which were said to be coming in some secret capacity to the festival itself. As it turns out, they were there adorning “The Sheriff”, a custom arcade cabinet on public display in the main GameCity tent.
While the cleverly-named Sheriff itself was wicked enough — running, as it was, Pippin Barr’s amazing lo-fi Johann Sebastian Joust demake Ludwig Von Beatdown — Hateley’s designs somewhat stole the show.
Unbeknownst to us at the time, Hateley concurrently had opened a shop selling the first set of the stickers via RedBubble here — available in packs of two for the smaller designs and singly for the larger. Hateley adds that purchases of at least six packs get a 50% discount, so there’s no excuse to load up on the entire set and give your own cabinet/bumper/Samsonite the full treatment.
Probably the most exciting neo/retro development that surfaced last week: Paul Koller — formerly responsible for bringing AdamAtomic’s Canabalt to the Commodore 64 as C64ANABALT — fully revealed Super Bread Box, a C64 remake of Vlambeer’s freeware Super Crate Box.
While the latter’s already retro-styled designs might seem an easy task for porting back to vintage hardware, homebrew site RGCD goes into full technical detail here of just how challenging the task of replicating the heavier weaponry & screen-fulls of enemies actually was.
A full 64KB version is expected to be released for sale on cartridge by the end of the year, including, says RGCD, all unlockable progress & online crates-collected counts handled, awesomely, by password generation for each session.
If there was one game that quietly dominated last week’s stay in Nottingham for GameCity7, it was one that, weirdly, wasn’t present at all, but rather was on everyone’s lips in all the downtime in between: Frog Fractions, the latest web game from Jim “Twinbeard” Crawford.
What was remarkable, though — or, at least, will be until you play the game yourself — was in how little anyone would bring themselves to say about the game, or how little anyone who’d already heard of the game but hadn’t had a chance to play it wanted anyone to tell them.
It was something like a sly wink or a secret handshake — people would only softly utter “have you played Frog Fractions yet?” and wait for the knowing smile back, both too afraid to pry further and spoil something either one might not have seen.
So consider this a sly wink of my own, and a light push to devote your next hour or two to Frog Fractions, if you haven’t already. You’ll be forgiven for that first wave of confusion as you wonder what’s so compelling about what at first glance seems like simple, sort-of precious edutainment parody, as the game then begins to unfurl layer after layer of straight up ideas.
While the latter site seems to have suddenly gone dark over the weekend, it’s still worth a follow in anticipation of whatever future updates are in store.
While it may not reach the masterful heights of Travis Pitts’ “Madness of Mission 6“, the terrifying blank void tragedy of Deaddreamer’s “druqs” is as close as I’ve seen anyone come, in the honestly too-under-populated arena of “surreal & vaguely realistic re-interpretations of Pac-Man lore”.
Bonus points, though, for what I’m guessing is possibly not one but two veiled Aphex Twin references? [via YKBXTXBXLX]
[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!]
Don’t mind the huge creepy eyes staring at you in Environmental Station Alpha – focus on all the good stuff on the forums this week! Pixel art western The Wild West, mysterious point and click platformer The Remnant and 4-player arena party game Greedy Piggy Chase (shameless plug!) make their first appearance, while Rock Boshers DX sees a release on Playstation Mobile.
[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!]
Retro style in in vogue this week with pixel goodness from Misshoni, Sole Gunner and Journey into Hammerdale among others, while top-down run & gun game Venusian Vengeance gets released! On the opposite side of the gaming spectrum, 3D master Orihaus intrigues us again with a new, gorgeous FPS horror game called Aeon.
Kentucky Route Zero was one of the first best surprises of 2011 (as well as one of the first Kickstarter projects I had zero hesitation in donating to), a “magical realist” bluegrass adventure game pitched by Chicago-based indie Cardboard Computer that was as gloriously close to approaching the work of the Coen Brothers and Jeunet & Caro as games can probably come (see its initial trailer below and the references should become a bit more clear).
Still deep in development over the past two years, the game’s raised its head just above the surface only a rare handful of times, while Cardboard Computer head Jake Elliott let loose a small flurry of similarly abstract & haunting micro-adventure games like Balloon Diaspora, Ruins and M83-collaboration We Were You.
Cut to today, when Elliott has finally officially revealed the latest look at the game (at top), with a new and frankly completely jaw-dropping aesthetic overhaul by new collaborator Tamas Kemenczy, that should perfectly illustrate why this re-instantly became one of my most anticipated games.
Elliott says the new plan is to break up the game into five more-manageable acts to be released throughout 2013 after an initial drop in December. While you wait, do as I do on those cold & solitary half-drunken nights, and loop the soundtrack clip above ad infinitum, a washed-out version of bluegrass standard What Would You Give (In Exchange for Your Soul) by in-game band, The Bedquilt Ramblers, who elsewhere in the game’s score go even more amazingly ambient — and every bit as infinitely repeatable — thanks to remix work by the Ramblers’ Ben Babbitt. Keep an eye on the game’s official website for more upcoming information.
