Montreal art/game collective Kokoromi have just announced that they’ll be bringing the latest installment of their yearly Gamma showcase (traditionally reserved for the Montreal Game Summit) to GDC in March of 2010.
The theme for this year’s indie game showcase has yet to be chosen (you’ll recall that last year’s was the 3D theme that spawned both the original version of Infinite Ammo’s Paper Moon and Kokoromi’s own early-Offworld-exclusive super HYPERCUBE, and that 2007 was the year where Jason Rohrer first made news with the debut of Passage), but the group says submissions will open in November, and will give prospective indie game devs 6-8 weeks to build their games.
The chosen games will be “featured on large screen projections, and accompanied by the music of local and international DJs” at Gamma’s San Francisco opening party, and then be “playable in a special GDC-donated booth on the Game Developers Conference Expo floor from March 11th to 13th.”
When Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford explained the new art style of Borderlands to the press, he described it as a “mutiny”. His art team had apparently gone back to their concept art assets and realised that, ultimately, their drawings and paintings had more character and appeal than the art-style that had ended up in the version of the game they had at that time.
Going against the prescribed direction of the project, the team had begun to prototype the concept art in the game, ultimately delivering a build that knocked the socks off their boss, and blew away the drab vision of Borderlands that they had been working on previously. Brave stuff. And I couldn’t help thinking: Well, about time! Isn’t most concept art actually better than what we get in the final game? Isn’t it, perhaps, about time to let the concept artists take the lead?
The results from Borderlands are quite startling. Observe:
Before:
After:
Dodgy quality of the first section aside, there’s no contest in the visual impact. With its reference to the concept art style, the game is more visually arresting, and, perhaps more importantly, it stands out from a host of gloomy shooters that all share the same visual effects, the same shiny bump-maps, the same metallic sheen. Hell, if Borderlands hadn’t been reinvented, I wonder whether you’d have been able to tell it apart from Id’s Rage… (more…)
The Path and The Graveyard developers Tale of Tales reveal that Silent Hill lead artist Takayoshi Sato has designed, modeled and textured the lead in the studio’s previously mentioned, Wilde-inspired game Fatale, which retells the seductive ‘dance of seven veils’ Salome performed for her step-father so he would agree to behead John the Baptist. Follow Tale of Tales’ progress via their official Fatale site.
The second meme-lifting promo video in under a week sees Gearbox’s post-apoc sandbox shooter Borderlands getting the full Christian-Bale-flip-out treatment as helper bot Claptrap just tries to tell you that the game’s wasteland creatures are every bit as procedurally generated and diverse as its ’87 bazillion’-ish weapons.
The official Catan site has updated with news that beta applications are now open to test out the forthcoming iPhone port of the board game (which, going off rote number of re-tweets of the original announcement, appears to be one of Offworld readers’ most anticipated upcoming games), which also includes the first screenshot of the game, at right.
Developer Exozet expects testers to undergo the usual loop of feedback to and questions from the studio, but if you’re willing and able, you can apply to get early access to the game via this site, where you’ll need your phone’s UDID (which you can get in iTunes by selecting your iPhone and finding the ‘serial number’ under the ‘summary’ tab, or by using free apps like Ad Hoc Helper [iTunes link] to email the 40 character string to yourself).
Microsoft sets up a charity auction for this Beatles: Rock Band painted Xbox 360, to benefit Doctors Without Borders, the same charity receiving a cut of your “All You Need Is Love” Rock Band download, which doing so — completing the loop — will also enter you into a contest to win one of these Beatles: Rock Band painted Xbox 360s.
My Game & Watch card holder (Octopus, if you’re wondering) has been showing its age for years now, and if it hadn’t have been the hit of every card-exchange since E3 2005 (where it was first wide-eyed well-received by none less than Suda 51), I might have been more apt to retire it already.
It’s looking like I won’t have to fall too far from the 8-bit geek tree when and if I do, though, as Banpresto re-introduces its line of Famicom controller holders (detailed down to P2’s mic volume slider), and just announces a line of 30th anniversary Pac-Man holders available in both cocktail table and game-screen designs. Start your eBay/import site scouring now.
If you accidentally blinked through the first brief teaser for Capcom’s DS downsized sequel to Clover’s original Okami, here’s twice as much footage showing off new stylus-based rider-controls and a world seemingly more open-ended than you might have expected, though just as gorgeously illustrated as you knew it would be. [via Tiny Cartridge]
Case in point: Fathom and Flixel dev Adam ‘Atomic‘ Saltsman goes bare-bones for his brilliant one-button run-for-your-life stunt-man sim Canabalt, and its resulting release goes viral, aided by the terribly smart social-service add-ons Saltsman appends after its original debut.
And then this: already working on a number of additional iPhone projects (including his classic arcade inspired Retro Racer Revival) via his Semi Secret imprint, he rides the word-of-mouth-wave and quickly decides to port Canabalt to the platform, in what will surely be your new favorite buck-or-three time passer.
Saltsman talked to the IndieGames blog and said the initial iPhone version won’t yet contain any of those social aspects that have helped drive its success (though he “doesn’t rule out other crazy new features”), but he does say that contributing to the game now via its Donate button will very likely net you a free promo code for the iPhone version, alongside the desktop wallpapers and soundtrack mp3 you currently receive.
All this from five-days of dev time, tossed out like a diversion-in-a-bottle which, happily, washed up on lucrative shores.
