TIGSource

Cave Story: Developer's Voice

Derek Yu — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:37:00 +0000

If you’re a Cave Story fan I think you’re going to enjoy this video! The game is coming out for WiiWare (North America) on March 22nd. Check the Nicalis blog for more information and other goodies, like fan art.

GDC 2010: Photos

Derek Yu — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:58:00 +0000

Chrissy “Nava” Chubala took many fantastic photos of GDC this year – everything from sessions to the awards to the IGF Pavilion to recreation. Check out her photo collection here.

Rebekah Saltsman also took some great photos of the various goings on.

Nice way to reminisce about the conference for those who were there, and hopefully it will inspire others to make the trip next time. Thanks, Chrissy and Rebekah!

UPDATE: There’s also the official GDC photostream.

Digital

Terry — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 23:24:00 +0000

[This is a guest article by PerrinAshcroft. If you’d like to contribute a guest article to TIGSource, go here.]

Digital: A Love Story is a free to download interactive story by Christine Love available for Windows, Mac and Linux. The game is set in 1988 and you begin the game with a threadbare interface closely resembling the Amiga’s workbench. To progress through the game you must use your modem to dial into bulletin board systems (BBS), make friends and enemies, download utilities, hack into protected system and commit phone fraud to make long distance calls. The game has a wonderful retro feel that’s going to tug strings of nostalgia for anyone who built up astronomical phone bills dialling into BBSs back before the internet became so widespread.

Parallels can be drawn to Introversion’s Uplink but Digital is very much its own experience. While Uplink was driven by the game elements of upgrading your deck and breaking into systems in a cool cyberpunk-esque world, Digital keeps its focus on characters and storytelling and draws instead from the unglamorous nerdy reality of the pre-internet digital world. The tools at your disposals are primitive, but are interactive enough that it doesn’t just feel like passive story.

I don’t want to elaborate too much on the content of the story as finding that out is what makes this game worth playing, but the story is really well structured and paced taking you through quite an emotional three-act tale in only a few hours. While the primary story is a fairly serious affair, Christine is smart enough to include humorous side plots such as getting into arguments with Star Trek nerds, a level of attention to detail that keeps the world interesting.

On a technical level I was very impressed once I realised the game was built with Ren’Py, a python based tool for building Japanese style visual novels. The game has been customised to the point where it’s unrecognisable from most projects build using those authoring tools. The interface is slick, the graphics are retro in a perfectly fitting manner and it includes a fantastic ambient soundtrack.

A game like this is unlikely to appeal to everyone, heavily story driven games are not to everyone’s tastes. But for those of you willing to spend a few hours, working slowly through an intriguing piece of interactive narrative there is a lot to enjoy about this title. I considered nit picking at a few minor issues but it seemed silly when for the most part this is a game with a specific purpose in mind and it executes it brilliantly. Ultimately for me, when the ending finally came it was a truly emotional moment where I just didn’t want to let go but knew I had to.

GDC 2010: Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP

Derek Yu — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 20:11:00 +0000

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is an iPhone game collaboration between superbrothers (aka Craig Adams), singer-songwriter Jim Guthrie, and Capybara Games, the creators of Critter Crunch. These two videos are from the GDC build of the game, where the player engages in some exploration and combat. I got a chance to try it at the IGF Pavilion, where S&S EP was being shown for winning IGF Mobile’s Achievement In Art award. It’s great – the stylized art, the evocative audio, and the detail in each area makes you excited to see what’s coming next. The combat was also fun, if simple.

The combat video is after the jump:

(Source: GameSetWatch)

IGF Award Winners

Derek Yu — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:56:00 +0000

Former IGF Awards host Andy Schatz (pictured above) got to take the stage again tonight, only this time it was to accept both the Seumas McNally award and the Excellence in Design Award for his 4-player co-op stealth game Monaco. Other winning games included the long-lost Limbo, which won awards for Visual Art and Technical Excellence, Closure, which won Audio, and cactus’s Tuning, which won the Nuovo Award.

You can view the entire show here.

Seumas McNally Grand Prize:

Joe Danger
Monaco
Rocketbirds: Revolution!
Super Meat Boy!
Trauma

Excellence in Visual Art:

Limbo
Owlboy
Rocketbirds: Revolution!
Shank
Trauma

Excellence in Audio:

Closure
Rocketbirds: Revolution!
Shatter
Super Meat Boy!
Trauma

Excellence in Design:

AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!—A Reckless Disregard For Gravity
Cogs
Miegakure
Monaco
Star Guard

Nuovo Award:

A Slow Year
Closure
Enviro-Bear 2000
Today I Die
Tuning

Technical Excellence:

Closure
Limbo
Heroes of Newerth
Joe Danger
Vessel

Student Showcase:

Boryokudan Rue
Continuity
Devils Tuning Fork
Dreamside Maroon Student Version
Igneous
Paper Cakes
Puddle
Puzzle Bloom
Spectre
Ulitsa Dimitrova

Cactus gave the best IGF acceptance speech I’ve ever heard!

REDDER

Paul Eres — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 03:43:00 +0000

REDDER is a game by Anna Anthropy / Auntie Pixelante, with music by Amon26. It’s an exploration platformer focused around an alternating green/red block switch mechanic, similar to the mechanic used in the third pendent dungeon in the SNES classic A Link to the Past.

I found the colors very nice (even though the backgrounds are often just gradients, there’s a lot that can be done with just gradients of color), and the exploration of a fairly large world excellent. In a few ways the game resembles VVVVVV, but only in basic structure: a world of screen-sized rooms, numerous checkpoints, things to collect, but is more non-linear, slower-paced, and not as focused on challenge (you won’t die very often if you’re decent at platformers).

I’ve played through many of her other games (When Pig’s Fly, Calamity Annie, Mighty Jill Off, Invader), and so far this one’s by far my favorite; maybe you guys will agree.

IGS Photos

ARelativelyHotGirl — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:35:00 +0000

Coming in live…

Flotilla is out

Lorne Whiting — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:48:00 +0000

Blendo Games (the creator behind the very stylish and classy Gravity Bone) released Flotilla a little over a week ago.

Flotilla is a space exploration game where you go from star to star flirting with danger and talking to bull-slavers and cat-pirates and various other terrestrial animals piloting space ships, killing and getting killed by many of them.

The meat of the game is the turn-based spaceship combat. Turns take place simultaneously, so you have to really think about what your enemies are going to do, especially since each ship has a bunch of invulnerable armor plating that you have to circumvent. You can control the orientation of your ships, and there are a few movement options that let you trade speed for firepower and vice-versa, so it’s really a battle of lining up your ships so that you’re ships are flanking or can otherwise hurt the enemy, while making sure their shots can’t get past your armor.

It’s an incredibly satisfying system with a lot of depth, and the demo will make you cry and wish you had $10 when it ends. Or, y’know, you do and you can buy the game and everybody wins.

AGS Awards 2009 - Winners

Derek Yu — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 08:55:00 +0000

The winners of the AGS Awards 2009 have been announced. These are the best Adventure Game Studio games as voted on by the AGS community. The big winners are Zombiecow’s Time Gentlemen, Please! (Best Game, Best Gameplay, Best Dialogue Writing, Best Non-Player Character), Team Effigy’s The Marionette (Best Original Story, Best Background Art, Best Music, Best Tutorial or Documentation), and Ben304’s Shifters’s Box – Outside In (Best Puzzles, Best Short Game). There are a lot of other games and awards, so check out the award page for the full line-up.

Thanks, bicilotti, for the heads-up.

Let's Win Forever

Alex Macqueen — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:47:00 +0000

“Mouse click on gerbils to shoot them, get scores, youre winning, YOU ARE WINNING FOREVER”

Let’s Win Forever is the latest creation of Amon26, from whom sprang the wonderful Au Sable series and a number of other short, humorous titles. In Let’s Win Forever, the player aims their crosshair at the members of a large crowd of colourful gerbils. Shooting them results in their gaining jetpacks and a seemingly arbitrary number being added to the player’s score. There’s not really any objective or purpose to the game, but that’s okay since it allows you to WIN FOREVER (!). The music is quite brilliant, as always with Amon’s work. If you enjoy this, it’s also worth checking out the more experimental Let’s Win Everything.

Download Let’s Win Forever here; get Amon26 merchandise (including art-books and a CD of Au Sable/AOOFAD) here.

Hit the jump for an interview with Amon26:

Interview with Amon26

TIGSource: What does the pseudonym “Amon26” mean?

Amon26: I was fourteen when I found the name. Amon was short for Amontillado, and in junior high my friends and I talked about each other and our crushes in-code so that our peers wouldn’t find out our secrets. There was Eduardo, Oxy, Aim, Julius, Pizarro, and me, Amontillado. The 26 came in when I was tired of everybody using the same boring numbers like 69, or 666, 13, or 420. It seemed every number had some kind of special meaning. I couldn’t find any special meaning to the number 26 so I chose it to represent me. I let it become my ‘holy number’ I guess you could say.

TIGS: While you’re best known for your games, you’re also a prolific musician, visual artist, and occasional writer. How do you balance your multiple artistic interests?

Amon26: I don’t worry that much about balancing it out. For a long time I’ve liked the idea of trying to bring multiple elements to bear in a way that excites an audience. So sometimes I’ll write a story that becomes a picture, or I’ll design a picture that becomes a short film. I tend to think in fractals, so everything could be easily transformed into another media for me. AOOFAD could be a board game, or a 200 page poem, or a coffee table art-book. It just happened to come out shaped like a game. :)

TIGS: Where do you think games stand as a medium? Do you consider Anna Anthropy’s concept of games being primarily about creator-audience interaction to be worthwhile, or do you tend to focus more on your own individual expression?

Amon26: I think each game should be measured by its own merit. Boardgames for example: Mahjong can’t be compared to Brenda Brathwaite’s Train, or vice-versa even even though they’re both boardgames. Sometimes a game is meant to tell a story or have a message, sometimes a game is meant to realistically simulate an event, other times its just meant to look and feel cool with little or no substance and meaning. The whole “games as/are art” debate is hard for me to understand. The concept of what makes art art is so hard to pin down as it is. I think what matters more is setting out to try and accomplish something good, regardless of what it may be considered in the end

TIGS: All of the games set in the world of Au Sable are in traditional genres, as either run-and-gun or first person shooter. Is this due to a design philosophy that one can most easily distort what is already well known, or simply from the route of attempting to marry gameplay to aesthetic in a way that doesn’t require a great deal of coding?

Amon26: At first it was my way to make sure I wasn’t overstepping my bounds. I re-purposed a free, open source platformer example for GameMaker and didn’t want to design a game that had goals more complex than I knew I could accomplish with what limited skill I had. Now that I’ve learned more, I could try something less conventional but I’ve always been fond of John Carmack’s concept of simplicity. You can play Doom1 with a couple keys and the mouse, that’s all you need.

TIGS: What are a few of your major influences, in any medium?

Amon26: Hm, Castlevania II really helped me see potential in making lo-fi graphics unsettling, the whole game gives this stark sense of loneliness even when you’re in a populated town. Same with Wizards and Warriors 2. Silent Hill/Fatal Frame were good examples of creating a vulnerable player; someone who wasn’t good with guns or combat. As far as books go, I used Ray Bradbury’s “Death Is a Lonely Business” as inspiration for creating an eerie mood from what would otherwise be considered mundane. Also “House Of Leaves” created an illusion that the book was shredding itself apart as you progressed. I listen to a lot of music all over the board, from Lilly Allen to Soul Coughing. I modeled AOOfAD/AuSable’s music after Throbbing Gristle, and the ambient tracks off of the Quake1 CD written by Trent Reznor.

TIGS: Your games tend to employ a glitch aesthetic in that there’s no definite reality that is readily understood by the player, making them unsure of their abilities and goals. To what extent is this intentional, rather than accidental as a result of your unfamiliarity with your tools?

Amon26: Well a lot of those glitch and scratch concepts come from “manufactured accidents” during the development process. I.E the Eyes in Ausable. I wanted them to do something other than hover in a fully predictable pattern, so I made attempts to break the game on purpose with lots of random integers, particles, distortions. Once I found something that looked good, I toned it down to a point that kept the game playable, but reflected that sense of nearly crashing. That’s pretty much how I do everything.

TIGS: Collaboration is obviously something that you’re familiar with, as you’ve done the music for both Anna Anthropy’s and Jazzuo’s games. To what extent has this been a positive influence on your own work?

Amon26: Mighty JillOff and Sexy Hiking have been two heavily played games among my local friends and I for years. We’d spend hours at all-night diners trying to work our way over that damn tree, or up the impossible tower. So when I was invited to compose music for Jazzuo/Anna/Kepa I nearly wet myself! Now, a year later, I’ve learned about who they are, and what they enjoy doing beyond what brought us together. Their friendships have been the most valuable outcome from all of this. I’ve met Anna in person and someday I would like to fly over and visit Jazzuo so we could do a live performance of the DildoTank theme song. I think we would obliterate all of Eurasia with its greatness. (And some of Denmark)

TIGS: One of the defining features of games as opposed to other artistic mediums is the possibility of a social aspect; this is present even in single player games, as you’ve mentioned in relation to your experiences with The Mighty Jill Off and Sexy Hiking. Do you plan on ever creating a game that focuses as much on human interaction as atmosphere, a la Anna Anthropy’s Octopounce?

Amon26: I have this really crazy idea for a 2 player game that actually encourages failure to some degree. I loved how the later ps2 Burnout games rewarded you with super-dramatic visuals when you failed. I want to recreate that same sense of “oh man, I lost the round but look how amazing my failure was!”

TIGS: Do you have any tips for complete beginners to Game Maker or independent game development in general?

Amon26: hmm.. well it applies to more than just GameMaker, but; Make lots and lots and lots of mistakes. Visit forums, grab examples and code and just rip them apart. Even if you dont know what you’re doing, you’re still doing something. Eventually it gets clearer.

its not effective for people who want to go from zero-to-awesome in a day, but its really rewarding

also, make friends with other small devs, cultivate meaning partnerships with other fledgling designers and share your experiments between eachother.

if it wasn’t for the help of glyph, the A.I in AuSable would be little more than bouncing do-nothings.

TIGS: I see that’s worked out very well for you and Anna Anthropy.

Amon26: exactly, she really took me under her wing and spends lots of time helping me fine-tune things. In return, I’m her “piano monkey” writing fun music for her work.

TIGS: Are you doing the soundtrack for her new deep sea diver game, too, then?

Amon26: It’s planned, I’ve had really bad writer’s block with music lately. Winter gets me down and makes it hard for me to focus on things, but I sent her a few blurbs of music today [Ages ago, now- Ed.].to see what she thinks.

it’s a lot of fun, there’s stuff I cant discuss about it that really amuses me. Very much her sense of humor.

TIGS: Your Quake machinima tend to have a comical aspect not present in your games or music (aside from the Dildo Tank theme). Is it less natural for you to make humorous, rather than melancholy, creations?

Amon26: I struggle with chronic night terrors. I’ve had them since I was a child and they’re very distracting. One time I had a therapist that encouraged me to try “trapping” my horrors on canvas but It didn’t work out really well. The pictures didn’t make me feel any better. But it all changed the moment I personified a nightmare as an NPC, took aim, and killed it.

In my ordinary waking-life I tend to be very light hearted, positive and quirky. I avoid over-exposing myself to negative things, I don’t read the news or watch TV. So when I’m in the spirit and feel it’s time to tell a really good joke, I do it by whatever means necessary. I look forward to creating a really absurd and hilarious game in the future. Something that I hope will equal the polish of AOOFAD/AuSable.

TIGS: Have you played any of Aliceffekt‘sgames? They’re quite reminiscent of yours, especially Cyanosis Fever.

Amon26: ooh this looks interesting (downloading valp.zp)

angon a sec, trying it

ohh MAN!

i never knew i could feel that way about a game. valential hopes just made me keep going “YES! FASTER! YES!” then i ate some mints, and i was allright. im not sure what its about yet, i just tried the first path

yeah, i’d really love to develop something alongside a programmer with some genuine 3d prowess. I have an idea for a flight game that I’m not nearly smart enough to make yet. I tried unity, but it made my brain explode out my ear,

TIGS: It appears that you’ve tried to sell some of your work on CD and USB locally as well as on-line; has this been successful?

Amon26: The money I’ve made off sales doesn’t cover much more than a nice dinner or a DVD on occasion, but I don’t expect it to. It’s just my way of providing people a method to donate money and be able to get something nice in turn as my way of saying thanks. I wish I could curb production costs though, I make 2 dollars profit off a 18 dollar shirt.

TIGS: You’ve recently made the jump into 3D; how is designing for three dimensions different than designing for a spatial area seen only from one side?

Amon26: It was a nightmare at first, but I was sort of expecting that. Even though all I was doing was providing a variable for “height” along with width and length, it took a lot of re-thinking to understand. Once I started getting the basics down It actually felt very familiar. Cactus helped me solve a problem that was a bit tedious but he really saved my ass. Without his tip, The Hunt still wouldnt run right on most PC’s. I really need to look into Unity and see if I can make anything interesting in that next, but I’m not sure if my brain can handle it. We’ll see. If i start speaking aramaic and drawing stick figures of zalgo with my own feces, then maybe i’ll stick to 2d a little longer.

You can ask Amon26 your own questions at his Formspring.