Cryptic Sea

By: Derek Yu

On: August 7th, 2006

So yeah, for this week I’m going to grab some of the more interesting finds from Tim’s blog and post them over here! Unless, of course, you wanted to do it yourself, Tim… hint hint!

I was wondering what artist/game designer Edmund McMillen was up to after finishing Gish. Apparently he ran off with a few Chronic Logic members to start up Cryptic Sea.

Their first game, Blast Miner, looks pretty lackluster for someone with an imagination like Edmund’s. I mean… it’s Tetris, right? With physics and stuff. I dunno, I’m not interested at all and combining Edmund’s super-unique art style with some pretty generic casual gameplay sounds like a marketing disaster, if you ask me. (Of course, nobody ever does.)

On the other hand, project number two – Book of Knots – sounds freaking awesome and I wish they’d stop working on Blast Miner and get going on that! C’mon now!

Posted in Community, Previews

Albert Lai

I agree completely Derek – Book of Knots will definitely be a hit, judging soley by the concept art.

This is probably jumping the gun, but the fact that they bothered to flesh out the internals bodes well for gamers. Or they could just be having fun.
Sergio

I’m looking forward to Cereus Peashy.
http://www.diverge.ws/index2.php?page=viewpreview&id=2
tim

great stuff sergie!

feel free to grab anything from the site. i’m not a particularly good writer but pretty adept at finding them gems. :)
dessgeega

actually, i’m pretty sure blast miner is triptych – a chronic logic game – with explosions.
Teeth

Yeah, that’s right. A few extra elements but it’s basically the same.

Personally I’m not massive fan of Edmund’s work, it’s got a good style to it in principle but overall everything’s just too dark to be interesting. Both in terms of luminosity and mood.
Moose

By the look of it, Blast Miner is Triptych but with the gameplay modified. It looks from the video like there’s something more there than just making up lines. Triptych was fun but 90% of the time the trick was to just ignore the physics entirely and try to build lines like a regular Tetris game, so the main feature of the game wasn’t used. Blast Miner seems to have rejigged the game play a bit to make the physics aspect more relevant.
failrate

Is there any back story why they left Chronic Logic?
Hunty

it looks like Cryptic Sea is part of the “Badlands” series that McMillan created for New Grounds, which are collected here:

http://www.newgrounds.com/collection/thebadlands.html
Hunty

er… “Book of Knots”, rather.
http://ireadnews.net/ blogspot news blog

I searched a long time for such an great article. Thank you very much.
You have to be patient with such material if you’re really interested in extracting some info off.