Snapshot Teaser

By: Derek Yu

On: January 16th, 2009

Here’s a short teaser video for Kyle Pulver’s Snapshot, which has been nominated for Excellence in Design at this year’s IGF. Kyle is best known as the creative force behind ~~Bonesaw, Verge, and~~ Diamond Rider.

Posted in Platformers, Previews, Videos | Tags: KylePulver

Snow

Cool. Kind of like Fatal Frame. Interesting concept and looking nice.
xerus

Diamond Rider II will blow this away. GDC 09…
Adamski

Complete CS Clone through and through.
Craig Stern

That looks pretty damn cool! I’d play this in a heartbeat. :)
jkd

Nice art! Looks like a less-saturated Yoshi’s Island.
http://www.youtube.com/user/slonzivaca Slon Zivaca

Wow, looks great. With those lovely visuals, great music and an interesting mechanic, that game can’t be bad. Hope the game will be finished.
The only bad thing is that there are tons of monkeys just waiting to start bitching and moaning stuff about Yoshi’s island this and Yoshi’s island that.
Matt

“Complete CS Clone through and through.”

Is this like “looks like another SOF clone no thx” was for voodooextreme a long time ago? I’m not familiar enough with this board’s standard troll lines.
FISH

awesome game and awesome art.
i will, however, say this: the character is an abomination and i want to kill it with fire.

harajuku smurf.

give him a camera or something!
king

Love the art style.
solvalou

Enough cave story like games. I swear, the indie scene is supposed to be a place full of innovation. Now it’s becoming nothing more than a pale imitation of mainstream gaming.

What’s the difference now? Yes, while in the mainstream they keep churning out same looking FPS games with brown and bloom and that all play like copies of Halo with regenerating health and crap like that. But in a similar manner, indie games have all become platformers which all try to be like Cave Story.

Is this what it all boils down to? Give people the chance to make games and they’ll all copy whatever is already out there and never try to be original?

If so, then gaming, not just indie gaming but gaming in general is dead as far as I’m concerned.
solvalou

Don’t get me wrong, the whole idea of taking pictures as a gameplay element is pretty cool. But like any game in the mainstream or indie scene, one original idea does not make a game original when the rest is completely derivative.
none

Am I the only one who can’t see any resemblances with Cave Story?

Seriously, you guys just like to complain.
mots

no resemblance to cave story, the visuals do look a lot like yoshi’s island.. but who gives a feck..

it looks fun and if the other puzzles are more complicated than from what i’ve seen from the teaser then this game will be great
http://www.dyson-game.com Alex May

See what you’ve done Adamski? Do you see what you’ve done??
Josh

I see the similarity with Cave Story, not in artwork but in some of the gameplay mechanics and level design. However, I don’t think it’s such a big deal. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Or, as I like to say, if it ain’t baroque, don’t play it.
Cobalt

@solvalou: It’s a Cave Story rip-off because it’s… a platformer, right? Are you serious? It looks like it has more influence from Yoshi’s Island than Cave Story.

Make a truly original and fun game, then come back here and show us, ‘kay? Otherwise, I (and probably some others) will take your comments as cynicism and not much else.
Anonymous

solvalou: Did you know that there were platforming games before Cave Story? Yes, hard to believe, I know. And believe it or not, these B.C. (Before Cavestory) platformers were very inspiring to many of us when we were kids, and now we are able to make games, and those inspirations are showing up in our work.

Some people like platforming games, and some people like making games that they like to play. See the connection here? They like platforming games so they… make… platforming… GAMES?!

My God… I have to inform the president.
Cobalt

I totally used _cynicism_ out of context.

*pessimistic
http://chaoseed.com/garden John Evans

Looks clever. …er, but what’s with the strikeouts in the post? Is that because the poster was incorrect and edited for correctness? Or…something more sinister?
http://www.illogictree.com Eddie

Reminds of the Pokemon snap for Nintendo 64
Adamski

Actually if Im honest it looks pretty cool, but I have to agree with FISH, I can’t stand the look of the main character :( The elephant is cute, though.
FishyBoy

THIS GAME IS A PLATFORMER JUST LIKE CAVE STORY

WHAT A RIP OFF

IT ALSO HAS CONTROLS, WHICH IS A FEATURE CAVE STORY HAS AS WELL

Damn it, Xerus, can’t you make a game where you don’t control anything at all? Where you sorta just watch someone else play the game instead, with no influence whatsoever?

IS THAT SO HARD
Von Torpedo

Could you people care to enlighten us as to what mechanics this game is copying from Cave Story?

If they are anything along the lines of “jumping” and “running”, I think you have forgotten about the word “genre”.

I mean holy crap, I’m used to people making “CAVE STORY RIPOFF” jokes, but it’s not too often I see that argument made seriously.
Pigbuster

Looks pretty good.

It seems to have a nasty case of “Distracted Camera” syndrome, unfortunately.
Taking the camera away from what the player wants to see (their character) in order to show them something they probably know about already (a door opening) is generally not a good idea, especially when time continues to move forward while the camera is away, which seems to be the case here. Oh well.
Joshua

I am quite curious to see how well the photo mechanic works! Very interesting idea.
Kvalsternacka

The game looks pretty cool. But that character kinda makes my eyes sting. I don’t want to play as it.
Papa roach

The problerm is that all games are made with Gamemaker nowadays, that’s why they all look the same.
That the Game maker look.
Papa roach

Also some people are a bit too anal retentive about what pixel art should be.
http://www.mawsoft.com/blog Impossible

I think “cave story ripoff” has become synonymous for “indie pixel art Metroidvania” especially if said game has Cave Story-like environments.

Of course solvalou also claimed all mainstream FPS games are the same. If you’re the type of guy that considers Mirror’s Edge, Bioshock and Far Cry 2 to all be “Quake ripoffs” then Underside, Snapshot and Spelunky can all be “Cave Story ripoffs.”
pyabo

Looks awesome! Love the Yoshi’s Island influence… one of the best platform games ever made, in terms of both visuals and gameplay.
Craig Stern

Now that you mention it, the main character *is* kind of hideous-looking.
xerus

Yes yes, the character will be redone. We will throw him into a pit of fire and start over. The game is really early in development (the IGF nomination has caught me totally of guard here) so a lot is going to change by the time it’s good and ready.

As far as the “distracted camera” comment goes: Time in the game starts just as the camera goes back to you. And the game is so early in development right now, I wouldn’t worry about it. We’ll be sure to not let something like that screw up the game.

Thanks for all the feedback so far. ;D
Cobalt

@xerus: Good, because the main character looks like an orange with some watermelon seeds embedded into it.

@Papa roach:”The problerm is that all games are made with Gamemaker nowadays, thatâ€™s why they all look the same. That the Game maker look.”

I’ve seen plenty of Game Maker games, but they looked different. Most were platformers, but they had different art styles (though, of course, some of the art was similar).

I agree that Game Maker is a problem, though (sorry Mark Overmars). I’d like it if it was totally cross-platform, though. Too many people are left out in the cold, and that’s kind of mean. I’d recommend something like LÃ–VE or SDL (which LÃ–VE uses) instead. But that’s just me.
To solvalou

Some people said my latest project was a CS rip off too, but I’ve personally been doing games in my style since BCS (Before Cave Story… See… I remember).
It’s just a common style that CS made popular. Sure some people are ripping off the style. I won’t name names. But it really is some peoples style.

That said I don’t think xerus has a consistent style yet. Bonesaw was clearly inspired by Kirby and this more by Yoshi’s Island.

BUT FUCK ME this is nothing like Cave Story, visually or anythingly. It doesn’t even look Metroidvaniay.
A Guy

To solvalou: I’m 99.9% sure he didn’t do the art here.. note the other name in the credits. :P
Ilia Chentsov

So,there’s actually one useful object in each photo? Why not let us just click on the object to store it? Otherwise, the photo, while cool-looking, carries too much useless visual information.
peter

@A Guy: Yeah, I did most of the art but really my time was spent researching CS

@Ilia Chentsov We have a lot of ideas for gameplay elements that make more use of the “photograph”.

It’s really inspiring reading all these comments, and I’m excited (as I know xerus is) to hit the ground running as soon as we can. We wish we could show you the finished game…but it’s stuck in our heads right now.
http://0xdeadc0de.org/ Eclipse

@solvalou: i hope you was joking, if not.. well you’re an idiot :

also if this game “ripped off” something, i think those are the sprites from yoshi’s island like that red arrow :] but i’ll call it more an homage than anything…
Paul Eres

I agree with solvalou, except that I think people should make the kind of games they want. If people want to keep making these games, fine. But I can still wish we’d see fewer pixel art platformer metroidvanias hyped, there is more to indie games than those, yet it seems it’s only those pixel art platformer metroidvanias that people get worked up about. So it’s not that games clone Cave Story, it’s that the fans are so fixated on Cave Story that any game that reminds them of it becomes the new hero of the day.
http://www.casualexplosion.com Uesugi

Looks slightly similar to Portal if you ask me.

And at first I thought the “CS clone” messages were referring to Counter Strike. Which this game resembles about as much as it resembles Cave Story.
RayRayTea

I honestly don’t see how’s this a “Game Maker game”?
Phasma Felis

I swear to God I can’t even tell when people are joking or not with the “CAVE STORY RIPOFF” thing.

Did anyone do that before The Underside? Or is that pretty much where it came from?
http://www.auntiepixelante.com auntie

it’s not that it looks like cave story so much as it looks like every other pixel platformer that seems to get this community excited. it has the token one thing to set it apart, the snapping photos, but i agree with xevious: “one original idea does not make a game original when the rest is completely derivative.”
Phasma Felis

Why does everyone get so worked up about originality? New ideas are fantastic, and they define many of the best games, but a game can be loads of fun just by implementing old ideas solidly and with skill.

The goal of games is to be fun. Originality is a strong second priority, but it’s still #2.
BeamSplashX

I think it’s the lack of bad hyped indie Metroidvanias, really. Most of the time, the announcement of a game like this means “GOOD GAME ON THE HORIZON!” Which isn’t really a bad thing…
falsion

It’s true that mainstream games these days have been really dumbed down with things such as regenerating health (which they even plan on adding to Deus Ex 3, as if DX2 wasn’t bad enough) and making it near impossible for the player to die, among other things like grimdark and brown and bloom.

But, that has nothing to do with this game. This game looks more like Yoshi’s Story than anything.
Scott

Something as obviously wrong and sarcastic as “CS clone” can’t be called trolling, unless you’re psycho enough to get mad at such things.
BoyBoy

@FishyBoy

Watch out! Nintendo just patented that!
Corpus

Cave Story Clone is a stupid joke. Stop taking it seriously, and don’t try to read into it.

Also, stop saying it.

Scott, that’s a load of nonsense. It is trolling. If trolling weren’t allowed to be wrong and/or sarcastic, it would pretty much cease to exist.
Trotim

Whoa guys he was just joking, we say that to every game, friggin lord-e