It was bound to happen you know. Adventures, you see, can't help but happen when Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer work within 100 meters of each other and apparently that's exactly what has recently been going on over at Double Fine. Well, that and discussions with Notch on Psychonauts 2, as well as attempts to port the (allegedly) excellent Stacking to the PC, but anything pointable-and-clickable is vastly more important than anything else.
Especially as a small, elite team of Double Fine comrades -with the help of Ron Gilbert and under the guidance of Tim Schafer- will actually go on and create a traditionally proper point-and-click adventure game. You know, of the sort that has been dying those past 15 years. No, really. There's a pretty excellent Kickstarter campaign that has been going on for the past few hours and rather impressively showcasing the fact that adventures are very much alive. Almost $300,000 have been raised in much less than half a day; is the FPS dead yet?
Now that you've hopefully watched the trailer, I could go on and mention just how important the fact that Double Fine will be doing everything the indie way is, or maybe highlight the equally intriguing fact that the process of creating the game will be both (relatively) open and documented (as in a documentary), but that would simply delay you in your task of supporting the creation of the Double Fine Adventure. There's a ton of lovely and even extravagant goodies to be grabbed.
[UPDATE]: Goal reached and it's only been a couple hours... Three cheers for dead genres!
Richie Shoemaker, an excellent writer who has enlightened and entertained us via the pages of such prestigious gaming magazines as PC Zone, Retro Gamer and C&VG, is preparing something new and special that is none other than the forthcoming Play SF mag. A computer and video gaming magazine that has decided to cover the futuristic and at times dystopian world of space and science-fiction gaming.
Play SF will be a bi-monthly, digital-only publication that, Richie Shoemaker aside, will also feature the eclectic talents of Jamie Malcom, Paul Presley, Emma Boyes, Brian Rubin, Harry Slater and Adam Tingle. The first issue seems to be very close to being released and it will be something I will definitely be grabbing and happily reading.
Play SF, you see, has already pushed all the right buttons. It will be PC focused (but not PC only), it will cover both new and old games, it already looks fantastic, it has wisely decided to cover all the varied and exquisite types of sci-fi, it will not ignore indie game releases and, above all, it will not provide with review scores! If that doesn't look like a quality magazine worth its ultra-low asking price, well, I really don't know what to say. Or do I?
Oh, I do; I'll also let you know that Play SF is being published with the help of Zinio; the Steam of of the magazine world apparently, meaning that you can expect to be able to handily sample, buy and read your magazine on a variety of platforms. What's more, the first issue will cover a rather lovely selection of games including X-Wing, X3, The Old Republic, Transarctica (!), XCOM and even Wing Commander Saga: The Darkest Dawn. Here is the magazine's site (in case you missed the previous link you absentminded reader, you) and here are a couple lovely page samples from issue #1 to further excite you:
Not wholly dissimilar to the excellent Swift & Stitch, the recently released The Cat That Got The Milk is a freeware indie game you, oh tasteful protector of the arts of a reader, should definitely try. At its basis, you see, The Cat That Got The Milk is a simple yet well designed twitch-arcade game that only lets you go up or down and handily press space to skip a level. Said simplicity is a wise choice* and will not make enjoying the game's artful take on modern art (and Russian constructivism) a chore; it is, after all, this take exactly (and those exquisite visuals too) that sets The Cat apart.
Anyway. You can see a magnificent, moving and quite playable version of Kandinsky's work and find out what I'm talking about by following this very link. And apparently by pressing space quite a bit.
*if you are in a rather more hardcore gaming mood, well, the game can also offer quite a challenge. And some pretty lofty high-score goals too.
Despite not having particularly enjoyed either Minecraft or Terraria there is one game sporting crafting that I simply love and it's none other than A Valley Without Wind by Arcen Games. Must have something to do with its brilliantly alienating and definitely unique setting, its strategic elements, its procedural landscapes, its crisp yet delightfully odd graphics, its deep combat system and its excellent arcade-adventure-exploration gameplay methinks... Anyway, here's Erik Johnson explaining us stuff and telling us what the future holds.
A Valley Without Wind, its ever-evolving BETA to be precise, has been out for quite some time now. Have you been happy with the coverage of the press and the engagement of the gaming public?
In some ways, open development seeks its own attention, and we've been sharing information about A Valley Without Wind's progress since February of last year -- just three weeks into development. So to answer the question, yes, we're happy with it, both through people contacting us about the game and through our efforts to seek coverage from some key members of the gaming press.
As for the gaming public, we find that those who have tried the demo and/or bought into the full beta have really taken to it, some logging in hundreds of hours in the first few months of the beta's availability. The critical thing for us is to just get people to try the game, because we find when people give it a try, they tend to really enjoy it.
You've been providing us with steady and at times really impressive (let alone, huge) updates. What does the future hold? Will the game keep expanding and getting better indefinitely? What major additions could we expect?
At the moment we're gearing up for the final phase of AVWW's beta stage. That puts the game's 1.0 version roughly 8-10 weeks away (not accounting for any unforeseen issues that may come up). Obviously that makes it an extremely exciting time for us with official release coming up rather quick (likely prior to our PAX East showing in April.) That said, our development schedule is to continue to update the game well past the game's launch just as we have throughout the beta. It all really depends on how the game does sales-wise, and subsequently how long after release the community wants to see it expand and evolve. As long as we have a fair amount of people who'd like us to continue to update the game, that's precisely what we have planned -- much the same as we've done with our space strategy title AI War over the last couple years.
Major additions are difficult to predict in a lot of ways, because we tend to work in collaboration with the players to brainstorm and refine the core vision of the game. We have our immutable design goals that we continue to work towards, and everyone is welcome to join AVWW's forums to share any ideas in the active brainstorming section.
How radically can we expect the game to change?
The past several weeks the game has been through a series of those, and is just finishing up with one more bout of fairly major changes, so hopefully we're settled in for a while with most of the radical stuff behind us. That's definitely one of the main purposes of the beta: to get the game to a point where the majority of our current player base finds it fun and engaging. However, if there's something that's in need of drastic change, count on it being addressed, whether before or after launch.
Also meant to ask you: When will AVWW be considered finished? Will there be some sort of official, more or less final release?
As far as being finished, as in no more updates, it will probably be years before we consider it absolutely done. AI War is currently on version 5.0, two and a half years after its own 1.0 release, and it still isn't "done" with another expansion planned for later on this year. Again though, it's all really based on community support.
Regardless of the post-release support, 1.0 for the game is intended to be a self-contained, satisfying experience even if players never chose to update beyond that version. That's the point where we start seeking reviews rather than previews, and courting a larger audience, before we continue evolving the game on top of that foundation.
Now, for those that have criminally not joined AVWW, how would you describe the game?
The game is a 2D side-scrolling action adventure (read: Metroidvania) that hearkens back to the 16-bit era, taking place in a post-apocalyptic world that's been ravaged by an ice age along with several other factors. As the player, you take on the role of a glyph bearer, a chosen one of the Ilari, a mysterious race of non-corporeal beings that look after what's left of the planet Environ. (This is a very different world from our own.)
There's heavy emphasis on exploration, crafting, spellcasting, civilization building, and tactical missions. AVWW is procedurally generated, so no two players' worlds will be alike, and with content updates arriving all the time, there's always something new out there to discover, new resources to harvest, and new enemies to battle.
And why did you decide to add strategic elements to the already rich action-adventure-exploration-crafting gameplay mix?
Because at our core, Arcen is a strategy game development team, that's especially true about our programmers Chris and Keith. They both live and love strategy. We're known at the moment primarily for AI War, an intensive strategy affair we're still updating and expanding, and our puzzle game Tidalis, which while not in the same genre, includes its own bag of strategic elements.
Like Tidalis, Valley is considered to be in a genre that doesn't innately bring about thoughts of a strategy game, but having a variety of methods to solve a problem just sounds like a better experience for more people. I'm not at all a natural at strategy games, but I find the inclusion of those elements in the game gives players more of a choice, even allowing development of individual play-styles as they explore and interact with their respective world.
In more recent versions of the game, the game has actually taken on both more and less strategic elements. More in the sense that we're tying in more and more strategic decisions, and have implemented an "Enemy Progress" concept that is very much the same idea as "AI Progress" is in AI War. But also less, in the sense that we no longer are including a traditional strategic-style map overlay -- we've no longer split our interface into two. Instead of trying to mash two very different game interfaces together, we've opted to make all the strategic bits controlled through the existing action-adventure interface. Most of the core decisions boil down to what missions you undertake, what spells you craft, and otherwise what you choose to do in order to thwart the overlord of each continent.
How about the utterly unique look of the game?
Our intention was to pay tribute to some of the classic 16-bit games of our childhood, while still creating our own feel and an entirely original setting. We've received plenty of positive feedback on it thus far, especially later into beta as some of the rougher edges have been polished off.
As I mentioned, Environ is a very unusual place, and our aim was to have that reflected in the visual style. When we showed the game at MineCon the various locales and enemies (specifically the bosses) took many attendees by surprise. Abandoned futuristic buildings, quiet snowy expanses, and lush undergrounds fertile with flora and fauna closer to what would be described in fairy tales as opposed to anything real. Odd, intimidating creatures that seemed to intrigue as much as strike a bit of fear into players--and that was only the intro portion of the game! Several asked about what else there was to find/fight out there, and where else they could go if they played deeper into the game. That part specifically hooked them in. It was fun to watch.
We've certainly seen the reader comments on some of the press coverage the game's received questioning the incongruity of the artwork. All we can say to these people: Download the demo. Try it out. We think it's quite pretty ourselves, and we've found that screenshots and YouTube videos (even high definition ones) just don't do the art justice compared to actually playing the game. There are details that only at full resolution you're able to see, and a lot of subtle animation that gives life to the exteriors in particular.
Wadjet Eye Games has definitely earned my attention. Let me tell you this wasn't easy reader, but, after playing seven of its rather brilliant adventure games, I have mentally awarded the studio with my spotless record award (disclaimer: doesn't actually exist yet), and am thus always eager to find out what its been working on. So, what has it been working on? Easy; on none other than Da New Guys: Day of the Jackass, a game that, not unlike Full Throttle, is a humorous point-and-clicker that a lesser developer would have turned into some sort of action, button-mashing thingy.
Happily then, Wadjet Eye and Chris Burton (for this is indeed a collaborative project) didn't do anything of the sort and have instead come up with a novel, delightfully odd, obviously humorous and unavoidably surreal adventure game set in the delightfully violent world of professional wrestling. The plot is centered all around Brain, a professionally misguided wrestler who has somehow used a table and won the championship belt, promptly gotten himself abducted and is thus now in need of being saved by a most eclectic and unlikely wrestling team. Right. Better watch the trailer I suppose:
Then again, it would be even better if you actually played the demo; it has just been released and will easily convince you of the quality of the game's humour, animation, writing and puzzles, while showing off its voice-acting talents and multiple playable characters, and simultaneously making you crave for more. Sadly, that more bit will have to wait a while till the 29th of February; the very day Da New Guys: Day of the Jackass will be properly released.
For now, all you can do is play (and replay) the demo and of course pre-order the actual game. The download-only version will set you back a mere $9.99, whereas the complete, extras-packed boxed offering a very modest $19.9. Mind you, the boxed edition will only be available during the pre-order period, so, uhm, better pre-order!
I've teased and repeatedly let things slip, but, well, the time has come to reveal a couple of pretty exciting projects I've been working on. Both of them are developed by Kyttaro Games, the indie game development troupe I've been a part of for almost a year. The same troupe for which I've designed the lovely site you too can visit by following the above link. What's more, Kyttaro Games is a deceptively small group that aims to craft some hopefully excellent and definitely innovative games, but to also publish a new and rather unique indie gaming bundle, which conveniently leads me to my first announcement:
The Bundle in a Box indie gaming bundle. A gaming bundle I have helped organize and design, and a gaming bundle that will try to innovate by offering a pretty novel take on the pay-what-you-want model, a thematically coherent selection of games and one game developed especially for it. Excited yet? You really should be you know, as them included games have all been selected by my humble self. Right... Anyway, as I can't currently reveal much more, you can follow it (for now) via facebook and the Kyttaro Gamesblog. Oh, yes, and the Kyttaro Gamestwitter account too. The bundle will be available very soon; maybe even sooner than you'd ever expect reader.
On to the second announcement then; the one regarding Artfully Framed. As you may have guessed, this one is the game we've been working on for almost a year now, but also something that I hope will play and look brilliantly. Wont describe its gameplay mechanics just yet, but I can let you know that it will be an iPhone release (possibly Android and PC too) with a distinct twitch-arcade feel. Artfully Framed has been designed around them touch-controls and will feature graphics inspired by such great modern artists as Mondrian and Kandinsky. Both Gnome's Lair and its official facebook page will soon unveil more of the thing.
And, uhm, that's that I suppose. No more announcements for today. Just wish us luck and, if possible, do spread the word.
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