Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 14

Creator from Alto’s Adventure releases trailer for new coming-of-age adventure

When you’re young, everything can feel like the end of the world. Your crush doesn’t like you back, or you didn’t get selected for the varsity soccer team, or mom embarrassed you in front of everyone at Career Day. The universe seems to collapse under you, the tenuous building blocks that made up your life snapping under their own weight.

That’s the basic concept behind Where Cards Fall, a narrative-driven puzzle game by the makers of Alto’s Adventure and and an ex Giant Sparrow designer. The newest trailer sets the release for this fall on iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Mac, and PC. As a coming of age story, it explores adolescence through a building mechanic—but with a twist. All of the houses are built on cards, presumably as a metaphor for the fragility of teenaged existentialism. Puzzles will revolve around building, collapsing, and combining these papery structures, as you build the world around you one card at a time.

the fragility of teenaged existentialism

The new trailer focuses on a sprawling, brightly lit world that is raised and destroyed in real-time around an of array of teenagers. In one scene, a girl and a boy meet in the doorway of a coffee shop as the building shakes, jostled by feet of another boy jumping on top of the roof. Coming from Giant Sparrow, the studio that released the painterly The Unfinished Swan, designer Sam Rosenthal emphasized how the mechanics serve the games’ story, which is counter to the usual design approach of slapping on a half-assed narrative onto a set of unrelated game mechanics.  According to the press release, “At its core, Where Cards Fall explores how our most fragile memories of the past can become the strongest foundations of our future.”

With a tone and mechanic inspired by Radiohead’s “House of Cards,” we can only presume the game will rock out with a quiet sense of passion.

You can learn more about Where Cards Fall on the game’s website.

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Hidden Folks, released today, offers a delightfully handmade iOS experience

Hidden Folks, which Kill Screen‘s Kathryn Madden originally covered last year, can best be described as an interactive Where’s Waldo? overflowing with personality. With little to no focus on goals, points, or challenge, players simply explore intricate landscapes in search of specific “targets” (or “folks”)  hidden throughout each scene. So much of the digital toy’s charm derives from its handmade feel, with illustrator Sylvain Tegroeg’s heavily inked art style creating lively scenes that feel populated without seeming overly busy.

Indeed, the unusual joy of Hidden Folks is just how human and authored it feels, especially when most games (particularly in the free-to-play saturated app marketplace) tend to come across as clinically designed virtual worlds at best, or lifeless bits of code at worst. But Hidden Folks, with its rugged edges and human grunts, radiates with the personality of its creator, Adriaan de Jongh. Best known for releasing unusual multiplayer iOS games like Fingle (2012) and Bounden (2014), de Jongh has a history of bringing people closer together in the real world through virtual play.

The game’s unique quality appears to come from the duo’s focus on a tactical, bodily approach to game design. “Everything in Hidden Folks is draw by hand, scanned in, placed, layered manually, animated, and scripted,” reads the press release. “All sounds you’ll hear originate from the developers’ mouths.”

bringing people closer together in the real world through virtual play

While some might accuse Hidden Folks of being a point-and-click game without plot or challenge, its simplicity allows for a lightly meditative and humorous experience. Also, I dare you not to giggle at the Lumpy Space Princess-esque “hayyy” sound that emits when you click on one of the human icons in the first level. It gives Pendleton Ward’s masculine valley girl voice a run for its money.

Hidden Folks is available for download on PC, Mac, Linux via Steam for $7.99 and $3.99 on the iOS app store (with an Android version coming later).

 

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Study finds female players may not be into guns, but are still into killing

The Quantic Lab, a survey data-based social science research project investigating the psychology of gaming, recently published interesting findings on players and their motivations. A portion of their research explores difference across gender, diving deeper into stereotypical assumptions about female players.

For example, some might point to Quantic Lab’s finding that, out of all the genres, women are least likely to play tactical shooters as proof that female player don’t like violent games. But another recent survey found that, upon further investigation, it’s safer to assume that women just find guns kinda boring and prefer to murder virtual people through other methods. According to the Lab’s blog, by Kaleb Embaugh, it appears “that women don’t mind killing things with Magical Spells and Swords. In fact, women rated weapons that would lead to up-close-and-personal violence (Swords/Hammers) just as favorably as men.”

women just find guns kinda boring

Embaugh and the other researchers (headed by Nick Yee and Nic Ducheneaut) trace some of this divide back to the thematic preferences across genders. Women heavily favored high fantasy, while heavily disfavoring WWI/WWII games. Consistent with these findings, the survey on weapon choice discovered that women generally seek out nature and magic-based factions while men liked the tech-based ones. As the blog aptly summarizes, “it is clear that women don’t mind killing things, but they dislike using weapons that are connected to realistic, conventional warfare.”

There are a number of potential reasons for this split. High among them is marketing: fantasy and historical settings in media (books, TV, movies) are often targeted at women. Another could simply be genre conventions, where “High Fantasy games tend have more character customization options or stronger story-driven gameplay, while WWI/WWII games tend to not have playable female characters.”

I’d definitely suggest perusing their full write ups, which offer more data-driven hypotheses that add layers of complexity to the usual discussions on gender dichotomies in games.

You can check out the rest of The Quantic Lab’s findings through their blog.

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Celebrate what diversity does for games at the Game Devs of Color Expo

For the second year in a row, New York-based indie studio Brooklyn Gamery is organizing a day-long Game Devs of Color Expo at the Schomburg Center on June 24th. The intimate expo, which welcomes creators of all races, genders, and sexual orientations, will include panels, talks, educational workshops, and an arcade.

A celebration of game creators from various races could not come at a more welcome time, as America appears to continue its hard reverse into the pre-civil rights era. Bombarded by story after story on the collapse of our republic into a dystopia uninhabitable to any except the lizard people running the oval office (alternative fact: Steve Bannon is a gutter cigarette in human form), it can be easy to get lost in the struggle and ostracization of being a minority in the land of the free.

But the G.D.O.C. Expo highlights the art, talent, and ideas people of color contribute to the game-making community. While many topics of discussion will center on the intersection of race and interactive media, the expo also serves as a space where game devs of color simply talk shop with people who can relate to their experience. For a preview, checkout the recap of last year’s event above.

You can purchase tickets on Eventbrite, though if you’re tight on cash you can also fill out this form to apply for free entry. Submissions for panel topics and games for the arcade are open until March 15. Stay up to date on the details as they develop by following the Brooklyn Gamery Twitter.

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The sequel to Sunless Sea is very much on the way

Less than four hours after its Kickstarter launch, the sequel to Failbetter Games’ dying-at-sea simulator Sunless Sea reached its funding goal of $126,635 (a simpler number, 100,000, in British pounds). Now, one day later, they’ve raised $215,942, achieving every stretch goal but the last. If things continue this way, Failbetter is going to need to come up with a few more.

The sequel to Sunless Sea takes players from the dim peril of a subterranean ocean to the final frontier; space! Instead of steering a steam ship through the black expanse, you’re the captain of the bastard child of a locomotive and a rocket. Once again, the game will revolve around exploration, with the promise of picking through Failbetter’s generously stocked, particularly dry vintage of world-building.

Despite the cosmic setting, Sunless Skies doesn’t seem eager to lose the series’ antique thematics. Sample characters include conductors and signalmen; your locomotive is armed not with plasma cannons but gatling guns. Spacesuits don’t seem to be a concern, since “Its plating protects you from the killing cold of the High Wilderness,” according to the Kickstarter page. Don’t worry though—I’m sure the world of Sunless Skies will find plenty of ways to kill you yet.

 

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VIRGO’s dreamy Water Planet drips to Steam this summer

When we last saw Water Planet in the summer of 2016, the virtual reality game accompaniment to electronic musician VIRGO’s EP of the same name, it had just been ushered through Steam Greenlight. But that was sometime ago, and after hearing nothing but crickets for nearly six months, its release window is finally upon us. Water Planet will be released on Steam for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and even PC in Summer 2017.

When listening to VIRGO’s music, it’s hard not to dream up the world of Water Planet on your own, as the synths lend themselves to the aqua-tinged visuals, and VIRGO’s own visual aesthetic outside of the game. Water Planet differentiates itself from other VR music videos, primarily in that it hardly defines itself as one. The core of the game is what you’d find in any other exploration title, being that you walk around and observe things. But unlike most of those, Water Planet‘s music is integral.

The game is wholly soundtracked by the Miami-based musician’s ethereal music as you venture across the mysterious blue planet: from oceans to mountains, encountering everything from cybernetic jellyfish and your ship’s onboard A.I., Gemini. As you embark on your quixotically soundtracked journey, you’re desperately vying to collect resources to complete the journey back home, far away from the dreamy, H20-saturated planet.

You can listen to VIRGO’s Water Planet EP here, while the VR game accompaniment will be released in Summer 2017.

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Splitter Critters swipes itself to release

Sometimes mobile games feel a bit hopeless, forever trapped to the realm of Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds copycats. But then a really good Match 3 game comes along, or a port of a transportation planning simulator, and faith becomes restored. In the new iOS (and soon Android) title Splitter Critters, the mobile platformer formula is twisted to show what shines in mobile games, rather than forcing in what doesn’t.

Splitter Critters is a platforming game from the Canada-based two-person development team RAC7 Games, the same developers behind Dark Echo and Super Surf Bros. In the game, the player swipes across their smartphone’s screen to split the world apart, then reorient the platforms accordingly to lead the spherical critters back to their stagnant spaceship.

In a way, the swipe to cut mechanic reminds me of the most recent Paper Mario game, where the Wii U gamepad was used in a similar fashion to cut a path out for the ol’ plumber. Meanwhile in Splitter Critters, cutting with a swipe isn’t enough—you have to shift the separate pieces of the world too. The game originated from the Ludum Dare 35 game jam in April 2016, where the theme was “Shapeshift.” After the team completed the game jam and saw the game’s potential, they opted to polish it into a fuller release for mobile devices. Nearly a year later, the game has been released in its intended, ever-swipable form.

You can get Splitter Critters on iOS for $2.99 . It will release on Android later this year.

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Is this Twitter bot the next Bob Ross?

Bob Ross is a man that needs no introduction, but I’ll write one anyway. Bob was a television host from long ago that taught the world how to paint. His signature afro, calming voice, and beautifully hand-painted vistas made him a household name in the 1980s and 1990s, until he lost his battle with lymphoma in 1995. Though Bob has remained a legend, still. And now there’s a Twitter bot paying homage to Bob’s life’s work.

Happy Little Painting 594282521-9 pic.twitter.com/2UZt2UNJQ3

— Bot Ross (@JoyOfBotRoss) January 26, 2017

Created by Brent Werness, the Twitter bot generates an endless cascade of new pixelated landscapes, inspired by the great Bob Ross and his work in The Joy of Painting. For inspiration, Werness didn’t look to other same-y fractal art or generative work, but to Bob himself. “[Bob] often talked of tapping in simple shapes, and he let the brushes and the fact that the paint moved over the canvas add character,” wrote Werness in a write-up describing the code. “So I start also with simple shapes: lines, triangles, and circles which are arranged to coarsely imitate the shapes of the intended objects and then distort it all with a procedural noise function picked to match the idea that you can move paint around on a wet canvas.”

Werness tackled the project as if he were carefully following Bob’s televised process himself: progressing carefully, step by step. For the bot’s code (the bot aptly named Bot Ross), each object in a work is dithered (or, made to look noisy and obscured) separately on a very limited color palette. The end result are meticulously generated pixelated landscapes that would make Bob proud.

You can follow the Joy of Bot Ross on Twitter , and check out the code for the project here .

(via Prosthetic Knowledge )

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Low-poly puzzles restore light to a dark world in a new game

Virtual reality is still in its early days, and being young, has a lot of issues that need ironing out. But sometimes developers can’t pinpoint everything, which is why the vast majority of developers are releasing games on Steam Early Access—to crowdsource Quality Assurance testing, in a way—before a grander, more polished release. And joining the ever-growing Steam Early Access club for VR is Awaken, a new puzzle slash rhythmic music game from developers Blueprint Reality, Inc. and sound design by BAFTA-award winning composer Jeff van Dyck.

At first glance, Awaken looks like cuter, digital version of the board game Mouse Trap. In Mouse Trap, the player builds a wild contraption, where a marble is eventually initiated to roll through platforms before activating the cage-like mouse trap (unlike the glue traps currently tucked away in your kitchen). In Awaken, as an “architect of light,” the player guides digital marbles (or, light) through pipes and levers to solve puzzles, but with a catch—they’re dynamically creating music through the orchestrating the tools as they progress.

Awaken’s Early Access edition features 30 puzzles currently and a level creation system. Upon release, the game will be expanded across five unique worlds with over 100 puzzles for players to solve. In addition it will implement real-time multiplayer, community level sharing, and a fresh narrative to tie everything together. With the help of towering, adorable “Guardians,” the player is seeking to restore light to a bleak, dark world.

Awaken is available for $29.99 on Steam for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. It will be 15 percent off for its first week.

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A closer look at the clunky bots and boxy spaceships of The Signal From Tölva

Do you remember Sir, You Are Being Hunted for its breathtaking art and scenic landscapes? Or do you remember mostly harrowing chases through the moors as bemonacled automatons try to skin you for sport?

We covered the studio’s newest game The Signal From Tölva last December, focusing on the stunning landscapes of the titular planet. Now, thanks to a video posted by the art team, we’ve gotten a better look at the pointedly clunky, resilient aesthetic of the machines that make up the world of Tölva, from the oil tanker equivalent of spaceships to robots that look like they were put together with an incomplete Ikea set.

The video dives into the technical aspects of turning concept art into in-game models, if you into that, but it’s also a welcome window into the look and feel of the forthcoming game, which artist Olly Skillman-Wilson describes as possessing a “junkyard technology aesthetic.” While some components in Big Robot Ltd’s formula clearly remain the same—it is, after all, still a game about shooting robots—the studio’s notions of what makes a game visually compelling have clearly matured past “steampunk.”

You can watch the video below:

 

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