Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 206

What's going on over at The Chinese Room?

A lot is going on at The Chinese Room at the moment. Perhaps not as much as before Everybody's Gone to the Rapture was released, or necessarily more than any other studio out there, but what is going on is being documented in surprisingly personal and honest blogs. This is going to start off grim and then slowly get less grim, so stick with it. We begin with the studio's co-founder Jessica Curry who had a "horribly hard post to write." In short, she's leaving (sort of), but will continue to compose music for the studio's games. 

"I was so wrong" 

The reasons for this are heartbreaking. Firstly, she's ill with a degenerative disease. She says this means that her health will only continue to deteriorate with time. What a crushing thing to have to accept. That Curry has managed to do so, even if partially, and admitted that she needs to step away from the work environment slightly, is surely a sign of true strength. "I pushed myself to the edge of a precipice on Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture- I thought if I kept running then I could always keep the disease just out of reach. I was so wrong," she writes.

Secondly, Curry describes her time working with a videogame publisher for the first time on Everybody's Gone to the Rapture as a "desperately toxic relationship." Yikes. "Big business and the creation of art have always been extremely uncomfortable bedfellows and making Rapture proved to be no exception for me." Curry says that seeing this side of making videogames has caused her to want to get away from it all. She refuses to accept that whatever she experienced to be the way things are, and that they cannot be changed, as was the general sentiment when she spoke up.

Finally, and most painfully, her crusade to prove that women have a vital role in the games industry will have to be passed on to others. She says that she experienced discrimination again and again as her husband and other The Chinese Room co-founder Dan Pinchbeck got all the credit and praise for their work. She has always been presumed to be the PA, or simply referred to by her marital status, or been left out of mention entirely when the studio is discussed. 

Then there's this crushingly personal anecdote that Curry shares:

"Last year I had a beautiful idea for Rapture. Dan went to LA and while he was there he told Sony about it. When he returned I said 'what did they think of my idea?' He admitted that he'd ascribed the idea to one of our team members, not me. He was genuinely bewildered by my anger and asked 'but why does it matter who gets the credit?' My reply: 'It only doesn't matter who gets the credit when you're the person who always gets the credit!'"

What Curry will be moving on to beyond The Chinese Room is a large-scale music project with Carol Ann Duffy, who is The Chinese Room's current poet laureate. "What Rapture made me realize is that I’m actually pretty good at writing music and by God, it makes me so wonderfully, dizzily happy," Curry writes. 

Before moving on, though, Curry wrote about the many processes that went into creating Everybody's Gone to the Rapture's wonderful music. Her enthusiasm bounds out of the text, but it makes for an interesting read also due to it revealing how these large orchestral scores are managed.

It was something different for Curry, who says she was used to keeping everything stored in her head, but was working with orchestrator Jim Fowler on the music. Consequently, everything was organized into condensed spreadsheets, proof-read, and the Dave Foster's scores were written for the players' ease ("They are the most beautiful scores I have ever seen – they are actual works of art," Curry recalls).

"a pretty serious departure from our normal games." 

The whole post goes further into what it was like working with Sony Music and the orchestra itself in the studio. Curry also takes a moment to praise singer Elin Manahan Thomas and her voice. The ardour here is worth a read alone: "All I can say is what a voice. I have never heard anyone like Elin and I doubt I ever will. The purity, the beauty, the sheer soul that bursts from her when she sings- it's incomparable. She's also really lovely- you're probably getting sick of me saying this but 'tis true."

Moving onto the third and final recent post from The Chinese Room, this time Pinchbeck is the writer, and he's looking towards what's next for the studio. At the moment, the studio is in a transitory state, both between a finished project and starting a new one, and in the process of moving offices. This has given the studio a rare chunk of time to reflect and plan what it's going to do going forward. 

Still, there are prototypes already underway for a project that will hopefully be exposed in a couple of months. One of those prototypes is called "Total Dark," funded by Creative Europe, and that Pinchbeck teases will be "a pretty serious departure from our normal games." Oh, there's a teaser image for that, too. Looky looky:

One last thing to note is that The Chinese Room recently got an HTC Vive—the most impressive virtual reality headset around right now—and have been playing around with that. The result of this could be the studio's 2012 poetic first-person game Dear Esther being adapted for virtual reality. "So it's all go," Pinchbeck concludes. "We're not very good at taking it easy."

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Why board game players make great testers.

Cards Against Urbanity lets you study and mock urban planning at the same time

The difference between Cards Against Humanity and the sort of flashcards used for revision is, I suppose, that the latter can come in a greater range of colours. Sure, “a cat video so cute your eyes roll back and your spine slides out your anus” is not the typical exam prompt, but the mechanics are fundamentally the same. Flip the card over; deal with the hand fate has dealt you.

maybe it’s a little bit worrying 

Cards Against Urbanity, which applies its generalist forebear's mechanics to the lexicon of urban planners, splits the difference between these approaches. Its cards can combine into amusing nonsense, but the building blocks are all real world references. That’s why Next City’s Rachel Kaufman finds that the game has actually been used as something of an aide-memoire:  

“Even though it’s snarky and cynical — which planners are — it has terms in it that people might not know,” says Catherine Hartley, a senior planner at Hillsborough County, Florida. “If you’re an old-timer, you might not know what tactical urbanism is. If you’re not in historic preservation, you might not know what demolition by neglect is.

Inspired by the ways Cards Against Urbanity players are educating each other about urban planning through in-jokes, the team behind the card game is launching a new, more serious stack of cards. Call it, if you wish, Cards For Urbanity."

What does this all say about urban planning? Maybe nothing. Maybe weird combinations of cards are inevitable amongst colleagues and social drinkers. But maybe it’s a little bit worrying that the language of urban planning can just as easily be a flashcard as it can be a joke.

In How To Speak Money, his excellent book on the linguistic peculiarities of financial discourse, the journalist and novelist John Lanchester argues that the field fallen prey to a process whereby words come to mean the opposite of what one might intuit. The term Lanchester coins for this phenomenon is “reversification.” Specific examples of this process abound—“consumer surplus” and “Chinese wall” (in its financial sense), to name but two—but How To Speak Money is really concerned with the effects of this phenomenon. If the average citizen cannot reason her way to a general understanding of what financial jargon means, she cannot participate in debates about the economy or financial regulation. In this way, obscurantist language is a democratic threat, effectively locking much of the population out of meaningful discussions.

The language of urban planning is not as bad as that of money. (When in doubt, the moneymen are the worst.) Nevertheless, the various uses of language in Cards Against Urbanity suggest that the language of cities may be moving in that direction. Laugh about it, sure, but should such a day come to pass it would represent a similar threat to democracy as the one Lanchester writes about. Here's hoping Cards For Urbanity is a solution to that very problem.

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The toylike world of Lovely Weather We're Having will be with us soon

Colorful going-outside sim Lovely Weather We’re Having has a release date of November 10th for PC and Mac.

You can watch the Big Announcement in this totally real clip from the Ellen DeGeneres Show.

Lovely Weather We’re Having is described as a “goal-free” game about spending time outside, chatting with locals, kicking rocks, and just generally enjoying the blobby scenery, rain or shine.

According to its website, the game uses local weather data to simulate nearby weather conditions, so if it's raining in real life, it'll probably be raining in the game too. This might result in a change of mood for certain NPCs, but it won't necessarily trigger any "plot points" or "mysteries" to unlock.

“A lot of games are designed around this cycle of conflict > resolution > conflict,” creator Julian Glander told us in a recent interview. “I have enough of that in my real life, so when I play games I don't really get anything out of accomplishing tasks or winning things. In my opinion, it's more appealing to move around a space and see what's up, on your own terms.”

The game looks as vibrant and toy-like as something by Keita Takahashi, so exploring its world should be appealing indeed. If the song in its gameplay trailer is anything to go off of, it should sound amazing too.

You can find Lovely Weather We’re Having on its website, itch.io, and Steam.

Fatal Frame for Wii U finally puts your selfie skills to use

Instagram of the Dead.

Movable Play continues November 3rd with the folks behind Swarm and Songpop

On November 3rd we'll continue the third installment of our new series on beautifully crafted mobile games. Join us at Betaworks Studio for great after-work talks from the creators of Swarm, SongPop, and the great student project Wukong - The Monkey King. Movable Play features valuable talks from industry experts, but most importantly there is free food and alcohol. 21+up only. 

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Next week: free arcade at the Ace Hotel

Next week, head over to the Ace Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, where we’ll be hosting Playlist, our monthly public arcade. The arcade will be open, and free, from six to eight, so come out and join us for some afterwork digital play--no costume required.

This month, get inside the head of a videogame developer in The Beginner’s Guide, go on a space-date in Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, and take a walk through the spooky halls of SOMA. Play these games and more on October 27th, next Tuesday.

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The surreal, vaporwave harmony of Executive Towers

Can an album also be a videogame? Last year, chiptune artist George & Jonathan did it, with an interactive experience for their synth-pumping, hyper-colorful third album III. So did pop producer bo en, curating his own interactive accompaniment to his debut pale machine with a host of mini-games based on songs from the record, which notably included a collaboration with Arcane Kids's Ben Esposito.

Vancouver-based musician Jade Statues’ new album, Executive Towers, follows this videogame-album trend, the game itself programmed by first-time developer daffodil. Jade Statues dreamed up the concept for the dual videogame-album approach to his official Dream Catalogue netlabel debut, and takes the modern trend a step further with a more cohesive collaboration between the mediums.

The game itself, and overall concept for the album that accompanies it, was inspired by Asmik Ace Entertainment artist Hiroko Nishikawa’s cult classic LSD: Dream Emulator, a surreal exploration game for the Playstation based on Nishikawa’s very own “dream journal.” The game has garnered a cult following ever since its Japan-only release in 1998, and even got a fan-made remake in 2014. People who have played that game will recognize its alien signature in Executive Towers, both visually and through the soundtrack’s ambient whines. Even as you greet a Japanese-speaking armless secretary that bears a striking resemblance to the robot from Hayao Miyazaki’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky. 

A cohesive collaboration between two mediums  

The verbiage for the game’s description seems to beg us to know that this is an album first, and a game second. Daffodil’s itch.io description urges players to “apply for a high paying VIP position in the official game of the album.”

Pay what you want for Executive Towers on daffodil’s itch.io.

The Stanley Parable co-creator teases new game with mysterious ARG

Coming right off the tail of Davey Wreden’s The Beginner’s Guide, the other Stanley Parable co-creator William Pugh has begun teasing a new game of his own. The unnamed mystery game, described as “a weird puzzle,” will be the debut project for Pugh’s recently founded studio Crows Crows Crows. But aside from that bit of info, a few screenshots, and a strange ARG, we don’t know much about it just yet.

The images depict a large, numbered vault locked away in a dark storage room, what appears to be the backstage area of a theater, and a pipe-filled basement with metal grating on the floor and, curiously, an umbrella hanging from the wall.

There’s talk of stolen items 

Dive right into the ARG happening on the official Crows Crows Crows website, and you’ll find a collection of documents on what appears to be a police investigation. There’s talk of stolen items, from paintings to pens to orchid bulbs, a timeline of events, some clues, and letters between characters called Inspector Lavigne and Deputy Angelo, who are communicating between the cities of Rome and Lyon.

Stay on one page too long and you’ll be transferred to a page titled Mayflower Networking System. I haven’t dug too deeply into this just yet, but there’s an entire subreddit dedicated to decrypting this teaser for clues. Can you figure it out?

According to the website, this unnamed project is “due quite imminently.”

Head over to the Crows Crows Crows website to find out more.