Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 21

Ooblets is still the cutest farming game we’ve yet to play

Forget about Moblets, that cute-as-heck game we spotted earlier this year. It’s no longer called that. . And to reflect that title change, the world it’s set in is now called “Oob.” So yes, it’s still goddamn adorable, even more so these days.

That isn’t all that is new. As Ooblets designer Rebecca Cordingley has outlined, there have been some changes to how the game works put into place recently. If you don’t know, Ooblets is a farming and creature collecting game. You play as Essie, who aims to start a simple life in the country, growing crops on a piece of land to sell them on. But she can also explore the wider world for new seeds and make little friends called ooblets.

The ooblets exist as part of an influence from the Pokémon games. As such, in previous versions of the game, you fought them and then caught them to befriend them—please note: that is not how you should make friends in reality. But that isn’t very friendly, and it turns out early players of the game thought they were supposed to grow the ooblets rather than catch them. Maybe it’s because they look like vegetables or simply that the world of Ooblets doesn’t invite such a hostile takeover.

In any case, Cordingley thought that growing ooblets was a much better idea. Now, when you defeat them in battle, they drop seeds which you can plant in the ground to grow a little friend. Aww. “When you defeat wild ooblets, they’ll either drop a seed matching their ooblet type, a semi-random seed matching their ooblet category (like a Shrumbo is a fungus-type), or a completely random seed that could grow into any type of ooblet,” Cordingley wrote.

What else? Oh, the adventuring part of the game is closer to being figured out. The game’s world is divided into different biomes with different creatures and trainers to meet. Each of these were a self-contained map that you unlocked and could travel to and from using a trolley system. That’s now been scrapped in favor of connecting all of the regions in a way that lets you walk between them.

How can you not hug that immediately?

“They’ll still each have a trolley station so you can quickly get home, but now the region stations will be locked until you travel to them on foot (and defeat any obstacles in your way),” Cordingley explained. “Making it a bit more linear in this way will hopefully make the adventuring parts of the game a lot more compelling and give us clearer direction in laying out the maps.”

Ooblets also has a new, simple dialogue system that’s better geared for localization. Cordingley also added some new hats (ooblets wear them) and a bunch of new ooblets taking the total number up to 18. Let’s take a look at those adorable little feckers, shall we?

This is Fleeble. Loving the spectacles, propellor hat, and THAT BOW TIE!

This greenie is called Whirlitzer, which implies to me that it can fly. But it’s a nut. Can nuts fly?

OK, so all of the ooblets deserve a hug, but look at Plob. How can you not hug that immediately? And it’s called Plob. Why is that name so adorable?

Look at this fancy pants! A veggie with a monocle and classy hat, but unfortunately doesn’t quite have the gait to pull off the full look. It walks like a drunk on icy pavements. C’mon Wigglewip.

Alright, so that’s all that’s new from Ooblets for now. It’s building up to be kinda irresistible: cute creatures, farm life, and adventuring—and you thought Stardew Valley had it all. Anyway, if you wanna keep up with everything Ooblets you should check out its website. You can also watch it being made live on Twitch.

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If you don’t know about Bokida yet, it’s not too late

I have bizarrely fond memories of playing around with Bokida when it was first released back in 2013. Bizarre because, at the time, the game was only a limited prototype. But there was something about its openness and the toy-like expressions its world allowed. It gave you a vast white landscape with only a few landmarks to break it up—a trench and a temple-like structure, if I recall—but you could place colorful cubes, cut them up, and push the slices around to create a right old mess. It was like a properly physics-based take on Minecraft (2011) that invited you to delight in destruction as much as creation, set in a world that was surprisingly intriguing given how spartan it was.

“playing with an entropic system”

Turns out I wasn’t the only one who saw something special in Bokida‘s prototype. It was made by a team of French students as their graduation project for a BSc in Game Design at the ICAN school in Paris. I presume they passed with flying colors given that, since its release, the prototype went on to pick up a Gameplay Award, selected to be shown at the Notgames Fest, and given an honorable mention at the IGF 2014. This round of attention is what prompted its creators, known collectively as Rice Cooker Republic, to turn that prototype into a larger, full game. Wisely, they started off simply.

“The idea at the time was to refine [the] basic set of interactions to create a more precise and rewarding way to cut and sculpt the digital matter,” Vincent Levy told me, one of the designers and the writer on Bokida. “We liked the idea that you could play with this matter, that it would react to the game world’s physics (bolstering the playfulness of it all), and thus that you would find yourself playing with an entropic system.”

What the game has now are four distinct tools for you to play around with: 1) a build tool, to place cubes, 2) a cut tool, that fires out a line that slices through your cubes, 3) a push tool that sends out a powerful force, and 4) a clean tool to let you easily delete anything you’ve created. You can get a feel for these tools in the game’s demo, downloadable on its website. The demo introduces each tool’s function clearly but what you want to do, really, is test out their limits for yourself. See if you can’t make the game shudder under the weight of its own physics engine. Once I got to the outside area I had great fun just stacking up a tower of cubes all the way up to the invisible ceiling (a disappointing if expected discovery) and then sending a slice straight down through the middle of the tower I was stood on so that it collapsed into a pool of debris.

Bokida is still that toy I remember playing with, then, and an even better one now. But what its creators really needed to work out when expanding the idea is what to do with the world the game is set in. They had the tools from the start but they lacked a reason for players to spend longer with the game outside of messing around. “Early on, we introduced the concept of ‘interactive landscapes’, Levy said. “These would have been specific locations within the game world where the environment would react differently to some of the players’ abilities as a way to elicit playfulness.”

The idea of these locations spread around the game’s world was to encourage players to explore the possibilities of their tools in a way they might not have otherwise. The hope was that it allowed for an emergent type of play, whereby players are given a motive and left to figure out how to combine their abilities to meet its demand. From this the puzzle ideas that are in the game now have been derived. But fear not, for Bokida isn’t all about puzzles, in fact Levy emphasized that the team has ensured to keep the playfulness of the prototype intact. “For us [the puzzle-like sections are] mostly about accomplishing some sort of a ritual action that will induce transformations in the world of Bokida.”

“we conducted research into the Taoist cosmogony”

This leads us to the game’s story, which is another aspect of the game introduced in the demo. At its beginning, we’re made witnesses to a love story between two stars—a light and a dark one. They’ve been separated and your function as “messenger” is to figure out a way to unite them. In the demo, you get to experience the introductory chapter, making your way from the Dark Star to the Light Star. It ends just as the Light Star is about to reveal itself, after you’ve activated the three monoliths across the landscape. It’s after this point that the game apparently opens up a whole lot after the guided sections of the tutorial.

Rice Cooker Republic seems to have spent a lot of its time creating a sense of place since the sparse prototype. You get this straight away in the demo, passing from a large temple, to a forest, and then an infinite vertical structure that shifts its walls and floors behind your back. Levy tells me the team looked to real-world references when coming up with these areas and the landmarks in the larger parts of the game. Namedropped is the distinctive hexagonal pattern of Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, which is practically recreated in the game. With regards to the temples and ruins in the game, their architectural details were drawn from places like the Chand Baori Stepwell in India and traditional burial grounds in Korea, as well as more widely recognizable sites like Stonehenge.

Chand Baori Stepwell, India, via Wikimedia Commons

But it wasn’t only the carved shapes of the rocks and the engravings of these places that the team borrowed. They took on some of the cultural aspects for the game too. “As we crafted the game […] we conducted research into the Taoist cosmogony,” Levy said. “Immediately compelled by how we were able to draw parallels between the few elements we already had in our project and the broad principles of ‘Zao hua’ (which could be considered as a Chinese equivalent to ‘Creation’ but in the Taoist cosmogony) we were interested in subtly incorporating it in the overall structure of the game. This lead us to read many translations of the Tao Te Ching (or Dao De Jing, a fundamental text of Taoism) and to incorporate some of the meaning found in these words in Bokida, most prominently drawing from the key principle of non-action.”

My mind is filled with how these principles could play out in the game. The idea that a game about creation and destruction, about the unification of two stars (perhaps one dead and one alive), eventually leads you to realize the power of “non-action” seems like it could be powerful. We’ll have to wait and see what Rice Cooker Republic manage to pull off when Bokida finally arrives.

You can find out more about Bokida and play its demo on its website.

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Murakami-inspired adventure game Memoranda gets a release date

How real are our memories? Many of Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s works meditate on this question. We remember the past a certain way, but are those memories true to life? His novels and short stories muse on memory, time, love, and human isolation, with characters put in strange settings that are as strange to the characters as they are to the reader. A cat talks back. A man-sized frog discusses the destruction of Tokyo over tea. Little by little, a woman begins to forget her own name.

All of these characters have lost someone or something

Actually, that last one is the plot of Memoranda, a point-and-click adventure game inspired by over 20 of Murakami’s short stories. The creators have announced its release date after being fully funded on Kickstarter last year. On January 25th 2017, you’ll be able to help Memoranda‘s protagonist hold onto her failing memory as she slowly forgets her own name. Is it as simple as memory loss, or is something more insidious and strange at work here?

In the small town in which our protagonist resides, which has inflections of both European and Japanese culture, over 30 distinct characters will remind players of different Murakami stories. A soldier from World War II stands alone in a field, unable to move past the atrocities he was witness and party to. An elephant, in the guise of a man, hopes to become human. All of these characters have lost someone or something, and it is the heroine’s mission to help them – and get her name back.



With beautiful, hand-drawn animation to accompany its 2D gameplay, Memoranda is a surreal story about memory, loss, and memory loss with over 40 scenes and numerous puzzles to solve.

Memoranda will be available for PC on January 25th 2017. Find out more on its website and Steam page.

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KAMI 2 will let you create your own origami puzzles in 2017

State of Play is known for creating videogames out of physical materials. Their biggest to date is Lumino City (2014), an adventure game set across a mechanical metropolis that the team actually constructed out of paper, card, wood, miniature lights, and motors. Outside of that are smaller titles like INKS, which turns pinball into a form of painting, and KAMI (2013), a puzzle game made out of origami squares.

The next game from State of Play is going to be KAMI 2, which once again is built from tiny pieces of colored paper, scalpels, and glue. Patience was also a crucial ingredient that went into making a game like this, as Dan Fountain, the creative lead on KAMI 2, told me. “Hours were spent at the local art store, poring over paper types to get the best texture,” Fountain said. “We spent a lot of time lighting these to discover how the paper responded to light, creasing, and cutting.”

Eventually, after picking out the right paper, Fountain and the rest of the team were able to put together the two keystones for the project. The first was the prototype you can see below.

The original paper prototype for KAMI 2

The idea in KAMI and its sequel is to make the entire sheet of paper in each level a single color within the number of moves you’re given. You do this by first selecting a color at the bottom of the screen and then tapping a paper tile to turn it into that color. All other tiles connected to that one you tapped will then fold (with a satisfying papery sound) with a ripple effect into that new color.

So, in the prototype pictured above, you would select yellow and then tap a blue tile to turn them all yellow. Later levels introduce more tiles and divide the paper into more shapes to increase the challenge.

The photo used as inspiration for KAMI 2

The second keystone for KAMI 2 is the photograph above that was used for inspiration. “Once we had this example, there was a big technical challenge to getting it looking great in-game,” Fountain said. “When simply using a photograph as a texture, it still looked jarringly flat when being lit from different angles. Instead, we invented our own method of scanning paper textures using a series of lit photographs.”

“Using triangles instead of squares was both a visual and mathematical advantage”

Fountain explained that the light and texture of the paper in KAMI 2 uses a highly-detailed 3D lighting model, capture from a real sheet of folded paper. “From any angle, the light catches the paper realistically and every cut, fold, and crease comes to life,” he said. “You can even gently tilt the phone and the paper responds as if it is being lit by a static light in the room.”

“We joked amongst ourselves that we were making our jobs really difficult by finding the most complex way of rendering a single sheet of paper, but we think it paid off,” Fountain added.

 Capturing the 3D surface of the paper

While the premise of KAMI 2 is the same as its predecessor’s, the major difference is that instead of squares, its puzzles are made of triangles—a “significant upgrade,” in Fountain’s words. “Using triangles instead of squares was both a visual and mathematical advantage, we can actually design puzzles with properties that weren’t possible before,” he added.

KAMI 2 also has a ‘Story’ mode that doesn’t tell a direct narrative as such but has a logical mode of progression. The idea is for it to take players on a journey that teaches them different techniques and skills that can are integral to KAMI 2‘s design. “We’ve also snuck in a few surprises and twists,” Fountain told me.

“We really love the moment when a player gets to a puzzle which is slightly more complex than the previous one, but can be done in the exact same number of moves, they are always shocked, confused and eventually become determined to conquer,” he said. “There are also several moments when a puzzle looks very similar to the last, but needs to be solved in a completely different way. One of my favourite comments from a player was that he felt as if he was having a ‘conversation’ with the puzzle designer as he progressed. We want all of KAMI 2 to feel like this.”

While the Story mode ensures that players get to know the ins-and-outs of the paper puzzles, KAMI 2‘s new level editor puts their knowledge to good use. Each player is able to publish a portfolio of levels so that the community can play them. If a player makes levels that impress others then they’re able to earn prestige. But that’s not the only community-focused features of KAMI 2 as it also has a global ‘Daily Challenge’ that lets players go on a winning streak and compete against their friends on the leaderboard.

State of Play has already soft-launched KAMI 2 for iOS in select countries and are already exploring player-made levels. They’re hoping to open up the game for global release in 2017.

Find out more about State of Play and its games on its website.

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CeMelusine’s journey to make videogames more like music continues in January

Vancouver-based artist ceMelusine has been working on the East Van EP for the past couple of years. It’s a collection of four games that ceMelusine has been steadily working on in order to grow as a game maker. The effort goes towards trying to make games more like music by packaging them in a similar way—as in, an EP—but it also drives ceMelusine to make games that are “extremely experiential (moody, readily interact-able, aesthetic).”

The first of the games in the East Van EP was ΘRAΩLE, back in 2014, which was about playing as an oracle and seeing surreal images that acted as prophecies. The second game arrived last year, called Summon the Apgrod, and could be described as a bizarre, dreamy bartender simulator. Now ceMelusine has a release date for third entry in the East Van EP. It’s called Star Swim and will available on January 5th 2017.

Star Swim is said to be a short horror game that takes place at an isolated public pool. You wake up in your car in the middle of the night. You’re parked just outside the pool. The gate to the pool is open and nobody is around, and so you wander inside, perhaps to take a dip in the water under the stars …

When I asked ceMelusine where the idea for Star Swim came from I didn’t expect to get a mysterious story in return. But I did. And now I must share it with you:

“I’ve always been in love with cities at night. East Vancouver (where I currently live) has a treasure trove of neat places that are more or less abandoned after the sun goes down, and whenever possible, I like to wander them,” ceMelusine begins. “Over the summer of 2016 I spent a lot of time at a place called New Brighton Park. Its a nice little space that’s wedged between the traintracks and Vancouver Harbour, and flanked by some of the more industrial parts of town. The park also features one of Vancouver’s larger outdoor public swimming pools.”

“We couldn’t locate the source of the splash”

“I spent a particularly nice day out there in early July and as the sun went down, my best friend (who incidentally wrote all the music for the game) and I decided to stick around for a bit. We heard there was going to be a meteor shower that night and we thought the park to be a good place to watch it from.”

“As we were sitting there, we heard a big splash from the pool and went over to take a look. We thought it would just be some teenagers who had broken in and were goofing off, but when we got close nobody was around. The pool was long closed but the gates were wide open. We couldn’t locate the source of the splash either. It was as though something had visited but vanished as soon as it hit the water. Or perhaps it was still there, and we simply could not detect it…”

Whether you find that chilling or magical is up to you. Either way, it’s this strange incident that inspired Star Swim, and so I can only imagine that the game will reflect that experience and provoke a similar reaction from you when you play it. For ceMelusine, it’s the next step on this journey of personal growth through mystical videogames. But what does that mean?

“In the 2(+) years that I’ve been working on this project, I’ve learned a lot about what makes a place feel interesting and meaningful to me,” ceMelusine told me. “I think Star Swim displays everything good about that process. My hope is that it is a buckshot of feelings I have about East Vancouver and digital space.”

CeMelusine also hopes that Star Swim will function as a palate cleanser to get people in the mood for the fourth and final game in the East Van EP. It’s called Scary Tapes and ceMelusine has been tinkering with it for a little bit over a year now. We’ll have to wait a bit longer to find out what it’s all about.

You can purchase the East Van EP on itch.io to receive Star Swim and the other games made as part of it.

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Pocket Kingdom might be the start to some epic pixel-art games

The pixel artist who calls himself “08–n7R6-7984” probably has too many projects on the go. The one that has caught the most attention is RE5734L3R, which follows a robot that makes its way up the class system of a mechanical cyberpunk city by stealing the social chips of other robots. It’s the pixel art and animation that steals your eyes: megacities sit in fuschia horizons, lightning-blue interfaces glitch and garble, bulky spaceships fly through metallic scenery at a blistering pace. It’s been four of five years since the game first hit my radar and it’s still only a piece of tantalizing vaporware.

This is true for many of the artist’s ongoing videogame projects. There’s Journey to Hammerdale, a puzzle-solving adventure set inside a sprawling world of entangled mazes and forking dungeons. Betelgeuse, an arcade-style space exploration game about finding the last known biological human in a future where only artificial beings remain. Spell Masters is to be a turn-based adventure for mobile about casting spells to navigate its charming grid-based environments. And then the one project he did get around to finishing last year is an old-school style, zombie-themed run-‘n’-gunner called Serious Dave.

Practically all of these game concepts manage to provoke the idea of there being a bigger world beyond the screen through the intricacy of the artwork. It’s the weathering rocks, the esoteric engravings, and indecipherable interfaces that really grip me. There’s a sense of deep history to uncover here; a mystery that has been embedded in each game’s world for many years, and you as the player get to go on an archaeological journey to dig it all up. That I’ve never been able to interact with any of these worlds and the cultures to be found within for myself only makes my desire to do so burn hotter. But perhaps I’ve also convinced myself by now that it would never happen.

“I wanted to take a break from this stuff and make something light and sweet”

It was to my utter surprise, then, that 08–n7R6-7984 released another game last week, one called Pocket Kingdom. As with his other projects, it’s the game’s world that immediately jumped out at me—the details and character in the pixel art making it recognizably his, even though it’s restrained so as to be an “authentic throwback to [the] Amiga era.” The game is set in a steampunk city on a floating island that its inhabitants can’t escape from due to it being enchanted by its unseen creator. You play a guy who struggles to make a living who travels to this island to try to take a photo of the Old God that rests there for a well-known newspaper—some quick and easy cash, he hopes, wrongfully. Of course, he gets trapped on this island too, but has the knack to solve the riddles that should help him escape.

I had to find out right away how this game managed to make it through the quagmire of half-finished game ideas that 08–n7R6-7984 has lying around. “It all began after the release of Serious Dave, that game being quite aggressive with all its shooting, zombies, and gore,” the artist told me. “Therefore, I wanted to take a break from this stuff and make something light and sweet. I imagined an unfortunate traveler getting trapped in this mysterious world and trying to return home. He keeps updating his diary and talks to the locals.”

He made some mockups out of this idea and the person that the artist was working with on RE5734L3R saw them and suggested that they should be made into a game. And so that’s what they did: they acquired a composer and sound artist, a translator and story consultant, as well as a publisher, and committed to finishing Pocket Kingdom. Why this game rather than any of the other projects? I have no idea. I wish I could tell you.

The original mockups for Pocket Kingdom

Perhaps it’s that the pixel art was meant to emulate an Amiga game and is therefore more manageable than the art requirements of 08–n7R6-7984’s other projects. Although this “authentic throwback” to the Amiga isn’t quite what it says. “To tell the truth, I relied more on my personal, subjective impressions while making the art, rather than on technical limitations of the platform,” the artist tells me.He looked at Dizzy and other Amiga platformers and saw something innocent in them that he needed after making Serious Dave. “I wanted to create a world like that, with kind characters, with happy little houses one upon another, with strange lore and setting,” he told me.

Hopefully this is the start of some proper momentum

To keep in line with these influences, then, the artist decided to take a piece of the ordinary world and render it in an unusual state with the help of magic. Each area in the game seems to have started out with an idea and then he followed a process of logic to build the world around it. One example he gave is the District of Tired Lanterns, which is always gloomy due to the cliff and the fog, and so its lanterns never go out, hence the name.

“But [these lanterns] are powered by special crystals mined on the other side of the Kingdom. Therefore, the residents had to make a deal with the pirates who took care of the logistics,” he told me. “The locals also had to deal with strange creatures who became prisoners of this place much like themselves. These creatures speak [a] different language, they follow different logic and purpose, but you have to get along with them, too.”

Understanding the interactions between the characters and cultures of Pocket Kingdom isn’t essential to progress but it does help to unify the logic of its branching city, which you are expected to navigate by yourself (with the help of the notes in the traveler’s diary). For me, it’s a teaser of what 08–n7R6-7984 and his new team—calling themselves 08 Games—can do. Hopefully this is the start of some proper momentum and we’ll see those older projects finished and released too.

“I am definitely not planning to start any new projects, I’d like to finish the old ones first, though not all of them,” the artist told me. “Of course, Journey to Hammerdale is on the list, the game is 50-60 percent ready at the moment. Still, we are not sure yet what game we want to develop next. We’ll discuss it after a short break, we all need to catch our breath a bit.” Watch this space.

You can purchase Pocket Kingdom on Steam.

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Toryansé and the storytelling advantages of short games

Nick Preston decided to call his upcoming series of short adventure games Toryansé after the Japanese folk song of the same name. The song is traditionally sung as part of a children’s game—Warabe uta, which is very similar to the English nursery rhyme game Oranges and Lemons—but has surprisingly dark lyrics thought to relate to a period of high infant mortality in Japan’s history. But it wasn’t only the song’s background that appealed to Preston, it was also the fact that it’s often played at Japanese traffic lights to indicate when it’s safe for pedestrians to cross.

“I loved the idea of layers of story being embedded in a part of everyday life, you could use a crossing every day and not realize,” Preston told me. This idea is what will unite each of his short games; threading a path between the mysterious and the mundane. The first one, due in early 2017, is called Reel and follows an elderly woman who runs a computer repair business in a small shopping arcade. The story starts when she receives a misaddressed package and sets off to find its intended recipient. In her exploration, the woman discovers the previous life of the building that she was unaware of, despite having worked there for years.

The stories that Preston intends to release after Reel will we built of the same material. “The core idea for each story is to show a character stepping outside of their normal, everyday routine and briefly experiencing something that makes them reassess, in some small way, the environment or people around them, then returning to normality feeling a little bit better,” Preston said.

To help realize his vision, Preston has been looking to the works of Studio Ghibli, especially My Neighbour Totoro (1988) and Whisper of the Heart (1995). He told me he has a shelf full of Ghibli’s “Art of …” books that  exemplify the idea of the mundane coexisting with the fantastical that he’s looking to achieve. He’s also been reading the short stories of Japanese writer Banana Yoshimoto, who he has been a longtime fan of, and hopes to capture even a fragment of her magic.

Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge collection of short stories has also been a big influence on Preston as “each story could stand on its own, but at the same time they all seemed to form part of a cohesive whole.” It’s these stories that convinced Preston to split Toryansé up rather than try to tell a single, larger narrative. What he enjoys about short stories are that, when compared to a novel, there is “less time spent on introductions and scene setting, less reliance on traditional structures and narrative arcs.” He added that he brings different expectations as a reader to a short story than to a novel: “I find I’m much less likely to expect an explanation for everything in a short story, or for it to have a neat and tidy ending. I’m hoping these concepts can be translated successfully to my short games.”

“I’m much less likely to expect an explanation for everything in a short story”

As Preston is a first-time game maker, working out how to realize his ambition with Toryansé has been met with a number of road blocks. Art was never a problem as his background is in 3D art, having hopped from doing a painting course in Belfast, to learning animation in Edinburgh, and then finally ending up doing visual effects at the National Film and Television School. And then, after blowing things up and covering people in fake blood, Preston’s life took a less exciting turn as he worked as a 3D generalist for advertising companies for a number of years.

He’d wanted to make games for a long time but has only been able to do so recently as the required development tools and software has become more accessible. It was Unity 3D that convinced Preston to give it a shot as it looked like the 3D software he’d been using for years. He struggled at first due to the coding requirements: “getting my artwork into the engine and up on the screen was excitingly easy, getting it to do anything after that was a real struggle.” But then he discovered PlayMaker, which replaces the lines of code with something more visually manageable. “A page full of numbers and curly brackets still absolutely baffles me but present the same thing as a few shapes connected with wavy lines and I seem to be okay,” Preston said.

An early animation test for Reel

Other than coding, a big challenge for Preston was writing—he simply didn’t feel confident enough in his writing ability, plus having text in the game complicated the localization process a lot. His solution was to make Toryansé wordless. “I also had an idea that removing the text allowed each individual player to have their own, more nuanced interpretation of what was going on,” he said, “graphical symbols and mime are more open to subjective assessment than words.” How to tell his stories without words has been a process of ongoing refinement.

Most recently, he’s been trying to focus on non-diegetic elements, believable interactions between the character and the world, all without even the typical adventure game fallbacks like inventory items and thought bubbles. “It’s a tricky balance to strike, on the one hand it emphasizes the feeling of sharing an experience with a character rather than controlling one, but on the other there’s the risk that players don’t feel engaged at all,” Preston said. “A benefit of splitting the game into smaller pieces is I can always adapt and change the interface to suit each character and story individually.”

Reel is being made as part of Northern Ireland Screen’s eXP Project. a scheme that allows creators to explore small, interactive experiences without needing to worry about their commercial prospects. The deadline for that is January 31st 2017 so Preston is hoping to have something ready by then. A Windows release is being prioritized, with Mac and Linux hopefully coming shortly after, and Preston hopes a touchscreen version is also possible.

You can find out more about Toryansé on its website.

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Diluvion is aiming for all the undersea peril and wonder of a literary classic

Outer space is what currently holds the global population’s active imagination. The big breakthroughs in science that wow us are made up there, and so our popular stories follow suit—whether it’s space disasters directed by Hollywood (Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian) or videogames that promise us the universe (No Man’s Sky, Stellaris, Elite: Dangerous). Popular culture’s current output sells the idea that we are infatuated with life and death beyond our home planet.

But Leo Dassey, creative director at Arachnid Games, hasn’t turned his head to the skies; he’s looking the other way. His team’s upcoming game Diluvion is an undersea adventure inspired most of all by Jules Verne’s classic novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870). His enthusiasm leaks through straight away as I ask him what it is about Verne’s novel that gripped him: “The sense of adventure in the ocean; the giant creatures; the fact that the Nautilus has a library; the creativity behind the submarine design in Disney’s film adaption.”

a whole new culture with underwater kingdoms

We need to slow this down. In the demo of Diluvion I play the captain of a submarine and with my crew we’re on a mission to explore the ocean. Now, in Diluvion‘s world, being a submarine captain is a big deal as the planet has been entirely flooded and humanity has been trapped underwater due to a thick, impenetrable layer of ice. This cataclysmic event happened centuries prior to when the game starts, and so what has evolved since then is a whole new culture with underwater kingdoms, traffic, legends, religions, and so on. The game is about diving into all of that.

What strikes me first about Diluvion is how it makes me feel like a captain. Although I am technically pressing buttons to directly steer the sub and increase its speed, the game brings up a talking head in the corner when I do, showing my helmsman’s face as he says variants of “Aye aye, captain.” There’s a sense of constant communication between my lackeys and I as we drive around thousands of meters deep in the game’s 3D rendition of a vast ocean.

But it’s not only these talking portraits that sell the effect, as at any time I can press a button to move smoothly from that 3D view and into a painterly 2D cutaway of my submarine. From there I can see which station each crew member is assigned to, performing their designated operations. Similar to FTL: Faster Than Light (2012), I am able to move crew members around from this 2D view, bolstering different functions of the submarine as required.

But as Dassey explained to me, crew management plays a different role in Diluvion than it does in FTL. “In FTL, you’re viewing your crew during combat, and giving them orders real time. In Diluvion, you assign crew to stations based on their stats to get the best bonuses from each station,” Dassey said. “Sometimes in combat you’ll need to dive into your sub interior and make quick changes, and for this we have a mechanic called Captain Time (similar to bullet time) which slows down time so you can make those changes without getting blasted.”

In practice, all this means is that I need to consider the skills of crew members and the number of crew in each station. If I’m concentrating on exploration I may put more crew into the helm to get bonus speed. Simple as that. For the most part, though, what I’m doing when playing Diluvion is sitting in that 3D view, bringing up my compass for navigation, and pinging my sonar to look out for any dangers. At first I’m stuck in the confines of a dark trench, shooting mines and visiting a nearby town to refill my oxygen, it’s a decent introduction but I don’t feel much like Captain Nemo.

“we never bar the player from exploring”

A little later on I emerge from the trench and, oh gee, there’s a whole frickin’ ocean to whiz around for as long as you have the supplies to do so. It’s a lot to take in—terror and wonder—and so I asked Dassey how he helps players with negotiating such a huge open space. “Aside from a brief introductory segment in the beginning, we never bar the player from exploring,” he said. “The aggressive fog is meant to build up that sense of mystery and put focus on the more immediate surroundings. We also use the sonar system to make sure that the player can find something interesting beyond the fog. We make sure that if the player is on a quest, there’s ways to navigate to that quest, using a system of landmarks, compass, map, and fish.”

As I approach the end of the demo, my crew advises me to check out a nearby town after we’ve been attacked by some large, jellyfish-like creature. We dock and find it abandoned except for what seem to be a few petrified citizens stood in the emptiness. It’s eerie. A few seconds later I find out why. A huge, fuck-off fish emerges without warning from the fog and swallows us and the entire town whole. It was shocking. And it certainly felt a lot more like the kind of peril and excitement a game inspired by Verne’s novel should be aiming for.

This extraordinary moment is only the start of what Dassey and his team have planned for Diluvion. I ask him if there will be more of these kinds of surprises, to which he replies, “Yes, absolutely. One of the first you encounter is a massive Japanese Spider Crab with a battleship inspired by the WWII mega-ship Yamato as its shell.” He means this thing …

Captain Nemo once said, “The human mind delights in grand conceptions of supernatural beings.” It feels like Arachnid Games is trying to capture the heart of that quote with Diluvion. And they’re being wise and not showing much more of the game’s more fantastical side in order to honor that. It’s to be a surprise to everyone as they steadily navigate the deepest blues, stopping at towns to restock and perhaps take on another crew member, and eventually upgrading the submarine and buying new ones. I don’t know if you’ll ever get hold of a submarine that’s equivalent to the technically advanced design of the Nautilus, but from the little I played I don’t think you’ll need it to get the thrill of the Captain Nemo experience.

Diluvion is coming out for Windows and Mac in 2017. Arachnid Games would love to get it on console one day too. You can find out more about it on its website.

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Girls Make Games ran a workshop at the White House last week

Where do you go after teaching girls how to code and make games with workshops, summer camps, and game jams across 38 cities worldwide? The White House, apparently.

Last week, on December 7th, Girls Make Games ran a two-hour workshop inside the White House with a bunch of girls from ages 11 to 14. (Which, as has been mentioned to me, is something that might not happen again for a while given the change of administration at the White House next year.) There were interactive lectures and time for some hands-on coding too, which each girl given a playable prototype at the end of the workshop, along with a certificate and the resources required to continue coding their game. We have some photos of the workshop in session below.

All the girls who participated in the workshop at the White House before they headed inside

Q&A time with Ruthe Farmer, the White House’s Senior Policy Advisor for Tech Inclusion

Izzy Penston, the lead writer and creative director for Interfectorem, sharing her experience writing and designing the game. Interfectorem was the winner of the 2015 national Demo Day competition hosted by Girls Make Games, in which teams pitch their games to industry experts. The grand prize is having continued mentorship while working on the game and having it published when it’s finished.

Jordan Levine, one of the workshop participants, holding a box of Hershey’s Kisses carrying the Presidential Seal

The workshop was part of the Computer Science For All initiative that has been ongoing since President Obama launched it back in January 2016. During his weekly address at that time, Obama said “we have to make sure all our kids are equipped for the jobs of the future – which means not just being able to work with computers, but developing the analytical and coding skills to power our innovation economy.”

As part of this “year in action” in support of the initiative, 14 states have expanded their computer science programs, 500 organizations have taken place with new programs and funding, and a new AP-CS course launched in the fall across 2,000 classrooms. Girls Make Games is one of the participating organizations and will be making its game development workshop curriculum available online for free in 2017 as part of that. It will also be distributing workshop-in-a-box kits to school districts around the US, which includes teacher training modules, art asset packs, a game building curriculum, and a mobile publishing resource.

You can find out more about Girls Make Games on its website.

All photos taken by and provided by Girls Make Games.

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Upcoming point-and-click mystery brings a fresh vision to future Florida

As a college student, my professors are pretty important to me, and not just because they hold the future of my GPA in their hands. My professors have been endlessly patient with my classmates and me, providing us with guidance, insight, and even free dinner once or twice. If one of them went missing without a word, I’m not sure exactly what I’d do.

When a professor suddenly disappears after making a mystical discovery in the upcoming point-and-click mystery game The Last Goddess, an unlikely investigative team of four comes together in Florida to solve the mystery. Each of the characters has a distinct personality and backstory:

– Seiko, a successful graphic designer, is questioning her career trajectory

– Colin, an intern at the same company as Seiko, is a young hotshot designer with a lot to learn

– Tamara is on her way to a PhD at Tampa Bay University, when her dissertation committee chair (the professor) goes missing

– Carmen is a down-on-her-luck investigator from the US Department of Education sent to investigate the disappearance

Each of these characters also bring unique perspectives and skills to the team. Carmen is particularly resourceful and adept at picking locks, while Tamara has a wealth of academic knowledge, for example.

going on an adventure and solving a mystery with your friends

Additionally, these four function collectively. According to the game’s designer, you won’t be playing as just one character; instead, the game features this ensemble working together. The cast of characters is intended to make you feel like you’re going on an adventure and solving a mystery with your friends. To create these unique protagonists, the developer drew from JRPGs like Chrono Trigger (1995) and Persona 4 (2008), which both heavily emphasized characters and their development.

The story is inspired by classic 80s movies like Ghostbusters (1984), and the visuals are designed to be reminiscent of early computer games from the late 80s and early 90s. Combined with simple point-and-click controls, The Last Goddess inspires nostalgia for games like The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) and King’s Quest II (1985).

This is the third game from developer Dean Sullivan, whose first point-and-click adventure game was titled Ozzie and the Quantum Playwright (2002).

The Last Goddess doesn’t have a release date yet, but you can learn more about the game at its official site.

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