This week I played some games
Puzzle Juice / I bought this Tetris/Word puzzle mashup due to a combination of it’s excellent graphic design and it being on sale for .99. I’m not normally a big word game fan so I don’t expect it to become an enduring addiction, but it’s great to see a game with a clean an modern non-illustrated approach. I love the subtle dimensionality and shading on the blocks and the colored stripe visualization for block placement.
Temple Run / A number of people mentioned this recently on podcasts and Twitter so I had to check it out. Turns out it combine’s everything I dislike about Jetpack Joyride (coins, coin magnets, buy more coins, etc) with what appears to be left over assets from a World of Warcraft troll instance. I like to imagine that the little running guy stole some sacred artifacts and you’re really just helping out some treasure hunting jerk.
Monsters Ate My Condo / Adult Swim recently launched a “Lite” version of this great match 3 stacking game by Pik Puk. I played it for about 30 seconds and had to buy it. The monster animations have an incredible amount of life and energy to them. It was great to play an actual game after spending so much time recently with the addicting interactive-spreadsheet that is Tiny Tower.
Bayonetta / The wife was using the communal office chair and laptop so I had no choice but to play some videogames on the Xbox. After reading an old Aztez post on brawler defense mechanics, I had to pick up Bayonetta and explore how her dodging and attack combos worked. It struck me as odd how refined and fluid the combat is and how terrible the UI experience is. Lot’s of odd decisions on that side of things.
Another odd thing I noticed was how similar the in game shop looks to an iOS in app purchase hub. I earned a few thousand rings every game, but the items were all priced at 20k-100k. It felt as if I was just overlooking the “Buy More Rings” button and kind of makes me fearful as these up-sells work there way into the console experience.
Videos I watched on the internet this week
A Year of Sun with Mr. Persol.
Knights of Basassdom. Late to the party on this one. I always read articles about it at work, but never checked out the trailer:
Giant hornets take on a colony of bees.
Prometheus trailer.
Cults – Abducted. I kept hearing this on the Current but never was around when they said who it was by. I was able to track it down through a bit of logic and the fact that their playlists are archived on the sight. Hurray fro the future!
This Battlefield 3 Simulator Shoots Back At You
Remember that awesome virtual reality games from the nineties? This looks like it might be a bit more fun:
If you’re looking for the perfect gift for your favorite gaming website this holiday season, why not consider this Battlefield 3 simulator constructed by Channel 5′s The Gadget Show? With an omni-directional treadmill, a wireless gun system, five HD projectors and a massive dome, it would strike just the right balance between you looking chintzy and us being embarrassed by your generosity.
This looks to be a pretty immersive, albeit fairly expensive, way to get your gun on in the future. It almost looks like something from a bad episode of the X-Files, where you know a rogue AI is going to eventually take over and make good use of those paintball guns. I’d love to see the interface hooked up to something less shooter-y an more atmospheric, maybe Alan Wake or Heavy Rain, or something ridiculous like Katamari Damacy.
Bonus: The Making Of video
Source: Joystiq
Sketch Dump: Nothing in particular
A random sketch dump. I was trying to experiment with scale a bit and came up with some bigger beefier biker beasts:
Sketch Dump: Concepts and Color Roughs
I decided that it’s important to fit a bit more T&A into my Seven Guns concepts:
I’m also playing around a bit with color, although I haven’t figured out yet if I want to have it flat and gritty or more rendered. I’ll need to work on some target screenshots to get a better handle on that before I get sucked into the coloring rabbit hole.
I’m putting “Rebuild the Black Warp demo in Unity” back on my list of things to do so I’ll be putting up art from that in the near future, just to remind myself of all the neat stuff sitting unused in sketchbook world.
Enemy Sketch Dump
Now that I have so much free time I’m starting back up with my game development! I’m currently working on 2 games: one super simple and one that’s more complex.
Simple game is a simple dodging game that I’m building with the Unity3D engine as a learning project that I will be able to publish to the web, and maybe iOS if I get that far.
Complex game will be a spinoff of my unfinished comic project Seven Guns of the Old Gods. I’ll mostly be working on animation and style tests in Photoshop and Blender, with the goal of finding a programmer and animator to help turn it into something more.
Here’s some sketches from Complex Game. It has a heavy metal inspired art style and will include lots of brushy hand drawn art. I’ll also figure a way out to include large portrait art on screen occasionally, similar to what I’ve seen in lots of Japanese games but less cutesy/Lolita.
More to come in the future…