Something to watch for from the USC EA Game Innovation Lab:
“The player’s voyage through The Night Journey takes them through a poetic landscape, a space that has more reflective and spiritual qualities than geographical ones. The core mechanic in the game is the act of traveling and reflecting rather than reaching certain destinations – the trip along a path of enlightenment.”
“It’s a game that rewards you for slowing down and for introspection,” says Viola, 59, a pioneer in the medium of video art for more than 35 years. “You’re alone and you’re not even told why you’re there. You just fall out of the sky into the middle of this amazing landscape with mountains, sea, desert, and forest, and go wherever you want,” he explains. “The more you do things mindfully, the more is revealed to you.”
Playdead just announced that Limbo is headed to XBLA. Looking forward to seeing this at GDC.
Limbo looks fantastic, and there’s something just so archetypally elegant about that little stroll in the woods; its evocative of Miyamoto’s childhood hillside wanderings, and my own memories of the intersections of exploration and imagination.
Are atmospheric silhouette graphics all that it takes to impress me these days? I think no – Feist and Limbo in particular look to be particularly subtle and refined in gameplay and sound as well – but there still is something to be said for simplicity of visuals taking such a strong position in the indie community now.
One of our tenets is to look closely at what the big studios do, then do the exact opposite.
This is a stylistic as well as practical decision. What happens if non-mainstream style is appropriated, to some extent, by the mainstream (as things often do with very near everything besides games)? What’s next?
Keeping cartoon characters trapped in amber is one of the surest routes to irrelevancy. While Mickey remains a superstar in many homes, particularly overseas, his static nature has resulted in a generation of Americans – the ones that grew up with Nickelodeon and Pixar – that knows him, but may not love him. Domestic sales in particular have declined: of his $5 billion in merchandise sales in 2009, less than 20 percent will come from the United States.
“There’s a distinct risk of alienating your core consumer when you tweak a sacred character, but at this point it’s a risk they have to take,” said Matt Britton, the managing partner of Mr. Youth, a New York brand consultant firm.
Nintendo, Miyamoto, take note! Capcom, take note! “Keeping … characters trapped in amber is one of the surest routes to irrelevancy.” Mario and Link are not sacred! Megaman is not sacred! Give us something new, something relevant! These characters and franchises are sorely in need of some new ideas.
They’re still fun, but they’re safe, guarded. They aren’t moving games forward.
Right now Nintendo is caught between taking advantage of nostalgia (New Super Mario Bros. Wii) and presumably finding the best direction for the next big Mario and Zelda productions. If I were them, I would be pushing for a major reimagination.
The first look at From Software‘s 3D Dot Heroes Game (PS3) recently made the rounds through the blag-o-web, but is so far limited to a number of nice looking high-resolution screenshots and some vague information about the context of the game.
Despite being intrigued, I’m fairly confounded by the popular reaction, especially from reader comments.
Beyond some critical observations, reader comments mostly consist of “WANT”, “ZOMGs”, and hyperbole about how the game is “the most (insert beautiful/creative/anticipated/pretty here) thing ever”. The look certainly is attractive, but I don’t know if I would go THAT far.
A comment on GameSetWatch smartly pointed out the similarity to an older prototype of the Yuusha No Kuse Ni Namaikida games. The “8-bit graphics redone as voxel graphics” idea itself is certainly not original, as 3D tribute art and mods of this kind have been floating around for some time now. For example, see Justin Buonvino’s DeviantArt.
The question is – is this a cleverly managed/optimized birds-eye view in the same engine? Or different rendering altogether? I suspect the latter.
Essentially the game appears to be a tribute (or potentially parody) to both the aesthetics and conventions of 8-bit Japanese RPGs. Apparently the player starts out in a traditionally 2D 8-bit world which somehow turns 3D. Depending on how central this dimensional shift is to the context and/or gameplay of the game, it could actually be hilarious – imagine the mass chaos such a alteration would cause in the 8-bit residents’ lives – or at least very interesting.
I absolutely can get behind the self-referential, ironic nature of this idea. However, aesthetically speaking, the appeal so far seems to be driven on nostalgia alone, along with some basic post-processing work – a tilt-shift style focus and so on. It’s attractive, but what we’ve seen at this point doesn’t suggest too much beyond being a 8-bit-style game in 3D.
Don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing that suggests this game will be bad! It absolutely COULD be genius self-referential parody or tribute. It doesn’t even need to be brilliantly inspired to still be a solid game. However – so far there isn’t much to suggest it WILL any of those things either. What may be compelling about this title entirely remains to be seen.
My point is that that the popular reaction to this early news seems to have jumped the gun – and that 3D Dot Heroes could very easily fall into the trap of relying entirely on a visual-nostalgia gimmick. I certainly hope that won’t be the case!
Gel? Stalfos?
Now I am being a little hypocritical as usual… An 8-bit JRPG-inspired/tribute game that would get me drooling and ZOMGing? A Dragon Quest I or Legend of Zelda remake that looks, plays, and feels like one of Fumito Ueda’s games, in all their atmospheric, minimalistic glory.
Edit:
Now THIS I would pick up in an instant… if it were somehow possible to have an abstract, voxel graphics Asteroids/Pong/Space Invaders/Mario/Pac-Man mashup be coherent in the least as a game. Or maybe not. “>
So the recent extended trailer for Gagne’s Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet is out. The animation looks fantastically smooth and well-conceived, but to be perfectly honest the Scandinavian black metal makes me cringe. Personal taste, that’s all. If it must be metal, may I recommend Sunn O)))? Better for atmosphere!
I’m particularly impressed with some of the larger creatures – the snapping one in the corridor actually seems to be genuinely frightening. Here’s hoping for more of those moments. Also, the potential of environment scalability could be interesting in this context – the trailer does flash a brief scene of your ship appearing smaller than it usually does in an open space. Scrolling-tunnel gameplay does eventually get old and is certainly nothing new.
The release of this trailer seems to have generated a lot of excitement tempered slightly by comments on the unoriginality of the gameplay and the origin of the aesthetic. I’m all for old-school/simplistic/subtractive gameplay these days (within reason), but commentary on the silhouette aesthetic has definitely got me thinking.
The look is highly minimal, with a “shadow puppet” sort of contrast between flat black foreground images and saturated colors in the background. Gagne, an animator with decades of animation/film industry experience, has explored this visual style before, and Tartakovsky‘s work on Samurai Jack also comes to mind. However as this aesthetic seems to have become an indie game trend these days, it merits some game-specific analysis.
World of Goo did not utilize this look throughout the entire game, balancing a more colorful look with the high contrast look in certain levels, and actually tied in a somewhat unexpected “digital” art style at a certain point in the game. Regardless, the game art maintained its stylistic consistency well throughout. It’s also a great game, incidentally.
Feist has won awards for its visual design (equal parts shadow puppets, Miyazaki sootballs, and Where the Wild Things Are) without even having been released yet. The vibe reminds me of indie exploration games like Knytt, which had an incredible atmosphere. The silhouette look and the music push what I’ve seen of the game so far in that direction as well.
Patapon for PSP is another obvious one and is pretty much a straight unadulterated expression of the silhouette look.
Am I missing any big ones?
Functionally, the shadow puppet/silhouette look seems to be, in a sense, a return to traditional arcade game aesthetics – albeit in inverse. Both vector and pixel-based graphics of games like Tempest and Robotron 2084 relied on the use of brightly colored foreground graphics over a black background, due to the challenge of providing visuals that would be as playable as possible within the constraints of current rendering limitations. Picture Robotron 2084 on a highly colorful backdrop with flat black characters, and voil?†, you essentially have the shadow puppet look.
The advantage of this look thus has much in common with its minimal ancestors. High contrast of in-game objects lends itself well to simple, straightforward gameplay, minimizing clutter. If the gameplay mechanics work to this end, playability can be improved by a look this simple and contrasted.
Other advantages are more representative of the times. Shadowed foregrounds and characters can create a highly moody look, which can be good for building a certain sense of atmosphere. Compare this with the look of LocoRoco for example: LocoRoco also has flat, simple foregrounds, but with a colorful style that is more reminiscent of well lit Katamari Damacy levels or Saturday morning cartoons – a style that doesn’t lend itself to a compelling atmosphere (despite how good Katamari Damacy is).
Another positive of this visual style – it seems that it can only be good for development costs – the creation of flat shadow characters and environments would seem to be much less costly than creating a modern platformer look like Braid. Also, the de-emphasis of texture and depth can lead to increased polish in surface details or animation, as several of these games have demonstrated.
Anyway, that all being said, I’m looking forward to seeing how Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet turns out. Did I mention I dislike the music? I really dislike the music.
Like many others, I briefly got my hands on the New Super Mario Bros. Wii demo at E3 this June. Still being a sucker for the franchise, I had some fun with it, and despite the simplicity of the DS game on which it was based, I was quite fond of Mario’s recent foray into 2D gameplay. New Super Mario Bros. DS was by no means as complex, expansive, or rewarding as Super Mario 3 and its ilk, but it was a refreshing reminder of the good ol’ days, and carried the promise of hopefully more retro Mario games.
After the initial enjoyment of a bunch of SMB characters running around on an old-school level subsided, I realized why the idea felt so comfortable and familiar. The fact that side-scrolling co-op platformers have been done many times before (from Chip N’ Dale’s Rescue Rangers on NES to Little Big Planet on PS3) notwithstanding, co-op in Mario felt like something that should have been done a long time ago. Considering all the advances Nintendo made in the genre, why did it take them until now to come up with this, after its been done so much before?
This feeling of general surprise at Nintendo’s failure to capitalize on this much earlier was then accompanied by a distinct and sudden memory of playing Super Mario Bros. on NES for the first time and starting up two-player mode with my little brother. I remembered the feeling of disappointment that struck me when I realized that we had to actually take turns playing – we couldn’t play together. The fact that this was a six-year-old’s first assumption on seeing that there was a two-player mode in the game makes me wonder – did it really take a Little Big Planet for Nintendo to come up with this? Having basically invented the 2D platformer in its heyday, this idea couldn’t possibly have been pushing their creative limits that much, could it? And technologically speaking it was certainly do-able.
Okay, hadn’t meant to break the G4C topics just yet but was just at the Microsoft press conference this morning at E3 here in LA. I am not the easiest person to impress at a sales pitch, but Project Natal had my jaw on the floor. This is a pretty enormous announcement for Microsoft – if nothing else, not for the product itself, but rather for what it means for the future.
Peter Molyneux’s bit is hugely significant for the possibilities of interactive fiction and technology/interaction in general – that is, depending on how much of this is smoke and mirrors.
I just heard about this. WayForward is reimagining A Boy and His Blob for Wii. The original was one of my NES favorites back in 1989.
In spite of my excitement to see this material and gameplay getting picked up again, I’m not sure how I feel about the art style and music. The original game was certainly not cartoonish at all and I feel would call for a less watercolory/Disney art style, although I certainly see the appeal in creating an aesthetic akin to Saga Frontier 2 or Legend of Mana on PSX.
I personally would love to see something Eric Chahi-esque in a Boy and his Blob remake.
Still… this is wild.
Now THIS is more like it! Musically speaking. This remake of the old theme makes it easy to see why the original was so memorable. Despite the fact that hearing this was tremendously satisfying, it would be pretty nifty to have a quirkier approach to the arrangement. Makes me think of Koji Kondo on Mario Galaxy (conventional orchestral) vs. … well damn near every earlier Koji Kondo Mario composition and arrangement.
Despite my endless moaning and groaning, this could be a pretty kick-ass old school platformer on Wii, purely on the strength and potential of the original gameplay concept from ’89.
The announcement of Love is exciting to me on many levels.
A game that is as freeform and open to personal innovation as Dwarf fortress that takes place in a dynamic public place shared with friends and strangers is very compelling. You would have the ability to work with friends to test the limits of the toolset and your imagination while simultaneously being able to be inspired by other citizen’s creations and their alternative methods.
The fact that Love is the brainchild of a single person is equally inspiring and leads me to appreciate the product even more.
However, what I want to reflect on right now is the art style and how it resonates with an ever growing personal desire for videogames and their art direction.
Love is a world built out of very simplistic 3d shapes and structures. However, by using tricks that involved complicated uses of “edge polygons” and alpha textures, the game distorts these simple shapes to be slightly more fluid and dynamic in their appearance. There are no hard edges only skewed lines and somewhat blurry intersections.
This effect in practice creates a very painterly landscape where the colors and shapes themselves are alive. As you move through the land it feels as if you are progressing through a 2d image or painting: the painting is changing as you move, rather than you are moving around a static, sterile 3d space.
This somewhat new representation of a 3d space in a videogame sparked abstract discussions about the goals developers can have now that our technology has progressed to a sufficient level. For example, can we try and recreate how we view the world, rather than simply creating digital representations of objects existing in the world?
I’m going to muse a bit about this topic in my next post, part 2.
Tektite? Is that you?
The question is – is this a cleverly managed/optimized birds-eye view in the same engine? Or different rendering altogether? I suspect the latter.
Gel? Stalfos?
