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GDC08: Spend some quality time with Fez's developers
At the Independent Games Festival Awards, Fez took the award for excellence in art. Now, here's an opportunity to hear the developers chat anxiously about their game, prior to the awards show. Mahalo Daily and Veronica Belmont spoke to members of the art collective Kokoromi about their innovative platformer. Check out the video above for development details, and Kokoromi's explanation of why Fez pulls off 2D/3D better than Super Paper Mario.
Passage is a lifetime in five minutes
At this year's Montreal International Game Summit, the game development collective Kokoromi held their second annual Gamma event, challenging designers and coders to create games under strict guidelines. For this year's event, games had to be a maximum of 256 x 256 pixels, and be fully playable in around five minutes. With these constraints, Jason Rohrer designed Passage, a tiny game that has been making tiny waves in our tiny community.There's not much to say about Passage. The game is available for Mac, PC, and Linux, and lasts exactly five minutes. In short, there's no excuse not to play it.[Via Raph Koster]
Audio input innovation jumpstarts Experimental Gameplay sessions [update 1]
Other than the obvious Karaoke titles and the later Mario Party games, audio is an untapped resource in gameplay input. Kicking off the Experimental Gameplay Session at this year's Game Developers Conference, a dozen or so quick-and-dirty games set out to change that.Here are some of the highlights from those initial games. The selected music will create falling enemies from the top of the screen (Though it was written with pop in mind, classical music was used to a rather disappointing effect). As a ball tethered to both sides of the screen, you move it with the mouse to capture the enemies. Capture radius too small? Talk (or yell) into the microphone and the radius increases accordingly). We rank this one impressive. Designer Sean Barret created a Tempest style game, where the player has two shooters representing the bass and treble. As enemies come down the field, your shoots created the notes according to the row you were at (the bass blaster had five or so lines reserved, while treble had eight or nine). In this scenario, the game was forcing you to play the song. To prove this point, we witness the horrible sounds made when shots are fired randomly or targets missed. In another game, blips appeared on the screen and you had to avoid them with your mouse cursor. Each near-hit would register a sound, starting with a simple bass beat. As the game progressed, more obstacles and lighting effects would appear. Eventually, we lost track of what the point of the game was, though the flashing lights, reminiscent of a rave, enjoyed us enough not to care. The audience agreed, cheering wildly at the demo's conclusion.
