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Sine Mora vets form 'Prior Games,' mobile series to precede shmup
Prior Games is a new developer composed of former Digital Reality creative director Theodore Reiker, along with "key talent" from the Hungarian studio and other new staff. At Digital Reality they were most recently known for the excellent side-scrolling shooter Sine Mora, developed and published as a collaboration with Grasshopper Manufacture.In an interview with Joystiq, Reiker revealed that the new team will return to the shmup genre in 2014, with another "Japanese-Hungarian co-development" codenamed Project Verona. "It will be more conservative in its gameplay and less ambiguous in its storytelling," Reiker notes, though he adds that it will also branch out from the conventions of the genre.But before that larger-scale project, Prior is working on a series of "microgames" for phones and tablets, with presentation inspired by Nintendo's minimal bit.Generations and Art Style series. The first game is Rotolla (above), coming to iOS in early February. As Reiker describes it, it's "a hybrid of Tetris' gameplay and our mad love of hexagons since Super Hexagon." The title is a dual-language portmanteau of "rotation" and motolla, the Hungarian word for a spinner's weasel. It also features an original soundtrack from "company friend" Akira Yamaoka."Our plan is to release four microgames this year and a second wave of three titles next year," Reiker told us – all with simple visuals, to keep the scope of the project manageable. "We are a small company and we do not want to grow beyond 15 persons," Reiker explained. "We would like to keep the 'manufacture' feeling even if the company size is limiting the scope of our output."
Preview: Sine Mora and Black Knight Sword
PSN/XBLA titles Sine Mora and Black Knight Sword are the result of a new partnership between Grasshopper Manufacture and Hungarian studio Digital Reality. Of course, both games are strange, though only one of them is strange in the familiar Grasshopper Manufacture milieu. Both of them strongly suggest that this is a worthwhile collaboration. Sine Mora is a traditional side-scrolling shooter, developed by Digital Reality with assistance from GHM. "The art direction, sound design, music by Akira Yamaoka, it's all coming from Grasshopper," explained Digital Reality creative Theodore Reiker. "Digital Reality, we have a ten-member-strong team making the programming, the 3D modeling, and the game design." That art style is a steampunk-esque world of big, complicated machines, airships, and squat, gunmetal-colored planes against skies of bright Sega blue. It was originally a much darker game, but Reiker explained that Grasshopper and Digital Reality eventually came to a "consensus" that the game should look like Studio Ghibli's Porco Rosso.
