Renaud-Bedard
Latest
Beers with Friends: Mixing drinks with Toronto's gaming scene
By ten in the evening, a steady stream of people stand outside the Get Well bar in downtown Toronto, clamoring to get in. The west-end watering hole is home to Torontaru, a new monthly meetup for local video game developers and players, which gathers on the last Wednesday of the month. Even in the event's three-month infancy, Torontaru has established itself as a meeting place for game developers to discuss fresh ideas or hatch harebrained schemes, but a casual and safe meeting place is at its core. Kris Piotrowski, creative director at Sword & Sworcery developer Capy Games, says conversations during Torontaru may lead to game ideas, but "maybe it's not intentional." "It just happens," he tells Joystiq. "This is the kind of environment where things do happen." The idea for a casual meetup for game makers in Toronto was one pulled from a similar event in Japan. Piotrowski, Marie-Christine Bourdua (Fez, producer) and Renaud Bédard (Fez, programmer) were inspired by a gathering organized by 8-4, a localization team and podcast crew based out of Shibuya, Japan. "[Marie-Christine and I] went to Japan a few years ago and we were invited to an event called Otaru, which is a gathering of developers," says Bédard. "I guess [the team at 8-4] wanted to have some kind of social evening that they could do every week - every Thursday - where they could drink with friends and bring whoever's in town to be part of it, so you just get there and you talk to people and meet people." Torontaru strives to bring that safe environment, for gamers and creators to come together, share drinks and stories and help grow an already expanding scene.
Capy Jam platformer, Synchroma, designed to work against you
Synchroma gives us an idea of how Renaud Bedard, the programmer on Fez, fits into Capybara Games since he joined the studio in November. Synchroma is a minimalist, cube-based platformer where players press groups of three random buttons on a gamepad to duck, jump, shift and basically not die, as Polygon reports. Every time the game starts up, the commands are different, but each move always involves a simultaneous mash of three buttons and the game never tells the player which buttons to press. Bedard and artist Nicolas "Qiqo" Stephan created Synchroma during the Capy Jam and they showed it off at the Fangamer X Attract Mode party in Seattle on August 31. It's meant to be ultra-challenging, "where the controls fight against you as you simultaneously fight to survive," Bedard writes. "It's a game about physical memory, and how much finger gymnastics you can memorize/perform under the pressure created by big red spiky rolls of death coming at you," he says. "Perhaps the best thing is that we suck at it exactly as much as any player." Capy President Nathan Vella says there are no plans to take Synchroma public right now, but weirder things have happened. Weirder things like this game.
Fez 2 cancellation 'a surprise' to Polytron producer
Polytron producer Marie-Christine Bourdua said she was surprised to learn Fez 2 was canceled, telling Joystiq she wasn't even in Montreal – the studio's home base - when company co-founder Phil Fish announced the game's fate on Twitter. "But it's ok," Bourdua told Joystiq at Torontaru July, a new monthly meet-up for game players and developers in Toronto, Canada. "It was weird and special to learn it that way, but I respect and trust Phil a lot, so that's totally fair that he decided that and he has his reasons." "We learnt it the same minute you did," original Fez programmer Renaud Bédard said, referring to the Fez 2's abrupt cancelation announcement on Saturday. "The development of Fez 2 is up to him. If he decided [to cancel it] now or he decided it at the end of development, it's easier to cut it out now, than it is to say 'Hey, we've been working on this for years and I'm not feeling able to finish it.' So in that way it just makes more sense," Bédard, who joined Capybara Games at the tail-end of 2012, added.
Fez programmer Renaud Bedard joins Capy
Capy Games announced earlier this afternoon that Fez programmer Renaud Bedard has joined the team at the Critter Crunch, Clash of Heroes and Super TIME Force developer. Bedard was one half of the Polytron team, with Phil Fish, who put out the critically acclaimed game, Fez. The game's lengthy and volatile development was chronicled in Indie Game: The Movie (on Netflix streaming)."The remaining employees of the Polytron Corp. would like to say goodbye and thank you to [Bedard] for all the years of amazing work," Fish tweeted out.Asked for more details on how Bedard came to Capy, studio founder Nathan Vella told us that the company wasn't saying anything beyond the tweets it put out.
Fez review: Hats off
Whenever a game is hyped to stratospheric proportions, many times over a course of years, it enters a volatile realm of public reception.When a game has won numerous awards before its launch, is one half of an industry documentary, and is developed by an outspoken, opinionated man, it resides in a universe of its own and players are relegated to describe it in one of two ways: with blazing praise or incendiary criticism.Fez is on fire, and it burns with a brilliant, red-hot, yellow-tasseled flame.
