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Lost Toys picks up Most Promising Game award at Casual Connect USA
IOS game Lost Toys doesn't come out until the fall, but already it's found success at Casual Connect in San Francisco, taking home the 2013 award for Most Promising Game. Lost Toys has players twist pieces of jumbled toys, in a limited number of moves, to reform their original designs – a ballerina, a bear, a train and other childhood staples. Developer Danielle Swank of Barking Mouse Studio describes Lost Toys as "a 3D puzzle game for introverts," but it's doing well in the public eye. Swank and the studio's other half, Jim Fleming, collected their award on stage last week. "It was pretty overwhelming and was compounded by the fact that it's really the first time we've shown the game in public, or really to anyone outside of our small circle of friends (our Facebook page has about 20 likes, and I know all of them personally)," Swank tells me. "Last year I told my family that I was quitting my comfortable, safe engineering job to make a video game, and several of them thought I was making a really bad life decision." The game has a touching, haunting tone that players at Casual Connect seemed to ... well, connect with. "The whole conference gave us a boost, not just the award," Swank says. "Watching people play the game is super encouraging. We came away with a ton of notes and ideas to make it even better .... Instead of taking it easy, like we said we would, we were super excited to start working on all of the new stuff right away. Jim and I ended up spending all this past weekend holed up and working. It makes us both happy though, so I'm not actually sure what else we'd be doing with our time." Lost Toys is due out this fall for iOS devices, with plans for Android and Blackberry versions – and probably more platforms, Swank says – later on.%Gallery-195504%
CE-Oh no he didn't!: Valve's Gabe Newell says 'Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone'
Always-outspoken Gabe Newell, the big cheese at Valve, made quite a few interesting statements at this year's Casual Connect conference, including the quote above. Gabe believes Microsoft's impending update will drive manufacturers away from the OS and he reiterated Valve's plan to make the entire Steam catalog available on Linux as a "hedging strategy." During the onstage discussion, he also weighed in on the longevity of touch input, which he estimates at a decade, the possibility of tongue control and the future of wearable computers. Other classic quotes include "the next version of Photoshop should look like a free-to-play game," which Adobe apparently didn't quite understand -- and frankly, neither do we.
PixelJunk Monsters migrating to browsers
As the nation's nerd and nerd-adjacent humans sully themselves with the masses at Comic-Con, attractive casual game developers are wining and dining at Casual Connect in Seattle. Sandwiched in between said wining and simultaneous dining are talks like the one today from Q-Games designer Jesse Venbrux. As promised last week, Venbrux unveiled the new Q-Games project: A browser-based PixelJunk Monsters game. According to PSN Stores, the new version of the tower defense title will feature a less linear design, smaller levels, new towers and monsters and, of course, additional social features to compliment services like Facebook. From what little information is available, it seems like there's little that won't be revamped in the browser that is, for the moment, untitled.
Q-Games showing new game at Casual Connect next week
On July 21, during the Casual Connect conference, developer Jesse Venbrux will reveal a new project he's working on at Q-Games, creators of the PixelJunk series as well as X-Scape, Trajectile and other DSiWare games. Q-Games head Dylan Cuthbert teased the upcoming announcement on Twitter, sharing the above screenshot. We declare it to be ... adorable! Before joining Q-Games, Venbrux created the Karoshi series of suicide puzzle-platformers, as well as They Need to Be Fed for iOS, Android, and PSP (which is the main focus of the presentation). It seems safe to assume that this new project will be somehow classifiable as "casual," given the venue.
Nintendo: Game market could grow another 50 percent
Nintendo of America's senior director of product development, Tom Prata, discussed some market research done by the company at Seattle's Casual Connect conference.In the last 2.5 years, Prata explained, the current gamer audience in North America has grown by around 30 million people to about 143.7 million. Hey, that's just about the period of time that the Wii's been out! What a bizarre coincidence. Prata said that the number of active console and handheld gamers worldwide is around 295 million, and could grow by another 150 million "if the right game came along." Had it been E3, a trailer for Nintendo's latest surprise game would have started up at that point. One game to trigger the adoption of 150 million new gamers -- that's quite the challenge. Such a game would have to be significantly more popular than Wii Fit.
Sony's PS2 effectively becomes "an open platform" in Europe
Seriously, calm down a minute. Your world has not just gotten infinitely better, although hearing the words "PlayStation" and "open platform" in the same phrase may make you think otherwise. In a relatively quiet announcement made at Casual Connect in Kiev, Ukraine, Sony Europe's George Bain proclaimed that developers would "no longer have to submit a game for content approval," effectively making the PS2 "an open platform." He pointed out examples from Russia and India, noting that they could now "create low-development cost titles and release them in their market." In all honesty, we have our doubts that this decision will make any real waves in North America, though Bain did mention a "global approval system" to replace the separated processes currently serving Europe, Japan and America. Now, if SCEA comes out and says something similar about the PS3, then you'll hear some real excitement in our voice.[Via Joystiq, image courtesy of GamesAreFun]
