PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

Indie game Let There Be Life presents players with a challenge the exact opposite of what they may be used to; instead of killing or defeating an enemy, Let There Be Life wants you to focus on growing a beautiful tree while nurturing the flora growing beneath its branches. Appropriate for the first weekend of spring, no?

Created by husband-and-wife team Backward pieS as part of the 2013 Get Into Games Challenge presented by Edge Online, Let There Be Life is a puzzle game of sorts, though you won't find any colored tiles or gems to swap here. Instead, players need to attach branches to their tree in a way that still allows enough sunlight to reach the flowers below. If the flowers lose their sunlight, they die, and players must rebuild their tree.

Mushrooms, on the other hand, act just the opposite: they need shade in order to grow, and once they reach maximum size, they can be used to heal any dying flowers. Woodpeckers and butterflies also dot the game screen as cosmetic upgrades meant to give your tree a better sense of life.

You can calm your mind and start creating your own happy trees for $7.99 when you purchase the game from the Backward pieS website. [Image: Backward pieS]

IT. IS. OVER. Done. Slain. Dead. Six feet under. Sleeping with the daises. Pushing up fishes. We gathered one last time for a reflection on this year’s whimsical game dev summer camp, its most important moments, and where the gaming industry is headed as a whole. Part one’s guests include Papers Please creator Lucas Pope, Depression Quest creator Zoe Quinn, and Boon Hill dev Matt Ritter. Part two, meanwhile, brings in such luminaries and champion toe fighters as Gone Home writerly brain man Steve Gaynor, Kotaku features editor Kirk Hamilton, resident Vlambeer madman JW Nijman, Action Henk‘s Kitty Calis, and RPS god heroes Cara Ellison and Hayden Dingman. The end result? A loud, exuberant, exhausted goddamn disaster. Beaming agreements, screaming arguments, and confusing argreements. Also lots of people walking into our room randomly.

Among many other things, we talked everyone’s favorite GDC moments, diversity in the gaming industry, the virtual reality fuuuuuuuture’s growing pains, my Lost Levels talk, and what happens after you release a game like Papers Please or Depression Quest. Settle in with some popcorn and a hideous, burbling soda and tune in below.

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The Second Amendment grants US citizens the right to bear arms, but a new game wants to grant them the right to bear arms. Bear Simulator by Farjay Studios aims to put an end to gaming's discrimination against our big, furry friends by letting you walk a mile in their shoes. Paws. Whatever. And only you can prevent forest fires help fund the game's development.

"It's quite clear the fat cats in Washington with their stove top hats and contemporary jazz music don't want us playing as bears," the game's Kickstarter page states. "It's about time to fight back against the tyranny." Yeah! Down with the system, man! You can use your bear-branded tote bags, t-shirts, in-game sunglasses, in-game squirrel companion, in-game rock and in-game adopted tree (all of which are backer rewards) to take it all back. Take it all back for the bears.

Honestly, we're not sure what else to say. The game is called Bear Simulator and hey, look at that, you eat trout, steal honey, punch butterflies, explore foggy ruins ... you know, bear stuff. Does a bear develop games in the woods? We don't know, we're not bears. But hey, it's not like we haven't been down this route before. The game is expected to launch on PC this November.

We've reached out to the only bear we know that can use Twitter about his thoughts on Bear Simulator, and will update if we hear back.

Update: The bear has informed Joystiq that he supports Bear Simulator, but also expresses a desire to see playable black bears, as well as rabbit skeletons. He also noted that the squirrel companion is "the most realistic aspect, speaking from my experiences as a bear." [Image: Farjay Studios]

It's day nine and time to take a break with a little PvP...

Framed is a game for comic fans, noir aficionados, puzzle gurus and lovers of story. It's minimalistic; the characters are silhouettes with details in white, such as ties and flowers, and there's absolutely no text. Gameplay involves sliding frames of a comic around to create the best possible scenario for mysterious, trench-coated characters as they attempt to outrun and outsmart the police force in a big city.

It's largely a puzzle game - move one panel to the wrong spot and the police officer in that frame will see your character running and shoot him in the face. Place a panel of a hallway in front of that, and your character runs up behind the cop, knocking him out with the briefcase he perpetually carries.

The briefcase is a mystery. It changes hands between at least two characters, one man and one woman (both wearing trench coats), and it apparently holds something valuable. Framed comes from Australian studio Loveshack, and designer Joshua Boggs tells Joystiq that the game includes two main elements: puzzle and story.

Hello, Bucket-eers! Today, I’m writing in from sunny Singapore where the food is great and people keep tripping over my extension cord. Also, a word of advice for those positioned for an imminent trip somewhere foreign: never pick a cafe parked next to a gaming memorabilia store. The effect such places have on your wallet is positively magnetic, I tell you. Magnetic. Because I’m typing this in between trying to catch my laptop each time someone tugs on the wire, today’s introduction will be short, frantic and slightly rambly. Our fuzzy Companion Cube of the day is from one Alex F. Enjoy the bargains. I’m going to finish up before someone sends my poor Fenris flying.

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I normally make it further before GDC breaks me. It’s normally Friday before I lose track of time, space and consciousness. This time it happened on Wednesday, and it’s now somehow Friday and I’ve not written the diaries for half the week. GDC eats you, until all of time is a blur of sessions, chats, games and walking through the hypnotising grids of San Francisco from diner to convention centre to Starbucks to diner to bed to diner to Starbucks to convention to diner…

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It’s that one time a year when we let the awful word “gameplay” onto our website. It’s that time when a bunch of developers show off their strangest, most interesting, most novel ideas. Ideas that may become games, may already be games, or may collapse into their own weirdness. I shall do my best to chronicle what’s happening, while pointing you toward appropriate websites. It’s all happening below.

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Okay, we can't be sure this box for dystopian hacking game Quadrilateral Cowboy is actually from 1987, but it does boast about stunning SVGA graphics.

With its teaser trailer, This War of Mine presents a world ensnared in combat, but focuses its lens on the civilians caught in the middle of the brutal conflict. "In war, not everyone is a soldier," the ominous video notes, featuring huddled civilians within a building as uniformed soldiers battle outside. In part inspired by the mature message found in award-winning indie game Papers, Please and an article that recapped "One Year of Hell" within a besieged Bosnia, Senior Writer Pawel Miechowski says, This War of Mine is a bleak game about the repercussions of war and attempting to survive the chaos.

In development at 11 Bit Studios, the team behind the Anomaly series, This War of Mine explicitly sets out of avoid the entertainment of firing a gun and scoring kills, Miechowski tells me. "This is a serious game. A mature game."

The Stomping Land sprinted into my heart–much like Jeff Goldblum fleeing the T-Rex in Jurassic Park–and I’ve been anxiously awaiting more news from what appears to be DayZ with dinosaurs. The silence has been broken! Not hugely. Not like the roar of a T-Rex with a bellyful of goat, but more like the squirty trill of the dilophosaurus*. The developers have been updating their site for the past week with more information about character customisation, taming, and tracking. Follow the footprints to find out more.

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Magnificent 2D flying machines take to the skies with style and seat-of-the-pants action.

Dragon Fin Soup’s trailer plays out as if it’s running to a strict time limit. There’s a brief introduction to the world, via the medium of lovely painterly stills, and then we’re straight into isometric tactical combat. All the while, text jumps up on the screen, telling us who made the game and why, while mining, crafting and fishing are mentioned in passing. Toward the end, dramatic music swells and pictures of meteor strikes are interspersed with menu screens and collapsing cacti. It’s an strange mix and oddly edited, but there’s an old-school Zelda vibe crossed with tactical combat and crafting. That appeals.

… [visit site to read more]

Hello, roving pile of RPS readers. Have you seen GDC day three laying about? I appear to have misplaced it. Or perhaps I am Gabe Newell, and I simply willed the number three out of existence or at least ignored it until it got bored and went away. Regardless, we’ve returned in style for day four, by which I mean we gracelessly crammed as many interesting humans onto John’s hotel bed as possible. This time around guests include Ashly and Anthony Burch of Hey Ash Whatcha Playin/Borderlands/infinity other things fame, Towerfall creator Matt Thorson, ever-handsome journo/Maia writer Paul Dean, Harmonix vet and Fire Hose talky man Sean Baptiste, and more still. They join John, Hayden, and I to discuss GDC’s overwhelmingly powerful #1ReasonToBe panel, the equally impactful Lost Levels “unconference,” the creeping toll constant layoffs are taking on the gaming industry, the new Arrowhead-developed Gauntlet game, the absurdly delightful Night In The Woods, and tons more. This is quite an episode! Tune in below. 

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Ubisoft has confirmed the existence of Assassin's Creed Unity in a new trailer also detailing release platforms.

It's weird to see tetrominoes - the boxy shapes we usually associate with Tetris - outside of their natural habitat. That's exactly what Tetropolis is about, though: a world obsessed with puzzle games, and the pieces that just aren't good enough. Tetropolis stars a defective tetromino (composed of only three squares instead of four) who joins forces with another defective piece (a single square) to avoid being destroyed.

Working together, they can combine into various familiar tetrominos, each with different abilities. The line piece, for example, can scrunch its body like a spring and fling itself great distances. You use these abilities in an open world platforming game, which NextGen Pants lead Bob Webb describes as "Tetroidvania." In an interesting (and literal) twist, the map is composed of tetrominoes, which players can rotate to reshape the world and access new areas.

We tried Tetropolis at GDC and, if nothing else, it's definitely novel. Tetropolis is currently planned for PC and Mac, and NextGen Pants is considering console ports as well.

Er. We didn’t entirely plan that well, did we? The IGF Awards have been and gone, but our series of interviews with the finalists in the 2014 version of the world’s premier indie competition continue. Moonwalking excitedly up to the plinth this time is Brace Yourself’s appealingly mad roguelike/rhythm action mash-up, Crypt of the Necrodancer . Read on for how to play the bally thing, if people without rhythm can cope, lead dev Ryan Clark’s take on the bastardisation of the term ‘roguelike’ and the importance of Michael Jackson’s Thriller to the whole endeavour. … [visit site to read more]

Far Cry 4 is coming in early 2015 and will apparently be set in the Himalayas, with rideable elephants also appearing.

Before Papers, Please came along and dominated our hearts and our awards ceremonies with its grim tale of bureaucracy and poverty in a totalitarian state, we were reliant on Cart Life to make us feel empathy for our fellow men and women. The simulation of a life spent running a food cart won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at IGF 2013 and caused Adam’s heart to grow two sizes.

But creator Richard Hofmeier has pulled the game from Steam. Why? Because he’s now offering it completely free along with its source code, so you can start to tinker with its innards. … [visit site to read more]

Batman: Arkham Knight will feature next-gen, redesigned versions of Two-Face, The Riddler and Penguin. Have a look.

Does a bear shit in the woods? Hopefully, since this is Bear Simulator. It’s a first-person game which aims to simulate being a bear. It’s a Kickstarter campaign which aims to discover just how far the internet’s love of novelty animal sims will stretch, after the resounding success of Goat Simulator. It’s a trailer of an extremely early version, embedded below.

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Action Painting Pro is a platform game in which the screen becomes a colourful mess as each playthrough works toward its conclusion. Different types of brush can be collected and paint spews from the player in an appropriate pattern, the colour changing as objects are collected. To survive and continue with your masterpiece, you’ll have to manage three resources by springing around the screen across the scaffolding that shifts position after every pick up. The resources are hearts (health), dollar signs (money) and artistic abillity (blue diamonds?). All three are effectively time limits that must be regularly topped up, which creates a nerve-jangling pressure that is only heightened by the nightmarish soundtrack.

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Barry Collins is a freelance artist and 14-year veteran of the video game industry who's been singlehandedly working on his passion project, Ashen Rift. During GDC he showed us a demo he put together in five months of the spartan post-apocalyptic survival shooter, which revolves around a man and his dog, Bounder.

"You will seldom find enough ammo for any given situation, this forces the player to rely on Bounder to help you find useful objects and ammo," Collins told us. "You'll find yourself keenly aware of Bounder's state of mind as the whimpers and wines may be indicators of trouble nearby. Don't make too much noise. Don't waste ammo... and leave nothing useful behind."

The game is currently on Kickstarter with a very reasonable $45,000 goal. Collins needs the money to pay for a Unity3D license, get some help with coding and music, with the end goal of the game being a "3 to 5 hour" experience on Mac, PC and Linux. If everything goes well, the game should be available by December 2014.

Name a horrible situation you could find yourself in and I’ve almost certainly sat through a Discovery channel recreation of it. Les Stroud, Ray Mears, I just recently rewatched all of Bush Tucker Man. Yup, there’s now nothing I don’t know about watching other people tying to make fire in the bush*. It’s for that reason that I’m intrigued by The Forest, a game about surviving after a crash into an island and using the elements to keep you alive. Plants grow, the tide comes in, and the inhabitants of the island want you dead. To keep them at bay you build traps, which is something I’m incredibly excited about. Super grim trailer is below, and I’d suggest you watch it with a parent or guardian. Preferably both.

… [visit site to read more]

The IGN AU Pubcast team chat Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes, TowerFall Ascension, and much more.

The Stick of Truth developer is helping the Russian sci-fi/fantasy succeed in western markets.

The upcoming discontinuation of Games For Windows Live is a possible reason for the disappearance.

75 games made it through, and a surprisingly high percentage of them look pretty decent.

There are only two things that zombies love: delicious, moist brains, and the lure of pop music. If Thriller wasn't proof enough, Sega's most recent DLC addition for blood-soaked keyboard primer Typing of the Dead: Overkill certainly cements the idea.

The "Dancing With The Dead" lexicon transforms the phrases that players are tasked with typing into popular song lyrics. Sega is being coy on which songs it has lifted words from, but the publisher's announcement this morning includes references to groups like House of Pain, Will Smith, The Clash and probably a few others that we're not picking up on.

As with earlier DLC releases for Typing of the Dead: Overkill, the Dancing With The Dead lexicon bears a $3 price tag. It's currently available on Steam to satisfy all of your oddly mundane fantasies of battling walking corpses armed only with keen office skills. [Image: Sega]

Founded in 1982 as a new division of George Lucas' entertainment empire, LucasFilm Games intended to hinge its products on cutting-edge technology. David Fox, also known as LucasArts Employee #2, envisioned a visually rich first-person spaceship game for Atari 8-bit systems - and doesn't that just sound perfect for Star Wars?

"I wanted it to be a Star Wars game originally," Fox said, "and we were told right up front, when we asked, that we were not allowed to do Star Wars titles. "And I was really upset," he said, laughing. "I joined the company because I wanted to be in Star Wars and that was the closest way I could do it, to create a game and do it that way."

Though LucasFilm Games would eventually align with Star Wars as it became the LucasArts we knew, it was this initial denial that set a course for long-lasting collaboration and unique design approaches. Speaking at the Game Developers Conference, in the first postmortem panel dedicated to a company, former figureheads spoke of an atmosphere in which creators were permitted to do anything but Star Wars. [Image: Guybrush Threepwood in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 / Disney]