Fez Message Board older than one year ago

#fez Fez, the perspective-shifting platformer and poster-child for independent games development hell, is ready to go and will arrive April 13, says its studio, Polytron. That's Friday the 13th, a fitting irony for something that's been in production for more than four years. The game will be offered over Xbox Live Arcade for 800 Microsoft points, or $10. More »

Fez's concept of 2D platforming in a 3D space sounds simple on paper, but you have to see its execution in motion to really, really wrap your head around it. Thankfully, we've got six minutes of said motion after the break.

Amidst the gridlocked, city-wide pandemonium that is SXSW Interactive, I was able to rescue Fez's lead designer and artist Phil Fish from a pack of ravenous, business-card waving fans long enough for an interview. We set up at the quiet end of the Palmer Events Center's glass-lined second floor, standing at a chest high, sidewalk cafe-esque table overlooking Zilker Park. It had been raining for two days straight, but that morning the clouds had parted and festival attendees were treated to one of the few gorgeous spring afternoons Texas will get this year.

Fez has missed its most recently announced release window of Q1 2012, but the fact that the game is undergoing Microsoft certification means that it'll be out relatively soon. "We almost made it to Q1," Fish said. "We entered certification like two weeks ago, but we actually just failed it, which is kinda standard. Pretty much everybody fails their first cert."

Microsoft has a two-month window in which it can release Fez once it has gone gold, and Fish wants to make sure it happens as quickly as possible. "We're trying to put pressure on them to release it as soon as possible because the zeitgeist is really good right now, with the movie starting to get a lot of play and the award. And, also, it's been five years. I don't want to wait another two months after that."

#fez Phil Fish doesn't want to talk about Japanese games anymore. Like, really. The Fez creator's been smothered by haters after his controversial remarks earlier this week. But he does want to set the record straight on some things. More »

#japan Earlier this week, game designer Phil Fish (above), best known for Fez, set off a firestorm. During a Q&A after documentary Indie Games: The Movie, a Japanese game designer asked Fish what he thought of modern Japanese games. Fish gave his honest opinion—rather bluntly. "Your games just suck," Fish infamously said. More »

Inafune has been a loud voice in trying to steer Japanese game development in a new direction.

Fez designer Phil Fish has been criticized at the Game Developers Conference this week for his harsh, crass comments about the state of Japanese video games.

Fish isn't a Japanese game designer, however. Keiji Inafune, formerly of Capcom, definitely is.

Inafune was at GDC to discuss the future of Japanese games, and his talk was equal parts introspection on his own work and motivational speech for the Japanese developers in the audience.

"For fans of our games, our country, our culture or people, please don't look away from me. Please don't look away from me," he said. "This is the honest truth that I want to share with you today."

The crux of Inafune's argument was pointing out that Japan used to be a trailblazer, and the country has become increasingly lazy in the years since. Japan needs to have the desire to win, he said.

The motivation to "win" was a central point, a refrain Inafune returned to over and over again.

"Back in the day, our Japanese games were used to winning and achieved major, major success," he said. "We celebrated many victories and walked down all sorts of avenues as winners. However, at some point, these wins became losses and not realizing, acknowledging and accepting that fact has lead to today's tragic state of Japanese games."

Even though fans have come around on Mega Man Legends, it was considered a failure for Capcom at the time. The press wasn't interested in Mega Man Legends, and the sales were disappointing. Inafune put his heart and soul into that game's development, but commercially, none of that mattered. What making Mega Man Legends did, however, was push Inafune to work hard and work through adversity.

"That experience is my biggest failure and biggest treasure in my video game career," he said.

After Mega Man Legends, Inafune worked on Resident Evil 2. He found it incredibly easy to get anything he needed approved for the project, and generating press was effortless. Inafune dreamed about a world where he never worked on Mega Man Legends, never experienced passionate failure, and envisioned a scenario where he was used to being treated as he was during Resident Evil 2, and how that could instill a poor work ethic.

"If you never get your hands dirty," he said, "you'll never be able to understand the nitty gritty details."

Mega Man Legends went on to become its own spin-off series, but that didn't happen initially.

He made sure to pay his respects to Resident Evil designer Shinji Mikami, pointing out how the original Resident Evil had development similarities to Mega Man Legends. No one believed in the project, no one was talking about the project, and canceling it was a real possibility. Mikami earned his stripes making Resident Evil, and could better appreciate the freedom in Resident Evil 2.

Inafune pointed outside video games for inspiration on how Japan can transform itself: Apple.

"If Apple chose to stick to the glory of the old days with their personal computers and its operating systems, they probably wouldn't be around today," he said. "Steve Jobs chose to develop the brand and not just maintain it, and that's why the Apple we know today exists."

Leaving Capcom was part of Inafune choosing the hard path, rather than the easy. Comcept still has to prove itself, but Inafune sounded upbeat, happy, and optimistic. He's also developing a brand-new game for the Vita, though he didn't provide any details on it.

Even though Inafune was incredibly critical of modern Japanese designers, developer and publishers, he seemed to do so out of desperation and hope. He wants Japan to be big again.

"Time is running out, and we should have realized this when I made that bold statement a few years ago," he said.

The dust has settled and only one independently developed title was left standing. Seconds ago Fez was announced as the winner of the 'Seumas McNally Grand Prize' at the 14th annual Independent Games Festival Awards.

This is the second IGF award for the Polytron-developed title. In 2008, Fez took home the IGF award for excellence in art. After nearly five years of development, Fez is currently undergoing certification for release at Microsoft.

#fez "Hi, I'm Phil Fish and I'm here to talk about Japanese games." Referencing the controversy over his recent remarks, the Fez designer's opening line during the Indie Soapbox got big laughs. More »

“There’s no plans to bring Fez out on any other platforms?” I ask Phil Fish, as he finishes off his sandwich. He chews and I mutter an inward prayer. Oh Gods, let him say PC. “We’re not even thinking about it right now,” he says. “I mean, ultimately, I would like to see it on everything. Why not? But we do have exclusivity with Microsoft, as you do – you find it’s really hard to not do that.”

The Gods are useless. Never pray.(more…)

After a screening of Indie Game The Movie at GDC, Fez developer Phil Fish told a Q&A audience that he felt modern Japanese games "just suck" in response to a question about them...

#philfish Remember a decade ago? Heck, remember six or seven years ago? I do. I remember telling Japanese gamers that Western games were great and seeing the wry smiles. I remember hearing that the Xbox didn't have any games on it Japanese people wanted to play—a polite way of saying Western games stink. How things have changed, no? Just ask Phil Fish. More »

Seeing Fez's technical postmortem directly before a screening of Indie Game: The Movie offered a jilted experience, one from developer Renaud Bedard, who presents the game's pitfalls in its most practical terms, and the other from a dramatic 15-foot projection of Phil Fish's muttonchops, who assure us that re-re-creating Fez was and continues to be a truly personal, life-altering experience.

Fez has been in development for almost five years and is now officially undergoing Microsoft certification -- the most the public (or press) has played is in demo form, yet Fez has been widely anticipated since its IGF win in 2008, a scenario that Indie Game: The Movie explores on a deeply human level. Bedard explains it in more technical terms. Way more technical terms.

Bedard and Fish created their own editor for Fez, called the Fezzer, and designed what they deemed "trixels," blocks like voxels but at 16x16x16, or as Bedard described it, four 2D views creating one 3D world. Instead of a standard 2D tile set, Bedard built 3D "triles" -- 302 of them -- in 17 trile sets. Fez will have 157 isolated levels, and these triles make up all of them.

Fez stars Gomez, a 2D character wandering a 3D world, and it also features a 4D character, Dot the tesseract. Dot is a 4D hypercube fairy that Bedard created using faux 4D to 3D projections with 96 vertices and 144 triangles, lending her the feeling that she knows more about the Fez universe as a whole, which she does.

Both Bedard and on-screen Fish agree that Fez has been a long time coming.

"The fact that Fez was such a long project means that we kept upgrading," Bedard said. "Fez is our first game, our first project. It's hard to manage the fact that you want the game to be perfect."

#fez Fez is coming. It's coming soon, believe it or not. Here's a new trailer. Just to make the wait that little bit more unbearable. More »

Long trailer is long. (Sorry, couldn't be helped.)

#fez How long has Fez been in development? I can remember my pal Sander going all OMFG showing me this video of the thing while we were goofing off at work. That was before I worked here. More »

It's been a long time coming, but it looks like the wait for Polytron's Fez is finally nearing its end. The adorable pixel art indie darling will arrive on May 2, according to the Xbox Live Marketplace.

Originally slated to launch in 2009, Fez's development has been characterized by repeated delays, as well as accolades from the indie-gaming community. It is also one of the titles featured in Indie Game: The Movie, which is an official selection at this year's SXSW Film festival. Here's hoping the game can download in less time than it took to develop.

[Thanks, Freakservo!]

Despite being into awards shows before they were cool, we're hoping you're not above voting for this year's Independent Game Festival "Audience Award." Voting has just kicked off for 2012's entrants, which comprise all finalist games across all IGF 2012 categories (yes, the list once again includes Fez).

Should you choose to cast your favor towards any particular game, you'll want to head to this particularly yellow form and fill things out before February 19. Once you've done as much, we're told a verification email will come through to make sure you're not an evil robot. If you are, in fact, not an evil robot, things should go swimmingly.

#fez 's Fez, a world-shifting indie platformer that's been coming to Xbox Live Arcade longer than some of you have been alive, might actually be out soon. Why? It's been rated by the ESRB. More »

Phil Fish's Fez contractions continue, with the game finally being rated by the ESRB. It was also rated by Europe's PEGI board in December, but has yet to hit the Australian boards. So, expect labor to last for a little while longer.

The long-in-development (yet award-winning) game now has a release window of "early 2012." If you order cigars from Cuba for the birth, feel free to go with the cheap shipping option.

#pullquote Indie developer Phil Fish, maker of Fez, opined today that after spending a lot of time with Hollywood types (no doubt in promotion of the critically lauded Indie Game: The Movie, in which he and his game play a central role), he's realized how cool the game scene is by comparison. Considering that the film is being turned into an HBO series, Fish might have to get used to kicking it Entourage-style. More »

Perhaps you've already heard of Indie Game: The Movie, but I'll just go ahead and assume you haven't been following the independent documentary on its journey from Kickstarter-based conception to its most recent stint at the Sundance Film Festival. Therefore, a recap: Indie Game: The Movie, is a documentary about indie game makers, and their struggles to bring deeply personal projects from their bedroom computers to the rest of the world. It features the likes of Fez creator Phil Fish, Team Meat's Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, as well as Braid creator and occasional industry feather rankler, Jonathan Blow.

Reportedly these people have made a fine little film about independent video games. Shame about this promo photo, then.

The film has been receiving extremely positive reviews during its stint at Sundance, and not just from the usual game industry cheerleaders you'd pretty much expect to love this kind of movie, either. It's gotten such great buzz, in fact, that rights to the film have reportedly been picked up by Hollywood mega-producer Scott Rudin, the man behind such big time blockbusters as the recent adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, last year's heavily award nominated The Social Network, and Oscar Best Picture winner No Country for Old Men.

Aha, but there is a catch. In fact, Rudin picked up the remake rights to Indie Game: The Movie, and plans to put them to use on HBO as a weekly, half-hour television series--one that is scripted, to boot.

So, wait, what do these two things actually have to do with one another?

Ostensibly, nothing, save for the licensing connection between the film's creators, Lisanne Pajot, James Swirsky. While some freaked out when the original deal became known, bandying about that this would have some impact on the film's eventual theatrical distribution (apparently it won't) and that Rudin planned to turn this into some kind of half-hour comedy series in the vein of Grandma's Boy (he doesn't). According to the film's makers (via the movie's Facebook page), the new series will not be a comedy. That makes some sense, given that Rudin's other projects with HBO are of a dramatic bent as well. Those include Social Network screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's cable news-oriented series Newsroom, and a series based on Jonathan Franzen's critically acclaimed novel The Corrections, which he's co-developed with director Noah Baumbach. Not exactly a comedy lineup.

Though the exact design of this weekly series is still very much up in the air, the filmmakers are adamant that, despite the half-hour run time, the goal is to make something as sincere and heartfelt as the film it's based on. Whether that proves true--or, really, whether this series ever actually makes it to air--we won't know for some time. But at the very least, Indie Game: The Movie is getting some great exposure out of this whole endeavor, and that hardly seems like a bad thing at all.

For the previously unawares, you can check out the trailer for Indie Game: The Movie below.

Monaco designer Andy Schatz was the big winner at the IGF awards last year.

There were hundreds of games submitted to the Independent Games Festival this year--very nearly 570, actually. It was a record-breaking number of submissions, and it’s taken weeks for the organizers to whittle it down to the finalists list announced this week.

The nominees aren’t given advance notice, so when Fez, Frozen Synapse, Johann Sebastian Joust, Dear Esther and Spelunky were revealed as Seumas McNally Grand Prize finalists, it was a surprise to the men and women making them, too. It’d be an honor to win, and also a hefty financial boon--there’s a $30,000 prize.

As word spread, I asked the developers to give their spit-take on what it’s like to be up for the biggest prize in indie land.

Here’s what they told me.

Dan Pinchbeck (Dear Esther) -- writer, producer, creative director at thechineseroom

“We're unbelievably pleased--massive honor and it's great to be standing alongside some really fantastic games. I think the line up this year is brilliant, which makes it all the more amazing to get the nominations. You read down the honorable mentions and there are games there that could so easily be capable of carrying off awards, and that's before you even get to the finalists. So we're hugely happy over here, and it's a real boost to the team, who have put in a crazy amount of work to get Dear Esther ready for release. I'm really proud of them, and what we've made, and delighted to be coming over to SF in a few weeks to celebrate!”

Paul Taylor (Frozen Synapse) -- co-founder of Mode 7 Games

“Completely bowled over and celebrating with some strange oat stout we discovered in a local pub!

We are just delighted to be up there in such illustrious company and very happy to have an excuse to come out to the US and see everyone at GDC.

We want to thank everyone who invested time to help us test FS andpolish it up at the end - we're always grateful.”

Douglas Wilson (Johann Sebastian Joust) -- co-founder of Die Gute Fabrik

“We're humbled and honored! We had hoped that we might make the Nuovo category or something, but we didn't think Seumas McNally would be in the cards. Wow.

I also want to add that I'm very proud of the Where is my Heart team. I didn't work on the game myself, but I love that game to bits. Where is my Heart received three honorable mentions (Audio, Design, Seumas McNally). I'd give them my finalist spot if I could. They deserve it.

The other thought going through my head is: how the hell are we supposed to show Johann Sebastian Joust amid the hustle and bustle of the IGF pavilion?! And will there even be enough space for it? I've got some "creative" ideas - let's see what we can pull together. Inspired by the spirit of Babycastles, I'm hoping to bring a little bit of mayhem to the GDC showfloor!”

Derek Yu (Spelunky) -- designer, artist, co-founder of Mossmouth

“We JUST submitted a significant build of Spelunky to Microsoft, so it's been non-stop action over here. Andy and I were stressing about getting one nomination even, so getting three is... beyond our feeble comprehension at this point. We're sharing a beer over webcam to celebrate!

I think the other nominees are amazing, and I'm very, very proud to be up there. To be honest, I wasn't sure exactly how I'd feel if I got a chance to be in the IGF again (Aquaria won in 2007)... I'm extremely relieved and excited, though. Andy, Eirik, and I have worked hard on Spelunky and I can't wait to show the game off with them and the other nominees.

NOW BACK TO WORK! :)”

Phil Fish (Fez) -- artist, designer, head of Polytron

"im just really happy we got any nominations at all.

we would have looked pretty dumb if we didnt get anything at all after the whole re-entry controversy. phew!

but grand prize is a big deal! super thrilled to be part of that line-up.

some tough competition this year!

i wouldn't mind losing to any of those games.

especially johan sebastian joust!

it's such a good edition this year.

the nuovo nominees are particularly on point, i find.

i am STOKED!"

--

The winner will be announced at the Game Developers Conference here in San Francisco in March.

Fez is finally showing signs of imminent birth, with this being the equivalent of "water breaking," as Europe's PEGI board recently classified the game for Xbox Live. XBLAfans took note of the rating, a step which has yet to occur with the Australian Board or the States' ESRB.

The unreleased -- yet award-winning -- game currently has a release window of "early 2012." Now, if we all eat our vegetables and wash behind our ears every night, that launch window may actually stick.

Can't make it out to the Sundance film festival to check out the world premiere of the crowdsource-funded documentary Indie Game: The Movie? There's no need to worry, assuming you can score passes to SXSW instead; the film will have a showing at the SXSW ScreenBurn Arcade (March 9 - 11) and SXSW Film (March 9 - 17) next year (clap, clap, clap, clap) deep in the heart of Austin, Texas.

The conference will also host a panel presented by IG:TM creators James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot, along with Phil Fish, the creator of Fez, one of the titular indie games. The whole thing is so full-circular, we might just faint.

#fez Fez, which is going on four years in development, was delayed to "early 2012" way back in September, so at least this luxurious long shot of the perspective-switching indie platformer isn't some oblique way of saying "BTW, it's been pushed back again." That we know of. More »

The 2011 IndieCade Awards were held in Santa Monica last evening and, in a pretty informal event, Phil Fish's Fez came away with the biggest wins of the night. It received two awards, one for Story/World Design, and the second for the Best in Show prize. Johann Sebastian Joust, a physical game that challenges players to hold PlayStation Move controllers still while getting audio feedback in musical form, also picked up two awards: one for Best Technology, and another award for Impact on the community.

Tom Sennet's manic Deepak Fights Robots won the award for best Gameplay Design, Superbrothers' Sword and Sworcery EP picked up the award for Visuals, and Proteus, in which players are offered up a musical environment to explore, won for best Sound. Interaction went to German physical game Ordnungswissenschaft, and the Special Recognition award went to side-scrolling puzzler platformer The Swapper.

The ceremony itself was short but wacky. Presenters like Samm Levine and Martin Starr (of TV's "Freaks and Geeks"), as well as web video stars Team Unicorn and Sandeep Parikh, cracked sometimes awkward jokes, while the indie developers themselves acted (unsurprisingly) indie. Joust's team used one of their awards speeches to silently demo the game, and Tom Sennet took the stage to simply announce, "I'm Tom Sennet, and I don't give a *crag*!" Fish himself (above) laughed maniacally after winning his second award, and then joked that he thought the Canadian Sword and Sworcery team was going to win. "Take that, Toronto!" he joked.

We'll be at IndieCade over the rest of the weekend, so stay tuned for more coverage.

Fez creator Phil Fish has posted this video on Vimeo, a "long screenshot" showing off one of the game's intriguing 3D environments. As with everything else we've seen of the game, it looks pretty amazing, combining great colors and design work with the 2D/3D ...

Wait, what? Oh crap. Fish just tweeted, buried in between parentheses of what we can only assume to be shame, that the game's been delayed yet again. It won't be out until at least 2012. So don't enjoy that video too much -- we're not sure if we can stand the wait that much longer.

Polytron's Fez has been such a long time coming, Phil Fish explained at Fantastic Arcade this weekend (where Fez won the above Audience Choice award), because "we've had no points of reference for what our 2D/3D 'moment to moment' play is." While there are other games that involve moving from 2D into 3D space, like Echochrome and Crush, they "don't work like Fez at all," he said.

As Fish has worked to figure out how Fez does work, he's removed a lot of features from the game that he began to see as cruft. "There used to be a billion different things in Fez that didn't have to do with the core mechanic of rotation," Fish said. "We used to have the concept of weight: objects had different weights; if a vase was empty you could fill it with water to trigger a switch ... It was nothing to do with flipping between 2D and 3D."

Other lost concepts included health, which Fish resisted removing at first simply because he liked the classic look of a heart meter on the screen. But it wasn't necessary in a game with no enemies. Both the "design by subtraction" mindset and the lack of enemies are inspired by Ico, he said. Fumito Ueda's game design philosophy informed his, as did Ico's "nostalgic, lonely isolation." He also cites Mario, Zelda, and Myst games as inspirations.

Fez has been in development for nearly five years, all thanks to XNA Game Studio.

We're all looking forward to Fez, right?

Phil Fish's mind bender was built on XNA Game Studio, Microsoft's widely applauded development toolset. Every game that's published within Xbox Live's Indie Games store was created using XNA.

Microsoft started rolling out details on the next iteration of Windows 8 this week, the latest update to its operating system. Tested's Will Smith has a detailed writeup of an early build that's surprisingly promising, but game developers became vocal on Twitter this week over word coming down that XNA wouldn't work in Windows 8--at all.

That's only partially true. Here the statement Microsoft provided to me:

“XNA Game Studio remains the premier tool for developing compelling games for both Xbox LIVE Indie Games and Windows Phone 7; more than 70 Xbox LIVE games on Windows Phone and more than 2000 published Xbox LIVE Indie Games have used this technology. While the XNA Game Studio framework will not be compatible with Metro style games, Windows 8 offers game developers the choice to develop games in the language they are most comfortable with and at the complexity level they desire. If you want to program in managed C#, you can. If you want to write directly to DirectX in C++, you can. Or if you want the ease of use, flexibility, and broad reach of HTML and Javascript, you can use that as well. Additionally, the Windows 8 Store offers the same experience as the current App Hub marketplace for XNA Game Studio, providing a large distribution base for independent and community game developers around the world.”

Here's what that means: XNA cannot be used to create "Metro" style software, so anything built on XNA cannot be sold in the "Metro" application store rolling out alongside Windows 8. It's still an unfortunate turn of events, as the new "Metro" layout is the centerpiece of Windows 8 and epitomizes Microsoft's big push to spin its new interface across multiple platforms.

"Metro" applications are not meant to as ambitious as traditional applications--more focused, directed. And as Microsoft points out, there is still a marketplace for their wares, in addition to the regular ol' Internet.

If developers want to continue working with XNA, those games will play just fine within Windows 8, but if they'd like to be part of the "Metro" storefront, they'll have to turn towards other options. It's not the best scenario, but it's not the worst, either.

To get a better sense of Windows 8 and Microsoft's new "Metro" layout, watch Tested's hands-on.

The top 10 indie games in the entire world have been selected as this year's PAX 10, each of them winning some free booth space at PAX Prime from August 26-28 in Washington. Chosen as the "best in gameplay, originality and overall fun-factor," winners include Atom Zombie Smasher, Jamestown, Fez and seven others you're probably not cool enough to have heard of.

Find out who won (and by process of elimination, who lost) according to the press release after the jump.