The last time I played Kerbal Space Program, there was way less in the game. It’s one of those Minecraft-type forever in development games, where every time you leave it for a while and come back you find whole new avenues opened up that weren’t there before.
Artist is trying out things for isometric tiles and other things in the new strategy game project, here is a preview of some of her sketches.
Mycenaean Greece, the Bronze age civilization that was the setting for The Odyssey, liked to build things with really big rocks. The walls of Mycenae were built with a type of masonry that had no mortar, only big stacks of boulders fitted together and stacked up vertically. The later greeks, the story goes, saw the giant rocks and decided that these buildings must be the work of a cyclops - and the masonry style is still referred to as “cyclopean.”
There is something in that idea, of coming across something from ages ago that is recognizable in form and obviously intentionally designed - but being so bowled over by the scale of it that you are unable to think of the thing in human terms. Kairo, by Locked Door Puzzle, is all about this feeling.
Concept sketches for next secret game project.
The game is going to be a strategy game, with magic, haunted cities, islands, forests and turtles. I’ve been tweeting these sketches out for a while as a kind of secret preview, but now with this place getting set up as my new devblog, I figure it’s a good time to post them all in one spot.
These are all by Rosie, who is doing all the art for this game. We’ve been meeting to come up with places and characters for the game (all very early going), and she’s been producing a ton of great visual takes on the ideas there.
I have been playing through a huge number of Ludum Dare games for rating over the past week. As usual it’s a bit of a slog - most of the games are not that fun to play. I can’t hold this against the creators, of course - 48 hours to make a game is not much time! You’re very unlikely to get any playtesting done, so it’s all about pushing forward just on instinct.
Every time, though, I’m surprised at how good the standouts are able to get despite that. Here are my 5 favorite gems from the competition that I’ve come across while browsing and rating:
Repost from my devblog: I made a new game for Ludum Dare 26 called MinimaLand. Because it’s a Jam entry and not a compo one, I collaborated with some folks. Madie did the art, and pneuman did the music.
My main WordPress install got hacked today (seems it’s only a matter of time with WordPress), so I’m moving my main development blog over here, to post along side my normal tumblr stuff. I redirected my RSS feed to this one, so you might see some weirdness on the feed if you’re subscribed over there, but here is the new place to be.
Once again too busy this weekend to write much about the game (doing Ludum Dare this weekend), but here is a fun, difficult arcade score chase by Robin Burkinshaw: Three Body Problem.
My high score is 4.
Not much time to write a post this week, so here’s a game I don’t know how to write about at all: Sluggish Morss
Year Walk is a short adventure game for iOS by Simogo Games. It’s a story about a vision quest, based on Swedish folklore. It’s heavy on puzzles, some of which had me stuck for a while - most of them revolve around finding a novel way to interact with a scene rather than solving a complicated logical construct.
