Lovely animation

Note to self: study this video closely before iterating the tree code from Flora. The musician is someone called Josh Pyke - who I've never heard of - and the artist is James Gulliver Hancock.





(Via drawn, as so many things seem to be these days).

You Have to Burn the Rope

Postmodern video games! More of them please!

This game is inspired by Clockwork Orange, Castlevania, that article in the latest issue of Edge about Boss Battles, and Portal.



It's here. Huge investment of time not required.

Gymnast

Had a great meeting last night about a new collaborative project with Daniel. All the really high level things have been thrashed out, and it looks like there will be enough overlap with Hohokum that I can reuse a lot of the code, which should mean we can concentrate on some interesting gameplay and visual treatments.

On that subject, a playable version of Hoho is now long overdue - I just need the time to bash out a string of small levels that introduct all the basic concepts. They're mostly all designed in my head even! It won't be this weekend though - the beta for Flora is next week and I'm going to Olympic Studios to record some songs with the Cock on sunday.

Once I stop being so busy, I can't wait to check out this game by Walaber - the JelloCar dude. I'll be interested to see how such complex motions have been mapped to the two analogue sticks..



Gymnast - launch trailer from Walaber on Vimeo.

I'm in a Wide Open Space

Thinking about ideas for a forthcoming collaboration with a friend of mine reminded me of an old game I remembered fondly, despite having never played..

Back when I was 8 we had a PC XT with a couple of games that my dad brought home on 5.25" diskettes from his pals at work. We had Space Quest 3 and Police Quest and some D&D games like Hillsfar, and some free ones too, like Alley Cat (I can still remember the music!) and Montezuma's Revenge. Sometimes the majority of the fun was extracted from working out how to make them run!

Anyway, I somehow acquired a copy of an early multi-format games magazine, whose title escapes me. Even though we only had a crappy PC and my pocket money wasn't in game-buying league yet, I loved that magazine, and read and re-read it until it fell apart. One game that always stood out for me was the one below: Typhoon Thompson on the Atari ST - a computer I never owned. Something about being able to explore a big wide ocean really stuck with me, and definitely explains why I was so taken with the sailing aspect of Windwaker.

I was reminded of this game the other day - and the only words I could think of to search on were 'Atari ST, Sea Sprites' - so I was delighted to find this video: