#cover5

When I was watching the trailer for Arco at Summer Game Fest, I thought to myself, those trees sure look like something Franek would draw. Sure enough, the environment artist from Kingdom: Norse Lands is indeed one of the 4 developers behind this story-rich tactical turn-based RPG, mesmerizing us with breathtaking scenes of grandiosity.

I played the demo on Steam (macOS, Windows) and enjoyed the unique fighting system, a blend of turns and active pause. You plan your moves based on telegraphed actions and watch the turn play out in real-time. As for the full game—potentially coming out this year—I'm looking forward to experience the Tarantino-esque intertwining of the "3 tales forged in bloodshed, laced with magic, and united by revenge."

When Evil Licorice approached me to try out their new game Retro Gadgets, how could I refuse something that literally has my name in it!?!

It’s much like the fantasy console PICO-8 where you draw in a built-in sprite editor and write Lua code to make your own old-school-looking games. Except now you also get to design the hardware itself and choose your own specs! Want an egg-shaped tamagotchi? No problem. Remake your favorite calculator? You betcha. Use an LED matrix for playing a game of snake? In fact, I did all these when they commissioned me to create a few gadgets to show in their announcement trailer.

I love the skeuomorphic UI experience of it, tinkering at your workbench rendered in lovely pixel art. It’s just so cozy and if you put some vaporwave music to make retro gadgets to in the background, well, then you’d be living my life over the last few weekends and evenings, drawing dog sprites and trying to figure out the best way to calculate mathematical expressions in my WIP graphic calculator.

YES, I finally got my hands on a game with @kirokazepixel’s art in it!

For The Warp (@forthewarp) is a spin-off from another project Kirokaze is doing art for, Massive Galaxy (@massgalaxy). The core crew is in fact the same: Gerardo Quiroz on pixels, Martyn Stonehouse on audio, and Gonçalo Monteiro as the main coder/designer/mastermind behind both ideas. During development of Massive Galaxy (a space exploration/trading point-and-click adventure, still in development), the space combat mechanic grew into a life of its own and broke off as a standalone roguelike deck-building game. Gonçalo sent me a copy of the alpha last week when it released into Early Access and boy did I have some fun with it! Granted, I haven’t built any decks since my middle-school years of Magic the Gathering fandom, but my deprivation for card mechanics was equally matched by the coziness of the colorful-yet-dangerous universe that keeps pulling you back in for more dueling.

The goal in the current alpha is to make your way across 5 levels full of fighting encounters (and other less lethal ones). Unless you pick up some hull-repairing drones on the way, the runs generally end up very fast and you’ll be replaying the game often (with pleasure, that is). After 3 hours in the game I explored barely half of the possibilities and the play style did feel quite different based on the cards that I had. The variability still has some rough edges though—once I lucked into some very rare cards, I was able to defeat all stages in one go. But that’s why it’s in Early Access, so things can get balanced as more cards and ships make it into the game. It’s a perfect title to start playing in alpha as it’ll be exciting to see how things change with each update.

One of my favorite things of 2019 was—surprisingly enough—a mobile app! Less surprisingly, it included mesmerizing pixel landscapes painted in the 90s by Mark Ferrari (Loom, The Secret of Monkey Island, Thimbleweed Park) for a calendar/organizing software called Seize the Day. What set Seize the Day apart was its ‘living worlds’ art—specially made illustrations for each of the 12 months of the year.

Now, before you say you’ve seen these images a hundred times already (as they often circulate the web), unless you’ve been around in the 90s, you haven’t seen all the special effects incorporated into the software. You might have seen the GIFs of the scenes with animated snow, rain, and waterfalls, and at best you went to the HTML recreation of the images where you could change the time of the day with a slider. While that’s immensely impressive as it is, there was even more to the art. Sizzling chimney smoke, beautifully shaded clouds, changing weather, lights turning on and off, fireflies flying around, luminescent fish, people with torches walking across a bridge in the evening, even auroras borealis!

Over the course of 2019, Ian Gilman, one of the authors of Seize the Day, painstakingly recreated all the extra effects within a mobile app called Living Worlds - Art by Mark Ferrari. At the start of each month we’d get a new masterpiece, which I’d leave idling on my iPad, quietly brightening my workspace. The amounts of joy this would bring me was quite unexpected (although, now that I think about it, not many things make me happier than beautiful pixel art).

I promised one more thing from Ultimate Pixel Crew yesterday. As much as permanent teams are not common in pixel art (I can only think of eBoy off the top of my head), the advantage is clear if you want to tackle bigger projects. Game companies sometimes have a lasting core of pixel artists, but it’s more common to outsource the work to a band of freelancers that stick together for just one project (or even less). We’ve had music videos created in this way as well, for example Goldfish’s We Come Together had a team of 15 working on it. Today we'll look at a smaller production though, coming from an established team.

Ultimate Pixel Crew, specifically @motocross-arts and @setamo-arts, early last year created a video for SKY-HI’s song Role Playing Soldier. The lyrics, neatly supported by gaming-themed visuals, tackle the often absurd nature of RPGs where the player essentially grinds their way to the end by killing and looting a never-ending wave of enemies. The meaningless task is questioned in the music video by both the player character and a melancholically-woke monster that is tired of the mindless violence. Where Elvis and Dimmi gave a satirical take on the same topic, Motocross Saito and Setamo paint a more positive resolution. I’ll let you find it out yourself in the video that clearly gives a nod to Hyper Light Drifter as well:

I’m guessing most everyone in the pixel art scene has heard of Battle Axe by now, at least those keeping tabs on the OGs of pixel art. Henk Nieborg is definitely one of the legends, being responsible for the beauty of plenty Amiga games in the 90s. Lucky for us he continues to use his love and skill for pixel art to these days and contributes to indie projects such as Tiny Thor and Xeno Crisis. It was exactly from working on the latter that the partnership to produce Battle Axe was born with Bitmap Bureau’s Mike Tucker who will now help bring Henk’s creation to life, as did Henk wonderfully for Xeno Crisis (I’m still to play and write a review for that one … one day).

Battle Axe is in its last days on Kickstarter, so head on over to see the classic arcade gameplay take place over Henk’s colorfully polished tilesets. Let’s hope he will keep giving us insights into his creative process during the development as it’s a real privilege to see someone with his amount of experience do their magic (below is the first timelapse from his new YouTube channel).

Super Science Friends is the animated show you wished you watched on Cartoon Network as a kid, but couldn’t because it was only made in November 2015. Well, it’s not exactly PG, so it’s more Adult Swim material than CN. In reality it’s neither, as it’s an independent production by Tinman Creative, funded on Kickstarter in 2014. The show is just as brilliant as big name titles though, perhaps more so, with its style of humor that works better if you’re a science geek a.k.a. nerd.

To be fair, it’s much more heavy on humor than science, the latter part being represented from a historical perspective of the show’s protagonists (Einstein, Darwin, Curie, Tesla, Freud, Taputti). If you know your science heroes well, you will have a good time with this satire. You can also go deeper on the Super Science Friends’ YouTube channel with additional videos that explain all the facts behind the references. For example, TIL Hitler was named Time’s Man of the Year!

After the first episode aired two years ago, the authors launched a new Kickstarter campaign to fund episodes 2–4. Even though it got even more support than first time around, it came quite short of its loftier goal (CA$150k). Lucky for us, the KS funds would only represent a part of the production budget, so with the rest covered from other sources (I’m guessing profits from Tinman’s commercial projects) the new episodes still got produced over the last two years (E04 just came out last week). Even a cool comic with Ada Lovelace happened. All of this free.

On another timeline, 1 year ago, the guys from Gorlami (a Brazilian game development studio and fans of the show) met with the Canadian animators and discovered they were all thinking the same thing: the time-traveling cartoon-comic universe is missing a video game! Long story short, after a year of hard work, a prototype is now ready to play and Super Science Friends: The Video Game is on Kickstarter too.

I call it a prototype (they call it a bug demo edition), because it’s not a true vertical slice (short polished piece that matches the final quality). The art and humor and cinematics are there at 100%, but the gameplay clearly needs more depth. It’s essentially Streets of Rage 2 with just the basic button mashing and none of the combos/enemy patterns—a tech/flavor demo with a lot of potential, but not necessarily tons of fun yet.

Unlike the smooth animated curves of the show, the game is done in lovely pixel art, transformed into pixels in big part by Gabriel Fernandes a.k.a. @gabefern​. Gabe was on the project as a freelancer with Bruno Atanásio of Gorlami covering the rest of the workload.

This is such a treat! I mostly write about games that—despite their retro visuals—run on modern hardware. Not today! Xeno Crisis is an upcoming title for Sega Genesis a.k.a. Mega Drive. Just look at this!

The project is up on Kickstarter, which is how you can get the cartridge at $54. There’s also a Dreamcast version at $40 (it comes on a CD so I’m guessing it’s cheaper to manufacture?) and a digital rom file for $20.

The Kickstarter is way over its goal already and currently working towards getting that Dreamcast version a reality as it’s the next stretch goal (co-op mode was already achieved).

You might be wondering how come the art is so good and true to the 16-bit-era. Well, besides that it’s ACTUALLY RUNNING on 16-bit hardware, it’s done by Henk Nieborg, an old-schooler that’s had his pixels in games since 1990 (Ghostbattle, Lionheart, The Misadventures of Flink etc.). Besides, he’s a nice guy and releases tutorials every now and then on Patreon.

Also on the art side, Catherine ‘@einsbern’ Menabde is doing character art for in-between screens.

Things that you can’t figure out from looking at the screenshots include: 9 weapons with limited ammo for strategic combat, 5 different areas, procedural generated levels and rooms.