Going to GDC this year and putting faces to twitter handles lead me to explore a bit more about Spaceboy Games that recently released their game Hacky Zack (I’ll talk about it tomorrow).

The screenshots above come from an earlier project of theirs, Fara & The Eye of Darkness and it looks pretty refreshing. Besides the uplifting, playful color palette, the fighting system offers a real-time take on deck-building card games. You can see it in practice in pre-alpha footage:

After Spaceboy’s diversion to develop Hacky Zack (and start publishing other indies’ titles such as High Noon Revolver and Pepper Grinder), the pixel artist on the project, Sandy Gordon a.k.a. @bandygrass, moved on to Yacht Club Games, so the future of Fara is uncertain at best. 

But I love the art direction so it's worth sharing the pixels as well as concepts no matter if it ever sees a release. The concept art is done by Fellipe Martins a.k.a. @goquest here on the Tumblrs.

Pepper Grinder is an insanely well-animated upcoming game by Riv Hester a.k.a. @ahr-ech-blog. I mean, you see the GIFs above … and I had to omit the really juicy +3MB ones, which go beyond the awesomeness that you see here.

The game revolves around Pepper, a pirate with a big drill that allows her to make her way through the ground around various enemies and levels. It looks awesome, but we’ll have to wait for all the details since the game won’t be out before Q1 2018.

Speaking of Spaceboy Games … Here’s HackyZack, the game I mentioned the team set out to develop as a short diversion from Fara & The Eye of Darkness. HackyZack was initially a prototype from 2014, but I’m glad they decided to pick up on it and released a highly polished version this year in February.

Like I said last time, I really love the art direction Spaceboy’s got going in their games: playful, colorful, and in this case also relaxingly minimalistic.

The gameplay is all about kicking a ball through levels … I’ll let the trailer explain it much better than me:

You can get the game on Steam where it has nothing but positive reviews, and also from their publisher Humble. 

It was actually one of the first 7 games in Humble’s expansion from bundling into the publishing part of the gaming world announced earlier this year. Here’s to hoping many more pixel art games come out of this initiative.

Fara & The Eye of Darkness

System: PC

Status: In Development

Release: Q1 2017

Developer: Spaceboy Games

Pixel Artist: Bandygrass

Website: spaceboygames.com / faragame.tumblr.com

Video: Gameplay Video