They say you should always be prepared to kill your darlings. Darwinia creators Introversion have taken it one step forward, creating nothing short of a Darwinian snuff movie to mark their transition from little computer people to… prison architects. Yeah, that’s still a little weird. But never mind. Help them celebrate this glorious new age of Not Darwinia by enjoying 2:36 minutes of burning, shooting and stabbing that really puts the ‘aaaaargh!’ into ‘carthasis’.
There's retiring old video game characters by not using them any more, and then there's retiring old video game characters by building little models of them and destroying them.
Introversion, the developers of strategy game Darwinia, are done with the property. Having worked on it in some for another for nearly a decade now across its various forms, by 2010 they'd become so sick of the thing that they couldn't just let it go quietly into the night. They had to kill it. With fire.
Introversion on why they're done with Darwinia [PC Gamer]
The long-running Humble Indie Bundle initiative has finally made the leap to smartphones.
The latest pack includes Android-compatible indie gems Osmos, Edge and Anomaly: Warzone Earth. What's more, you'll also get versions for Mac OSX, Windows or GNU/Linux.
As is traditional, you decide how much you pay, and what proportion of your donation goes to the developers, to charity (choose Child's Play Charity or the Electronic Frontier Foundation) and to the Humble Indie Bundle organisers.
If your payment is above the current average ($5.29 at the time of writing), you'll also get World of Goo thrown in.
The pack has got off to a solid start, with over 24,000 sales so far and revenue of $131,000.
Call him a sell-out. Call him a suit. Call him too mainstream. It doesn't change the fact that Mario was jumping and saving imperiled females before it was cool.
Ah yes, those young, hip fellows at the bar, sitting together exuding an aura of inapproachability. No one can get close enough to point out that all of their lofty achievements have been achieved before, and even if someone manages to slip past their defenses they simply rewind time so the transgression never occured.
This makes me glad to be the sort of gamer that will joyfully sit next to anyone at the video game bar and start chattering away. It's not about who jumped first. It's that they jumped at all.
US cable TV network HBO has optioned the rights to make a fictional TV series based on forthcoming documentary Indie Game: The Movie.
According to Deadline, the film's directors Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky signed on the dotted line at the annual Sundance Film Festival in Utah over the weekend, where the film premiered to glowing reviews.
Initial reports that HBO wanted to turn it into a half-hour comedy have proved wide of the mark, with a post on the movie's Facebook page today stating "HBO has optioned IGTM for the basis of a (fictional) series. It is NOT a comedy. It is NOT a sitcom."
Hollywood veteran Scott Rudin - whose credits include 2011 Oscar winner The Social Network, Moneyball, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Queen and Wes Anderson's take on Roald Dahl favourite The Fantastic Mr Fox - will reportedly produce. No word on potential casting choices, but the mind boggles.
It's worth noting that not every property that gets optioned by a network necessarily makes it through to full production.
The film follows a number of recent indie titles through development, including Super Meat Boy, Braid and Fez. Take a look at a trailer for the flick, which is due out later this year, below.
Acclaimed physics puzzler World of Goo has been downloaded one million times from the iOS and Mac App Store in the 13 months since launch.
According to Gamasutra, 29 per cent of those sales were for iPhone or iPod Touch, while 69 per cent were for the iPad. Mac App Store downloads only contributed two per cent, though a separate Mac version has been on sale since 2008 when the game first launched on PC and WiiWare.
iPhone/iPod sales made up 17 per cent of all revenue, whereas the more expensive iPad version constituted 79 per cent.
The Android version, which only launched in November 2011, has racked up 70,000 sales, although a free demo has been downloaded 450,000 times. The game sold 180,000 downloads over the same period of time following the iOS launch one year previous.
Life-to-date sales figures for the original PC and WiiWare versions have not been made public.
Not played the 2D Boy-developed gem yet? You really should give it a whirl - Eurogamer's Kristan Reed attempted to award it 11/10 in his World of Goo review.
When we last saw the upcoming game from Jonathan Blow this summer, The Witness already looked like an intriguing experience. The way that Blow's game design interwove puzzles and environmental cues created a hypnotic level of immersion where you had to pay attention to a gameworld like never before.
As a result of updated designs from a partnership with architecture firms FOURM Design and David Fletcher Studio, the look of The Witness' world and the resultant immersion will get even deeper. In a new post on the game's Witness website, Blow talks about updating the aesthetics of The Witness from the blocky placeholder structures previously seen to newer models with real-world architectural details:
If you see the different civilizations that came to this island as embodying different philosophies; and you see the structures they built as representative of the way these philosophies led them to interact with the world; and you see further that when they replaced a site, it represents the rejection of some older worldview that they consider no longer useful, then perhaps you start to get some idea of the amount of backstory that can be encoded into the world, nonverbally.
Further down, Blow explains even more what's driving the re-envisioning of his project's look:
Having smart architecture, it seems, really helps this process work, brings it alive. If you build a game where people are supposed to pay attention to details, but the details are wrong or naive or just don't have much thought put into them, then at some level the game just won't work. Even if you don't know the first thing about architecture, you have been in enough buildings in your life that the deeper parts of your brain have distilled plenty of patterns about those buildings. Your brain knows the difference between a real building and a nonsense building that wouldn't occur in the real world. It can feel the difference in veracity between carefully-thought-out structural details - on the one hand - versus stuff that was just placed by a level designer to look cool.
When I got my hands on The Witness this summer, the incongruity of the game's landscapes struck me as being on purpose. Were these structures from different dimensions? Were they meant to symbolize different states of consciousness in Blow's mysterious new adventure game? Now that Blow's offered some insight as to how interconnected the whole design of The Witness is going to be, it sounds even like it'll be a singular experience when it comes out… whenever that is.
Architecture in The Witness [The Witness]
