Monday morning is my time for calming soundscapes and otherworldly experience. The other world in this case is The Moon, the one you’ve been casting longing glances at for much of your life, thinking ‘one day I will build a robot factory upon you, the moon, one day.’ Today is not that day but Lunar Flight, which I’ve enthusiastically enthused about before, has since been released on Desura and Gamers Gate for £6.99. It’s a lander simulation that seems simple at first but quickly becomes complex as you spin moon-ward, the last of your fuel burning away in an attempt to correct a course that ends in a crater of your own making. There’s a launch trailer below.

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John spent this weekend glowing after interviewing Tim Schafer on Friday evening. He’s listening to it right now>, so he can make text zaps for your eye goo. But that’s this afternoon-ish. In the here and now I have an interview, the first in a series it seems, by Double Fine’s Tim talking to Double Fine’s Grumpy Gilbert about a genre of game called “Adventure”. It was filmed before the Kickstarter madness propelled their old-school 2D adventure game upwards, so it’s rather humble and nice. I expect the next video to be shot in 3D on a beach, with Tim reclined in a sun lounger while George Clooney reads out the questions and instructs the interviewee to not look directly at Tim. Until that day, here’s everyday Tim and Ron talking about adventure games, in the Double Fine offices. (more…)

It’s a very sleepy Monday morning here in the strange, forever hungry country of Newsland today, but fortunately Markus ‘Notch’ Persson has elected to show off an experimental TF2 RTS demake he’s been playing around with making for his own edification, currently under the placeholder (and certainly not final) name of HERP DERP HERP FORTRESS. He’s been live-streaming his development/noodling over here and it’s going on right now>. You can watch it below, or with the excited chatter of onlookers here. He’s shared the above image too, which you can peer at and dissect for hints by clicking on it for the full version. The bad news is that he says this game ‘may never be released’ – which means your job is, of course, to go nag him.

The good news is that he’s presumably too busy developing the game to read this post, so I could say anything about him here and he’ll never know. Did you know that he’s afraid of cheese? (more…)

I feel a little twinge of guilt. Alright, a big twinge of guilt. I popped in to visit fellow Brighton residents Red Bedlam, developers of promising free indie MMO/building game The Missing Ink, just before Christmas. Then Christmas happened. Then a thousand other things happened once I went back to work. So my write-up of it yet remains on the Angry Post-It Note Of Things I Must Do stuck to the bottom of my monitor. I do my level best not to look at that Post-It note. But I will. And I will write that feature.

In the meantime, I can bring you news that The Missing Ink, which features a rather charming paper cut-out art style and offers the twin pleasures of monster-bashing across multiple time periods and a private sandbox construction mode, is now in open alpha. If you head over here, you can sign up and start playing more or less right away. Some in-game footage is below, which shows adventuring, building, and jetpacks. (more…)

Accidental audio creation and island exploration are the tasks at hand in Proteus, although everything in the game is less of a ‘task’ and more of a possibility. Wandering around randomly generated landscapes, which are like storybook dreams from yesteryear, the player discovers visual features that trigger audio effects, from the plinky-plonky strum of rainfall to the jolly synth-speak of peculiar lifeforms. I think they’re lifeforms anyway. They may just be forms because that’s the kind of stroll this is; a perambulation through a world of beautiful, gentle wonder. The beta is now available to preorder customers, who’ll be paying $7.50 and receiving all future updates and an EP.

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We caught up with Hilmar Pétursson, CEO, and David Reid, CMO, of CCP to talk about Eve Online, Dust 514, the Tranquility super-computer’s consciousness, MMORPG saturation, CCP as a cloud-gaming platform, World of Darkness, and Eve’s future potential as a gestalt societal consciousness. > (more…)

Sundays are for sunshine pouring in through the window. I am so> looking forward to summer this year. To pass the time I’ve been reading the internet. Here’s some of the stuff I found.

• Here’s an article about games that are not just for computers, but by> computers: “Angelina uses computational evolution techniques to search design spaces for playable games. Using a fairly simple design language, Cook specifies certain parameters such as layout constraints and rule-set variations – effectively defining a genre. Angelina iterates through a vast number of semi-random permutations of these, where each permutation is a potential new game. The evolutionary aspect of the process comes in when the system selects the better candidates of each iteration – or generation – and combines them to form the seeds of the next. But in Angelina’s case, there are two phases to the process. First, selecting the component game-parts – layout, mechanics – and secondly; picking a playable integration of these. Cook refers to this as ‘cooperative co-evolution’.”

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I’m a shit Nazi, me. (more…)

It’s always pleasing when development trailers give us some insight into the sheer amount of work that goes into making things as matter-of-fact as concept art for game weapons and vehicles. The video below shows the preliminary design of Planetside 2′s “Sky Lance”, which was created to shoot down dropships and keep away hot-drops by enemy infantry. (Just thinking about hot-drops is making me do a silent squee.)

Worth a watch. (Via VG247.) (more…)

Capcom send word that the next Resident Evil game will be bursting out of our digital distribution outlets and feasting on our glands from May 18th. To celebrate this fact they’ve also put out a noisy trailer showing a lot of footage from the game. And hey, it looks extraordinarily violent. Raccoon City was inspired by the development of Lost Planet 2 (which I rather enjoyed) and you can definitely see the influences of that game playing out here. (more…)