Whimsical wildlife of the solar system, from the National Geographic classic “Our Universe” by Roy Gallant. Art by Michael Whelan–I never knew that!
- VENUS: Oucher-Pouchers feed on rock and metal, avoid the scorching heat by shifting from foot to foot, and travel by bouncing along on their inflated stomachs. - MARS: The Waterseeker shields itself from UV radiation with its parasol-like tail and coccoons itself inside its giant shell-like ears to withstand the frigid Martian nights. - JUPITER: Jellyblimps float in the “Goldilocks zone” of the mid-Jovian atmosphere, where they try to avoid predatory Swordtails. - EUROPA: Brinker-Roos skate across the ice, synthesizing nutrients through photosynthesis and drawing energy from Jupiter’s magnetic field via the EM coils lining their spines. - TITAN: Stovebellies combine oxygen from consumed ice with the methane from Titan’s atmosphere to produce a volatile rocket fuel, while Fishimanders huddle around them for warmth. - PLUTO: Zistles are crystalline-based superconducting sentients that communicate via radio waves.
The Waterseeker has always been my favorite…It just seems the most plausible to me. NO I HAVEN’T GOTTEN A NEW SCANNER YET
These drawings remind me of Disney’s Mars & Beyond film. Specifically, the “Life on Mars” section.
Pictures from modern Quake 1 single player maps. There seems to be a small renaissance happening in the community these days, especially after the release of the Arcane Dimensions community pack.
Loot rascals, a hexagonal card-based roguelite game is now on itch under the in-development program “Itch Refinery”. Buy it here, ensuring a steam key on release https://hollowponds.itch.io/lootrascals
Long story short, I like this game a lot so far. Here’s some notes:
Cool Stuff
Day Night cycle every swaps every five turns, determining who goes first in trading hits, rougelike style. This is a really cool twist on the parity flip work being done on games like 868-hack and Hopilite
Card based inventory gives you some pretty cool combinations. Modifiers ‘stick’ to base cards making it a hard choice to give up an old favorite when it becomes outdated
Simple small numbers help you think ahead, most encounters can be spotted as a clear win or lose
Not so great stuff
Level Exit is often hidden down a really long branching path, not sure if giving the player some kind of compass hint would help or hurt the game though.
Boring terrain generation makes each level feel like a palette swap. This is also probably hard to change, it’s not an action game so different room sizes don’t change the game feel too much. In Spelunky infinite room variation always feels unique, if a loot rascals room is larger than 3x3 it’s not noticeable.
No carry-over between runs. There’s some exceptions with a cool online card steeling mechanic and returning a quest card to the base, but maybe some other (even cosmetic) change over time would be cool?
If you’re a high school student who does art in California or anywhere near you should apply to this. I went for Animation in 1996 and it really changed my life in so many good ways. There’s also programs in writing, fine arts, film, dance, theater. There’s financial aid for those who need it, too.
I’m still friends with some of the people I’ve met here, and that summer pretty much set me in motion to doing what I’m doing today.
Colored Candles evokes a very early-2000s java applet kind of feel, with little mysterious hyperlinks taking you to different pages. Some of the screens are interactive, or games, or visuals. There’s a button that when you click on it it takes away one of your smiley face currency units and plays a 5 second long FMV, which kind of makes it feel like one of those lame zoetrope things you can check out at the Musee Mechanique, where you put in a quarter and watch a little animation of a horse running or whatever. Kind of hilariously disappointing. The games are tied together by some shared state- a smiley face currency / life meter and the overall quest for the candles. There’s also a shared iconography- smiles, fortunes cookies, sugar cubes, that have roughly similar meanings in the different games but get reinterpreted a little bit.
The structure of this game really appealed to me. I’ve been thinking a bit recently about this style, especially in light of Jake Clover’s games, of jumping between different genres in different screens. I like the opportunity to make lots of little games that build toward something more whole and cohesive. It’s a style that has a long history and an unfairly bad reputation. Probably due to bad mini games, which get the least attention but most overused. Also because of the way that polish accretes on game mechanics, and making lots of mini games stretches your attention across them. But then art games have a different relationship to polish and entertainment than AAA games do, so.
I’ve always had the most fun making trainwrecks, but my more serious ideas tend to be really big, bigger than I really have the patience to work on, and I usually want to couch the concepts that I want to explore within a fantasy world, which requires a level of boiler plate work to creating the narrative that surrounds and introduces those concepts, or at least that’s what I seem to convince myself of.
