I found this at Tiny Cartridge. Pretty much a long interview with Jeff Luke, who is the responsible art director for Scribblenauts, Lock’s Quest and Drawn to Life for the Nintendo DS.

The interview is divided into two parts (Part 1 / Part 2) and really leave no questions open – if you ever had questions about drawing, making and handling graphics for mobile or console development. Jeff Luke is the man, who does game design and art management at 5th Cell.

Scene from Scribblenauts

I highly suggest to read all of this interview. Some – maybe surprising quotes – should give you some extra-motivation to go through all of it. Jeff says on developing graphics for the DS:

“Well, one of the biggest things to keep in mind is the different brightness settings. You need to make sure your game looks good on all brightness levels which can sometimes be quite a hassle, but in the end, it’s the attention to detail that can make or break the experience for gamers. In conjunction with the resolution, screen real estate is a really big issue. You need to always be aware of exactly how much space you have on that screen at all times. Make a GUI sprite too big and you just end up having to redo it.”

“(…) we just make sure we create the original assets in high res and then scale down from there for in game art if needed. All of the portraits in Lock’s Quest started out as massive, multi-thousand pixel, full-body images of the characters that we then scaled down and took just the upper body portion of for the portraits.”

Scene from Drawn to Life

One of the leading netlabels of the “second era” of netlabels (about 2001-2004) was Tokyo Dawn Records. But they fell into deep sleep, missed to pay the bills for the website and the website got lost. Summer 2008 Tokyo Dawn announced, that they will come back again. Now they are slowly continuing the label. Most recently they announced, that all albums were uploaded to Last.fm – ready to listen to and download as well. Click there a little bit, the music is really great!

Les Miserables: Enter the Story

Chris Tolworthy is a class on its own. He finished his first game “Les Miserable” which is some like a first step of a broader concept “Enter the Story”, something Chris calls “world’s biggest adventure game”. Maybe I don’t get the genius of this game, or the game isn’t turned out to be that great yet. But before we get into the game and the really interesting concept, let’s talk a little bit about Chris himself…

Chris Tolworthy is the guy, who runs the biggest Zak McKracken archive on the web, where he collects every known fact under the sun about the Zak McKracken games. I spend hours and hours on this site, which is a good sign. It turns out that he is also a huge fan of Marvel comics and an advocate for “real-time in comics“. Some years ago he came up with the concept of “making the biggest adventure game of all time”, and I thought, well, yes, why not. This sounds interesting. If someone is capable of doing a really huge adventure game, than an adventure nerd like Chris. The whole concept he declares as “Enter the Story“

The project “Enter the Story” wants to transform epic literature into a huge gaming world. The decent goal is to create the biggest adventure game, that was ever written, with stories and timelines, that bridge each other with places and characters intersecting. Where you can walk seamless from story to story and from time to time. To get into the “Enter the Story”-project, he began to create his first game “Les Miserables”. He used the Aventure Game Studio to implement the “Les Miserables” book from Victor Hugo. So far so good. And this is where we are now.

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A carefully crafted game is on its way by Derek Yu, Mr. TIGSource himself. Even the name is kind of friendly: Spelunky!. It is the first game Derek made with the Game Maker tool. He writes on the forum: “Probably the easiest way to describe Spelunky is that its (kind of) like La Mulana meets Nethack – every time you play the levels, items, monsters, and so forth, are all procedurally-generated. And the terrain is destructible and there are quite a few ways in which the various game elements can interact with one another.”

What I read so far about the game was quite enthusiastic. The procedural design of the levels also will result an interesting play, re-play value. You also do not need to be an expert to detect the first class quality of the graphics. But you will need to have a play, to be convinced also of the playable qualities of Spelunky! Unfortunatelly I have problems in downloading the game. The download stops after downloadings some megabytes of the 11MB package for unknown reason. Someone maybe upload the game to a mirrorserver? That would be great!!

Tibori is an japan-based design group, that do pixelart in 3-dimensional form. They build imaginative landscapes with blocks and also use popular sprite characters like Super Mario, Megaman, Kirby or Link from Legend of Zelda. The works are expressing the obvious in beautiful shapes with a beautiful sense for colors. You can follow the works / progress at their blog Dotter Dotter

Ratloop figured out an extremely cool way of designing and creating your avatars and textures for the avatar, as well as puzzles and leveldesigns, in a charming, but also likely technically overdriven way at thier game Mightier. In order to get your avatar, you print out a sheet of paper, fill it with the texture, the body, the physiognomy. You do it by drawing face, foods, legs, skin with a bold pen simply on the paper. It is easy as that. After feeding your creation into a special scanning system (you can use a webcam), it magically turns into a virtual avatar. The same princible applies for creating platforms, levels and landscapes, simply by drawing lines on paper.

The game was submitted for the Independent Games Festival Award 2009 and can be downloaded on their website. Someone just handout the award for them.

A nice mixture of music and puzzlegame is Auditorium. Your goal is to “put on” audio-engines by throwing particles on it. The more particles it receives, the louder the sound will get. If all audio-engines are on, the level is won. On later levels more engines will appear and also more “particle modifiers” and the particle steam will have a more complex route to pass. Unfortunately, at least on my computer, the CPU usage really got high at higher levels. A non glossy cpu-friendly version of this game, a lot more trickier, with better puzzles and a more fun gameplay, could make this a much much better game. You can set the flash-player into the “low-quality” the optimize to performance a little bit. I also think that the the particle-stream without the glow-effect is pure and intense, beginning to melt the sensitive motion and the music into a good flow.

Thanks Frank for the tip!