Click for the new SuperGlad comic!

Hey guys. Hope you had a great holiday! Our first blog post of 2012 is up on the SuperGlad site, and features some lovely artwork and screenshots. Take a look, won’t you?

Oh, and check back here soon. We’re going to post our top 10 games of 2011!

Hey, you may have noticed that the original Pinch has disappeared from Apple’s App Store/iTunes. But don’t fret, it’ll be back. And it’ll be better than ever.

In the meantime, you could always check out Pinch 2 if you have an iPad. Yeah, you know you want to.

Yes, the Skyrim Edition. That means I’m going to disregard work-related commentary, and spend this entire blogpost talking about an amazing goddamn game.

We have (of course) been doing plenty of work since the last post, and things are progressing nicely. But, as is common in videogame development, grinding through code and systems development doesn’t amount to much noticeable change – at least nothing worth spending a blog post on. So, I’m going to take the opportunity and share my experiences (thus far) of 2011′s Game of the Year (yes, I know I said something similar about Arkham City – but this time I’m sure!).

Play

It’s a special moment in a nerd’s calendar: that magical time of the year when a new fantasy role-playing game is released. And this year it’s extra special, as Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series returns with Skyrim.

For Paul (Coatsink co-founder) and I, this series represents one of the major reasons we love games. As kids we spent many-an-hour in the land of Morrowind, often playing all night as we eagerly explored the vast environments. These are happy memories, and memories which have instilled a great deal of defining fanaticism (for epic videogame experiences) in us both.

As such, we spent the entire weekend on this latest masterpiece, and took a few screenshots along the way!

I think Bethesda’s greatest achievement in Skyrim (and there are many), is the delivery of a world that feels truly alive. From the salmon jumping through river rapids, to the extensive conversations you overhear NPCs having, to the majestic dragons and the way they stalk you from the skies before assaulting, these Nordic lands resonate with life; and that effect, as a whole, draws the player in.

Previous games in the series have, at times, felt a little too sandboxy. By that I mean that they presented the player with a world in which he/she could do almost anything, without much reason or consequence. This often left players asking “why am I doing this?”.

But the quests and unfolding stories of Skyrim drive you from destination to destination, pulling you through nightmarish tombs and pushing you onto blizzard-swept peaks. And every moment you feel engaged, not just in the gameplay, but in the narrative too. As a result, I feel fully invested in the world. I feel driven to explore, experience and conquer.

It might seem odd that a games developer would blog entirely about another developer’s product (though obviously we’re nowhere near the same league as Bethesda), but masterpieces like Skyrim can teach even we a few tricks that could be applied to our own meagre projects.

Bringing a world to life, whatever the scale of that world might be, is crucial. You want a player to feel as immersed in your game as possible, after all. And Skyrim teaches us that it’s not just the big things, like epic battles and fantastic A.I, which help create that feeling; it’s the salmon in the river that you walk by, hardly noticing.

Inspired by this great game (as we often are by the work of our gods and peers), we have some great ideas for our own projects. I hope you’ll stick around and check them out – if you can pry yourself away from Tamriel, that is!

Fran is currently working on the latest iterations of Ruby and Lloyd. Click here to check out her progress!

Fran has reworked the art of SuperGlad, and it looks better and ever. Click here to read all about it!

Just how important is innovation in videogames? Some people will tell you there’s nothing more essential, whereas others will tell you there’s no such thing as new ideas, and you might as well just build on existing ones.

Neither opinion is without merit (though the latter could be deemed a little cheap in some ways), and as a developer, it’s my view that you have to do something new in every game you make. What do I mean by that?

Work

Every hit game series starts out as a unique idea. Now, you might argue that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was no such thing, and was merely a rehash of decades of FPS war simulators. But let’s not forget that MW brought a unique set of systems and mechanics, as well as a compelling narrative, to what was a fairly dry and story-less genre; and what resulted is a hit game series, both critically and financially.

Likewise with Gears of War, Epic Games took some innovative, intuitive and complimentary gameplay mechanics and inserted them into a tried-and-tested genre framework, and made themselves a blockbuster. Batman: Arkham City is a blend of Splinter Cell and Assassin’s Creed with a glorious comic book paint-job on top, and it’s probably going to be Game of the Year 2011.

The reason I’m talking about this is that, as we’ve been working on SuperGlad and designing a couple of other (as yet unnamed) projects, we’ve been thinking a lot about new ideas in games. Innovation has always been one of our key principles as a company, though design for design’s sake is something we want to avoid. We don’t want to make something that’s different without reason; that has functionality without fun.

In SuperGlad for instance, we’ve come up with gameplay mechanics and systems that reflect the context of the game. The Lucidity system (which I spoke about in a blogpost last week) is an example of this, and one that I think will work well in the final product. We really want to encapsulate the experience of being in a dream in the gameplay, and leave users feeling like they’ve experienced something both new and yet oddly familiar.

So while you’ll get a uniquely dreamy feel from the game, you can also expect some familiar fun in the mini-games. On top of that, we have an intriguing and really quite unconventional narrative in the works, which is only revealed if and when you look for it, and only if you use the lucidity system (dreams often reflect reality, remember!). Anyway, enough waffle, onto the good stuff!

Play

I mentioned Batman: Arkham City in the same breath as Game of the Year, and I really mean that. I was so excited about this game that I broke my usual rule of ‘get it on PC because it’ll be better in every way’ because I just didn’t want to wait that long. Arkham Asylum was such a surprisingly amazing game, and as a big Batman fan (yep, got stacks of old comics and a signed Batman Begins script), I’m absolutely overjoyed to be treated to THE Batman in videogame and movie form in recent years.

And Arkham City is the perfect follow-up to that awesomeness. You take to a portion of Gotham’s streets, which (having been transformed into an open prison as the game’s name implies) are rife with just the kind of scum Bats enjoys beating on. It’s more of the same stuff from Asylum, but that’s exactly what I wanted. The new setting, characters, story and gadgets are going to be enough to give me tens of beautiful hours in-game.

Next week, I’ll tell you why I decided not to buy Battlefield 3 yet (though you totally should if you like multiplayer FPS games), and some more thoughts on story in games.

Our friend and sound effects producer Tapio (at Kaamos Sound) made this lovely Halloween video for you!