Jamin makes some interesting predictions about the future of gaming I wanted to share. He seems to think that at some point the idea of watching and playing video games will cross together more to create a kind of game/spectator hybrid experience. He cites Twitch Plays Pokemon as a recent example.

He makes a few other interesting predictions too. What do you think, where will gaming be in five to ten years?

I have a sneaking suspicion we might see Lilith in a future Diablo game. That or Diablo, I bet we will always be killing that guy.

Hyper Light Drifter is an upcoming 2D action RPG. Like many of you I was dazzled with the Kickstarter and am on the edge of my seat awaiting more information on it's development. After the last trailer dropped at PAX East I wanted more information on how things were progressing with the game and contacted Heart Machine Games.

I decided to take a different approach to this interview and reached out to one of my friends Alex Atkins, the lead writer of Monsters Ate my Birthday Cake. We are both excited about the game and he agreed to toss a few questions in the interview to give it a different perspective.

Alex Atkins: Many developers (and artists in general) are influenced by things that don't directly relate to their art, such as the lyrics of a song influencing the story of a video game. Are there any such instance for the Heart Machine team? Are there any specific cases of something outside the arena of video games (such as film, literature, music, or otherwise) that have profoundly affected your creative process?

Alex Preston(Heart Machine Games): Of course. I think we're all deeply affected by great film and music and literature of any kind, with the qualifying factor of "good". A major influence for myself in creating this game has been Miyazaki films, primarily Nausicaa.

jdodson: So far, the story details of Hyper Light Drifter are pretty sparse. I am wondering if you can share a bit about The Drifter?

Alex Preston(Heart Machine Games): Intentionally so! I don't want to spoil anything. I prefer people to experience the story and character progression themselves once they play.

Alex Atkins: After some playtesting at PAX East, the character animations seem a bit 'framey', is this an intentional allusion to a bygone era of games with limited hardware and choppier framerates?

Alex Preston(Heart Machine Games): Hmm, not sure precisely what you may have noticed; our animation is fairly fluid, as each character is loaded with a large amount of hand drawn frames. There are a few milliseconds of hold on the attacks and some other moments to add impact and weight to the gameplay. Could be the build had some frame rate stutter, as it is still pre-alpha.

jdodson: If you could work on any video game property what would it be?

Alex Preston(Heart Machine Games): Maybe F-Zero. I say maybe since the answer would likely be "none" if confronted with that in actuality; I very much enjoy creating my own worlds to experience.

jdodson: How long have you been working on Hyper Light Drifter? How has it evolved from your early concept of what you wanted it to be?

Alex Preston(Heart Machine Games): About 2 years of concepting, experimentation, lore building, and some loose dev work. It's evolved into something much more cohesive and gratifying, due to having a full team now. Everyone at Heart Machine has great input, ideas and abilities, so it's far better than what I could have produced by myself.

Alex Atkins: Why did you choose Game Maker over other engines such as Unity?

Alex Preston(Heart Machine Games): We are most familiar with GM, and it's very fast and cheap to iterate on. Unity is less suited for 2d, and none of us are as comfortable with a 3d toolset in the first place.

jdodson: Imagine yourself in the following scenario. You are in a abandoned 1950’s town and you hear a distant siren. After some searching you realize you are in a nuclear test area and the bomb is close to dropping. You notice a lead lined fridge. What do you do?

Alex Preston(Heart Machine Games): Search the fridge for a (hopefully delicious) final meal.

Alex Atkins: How has it been working with Rich Vreeland (Disasterpeace?)

Alex Preston(Heart Machine Games): Rich is a gentleman, and a super talent. He understands the project and process well and adds such a magical quality. I'm always so damned excited to hear his next track; music is such an integral part of the experience.

Alex Atkins: You received a very generous sum of financial assistance with your kickstarter, but do you care to give any figures or insight on how the inevitable ‘dropped’ payments have affected Hyper Light Drifter’s development? Especially if the total amount paid after drops brought you below a stretch goal that to an outside observer appears paid for?

Alex Preston(Heart Machine Games): Sure. It was a decent chunk, a percentage point or two, on top of the fees for KS and Amazon, so it absolutely takes away from the final budget. It's inevitable with mass payment systems. However, I think it has balanced out; our humble bundles have helped to offset losses like that for the most part.

Alex Atkins: Any regrets on the offerings of the kickstarter reward tiers (i.e. you wish you hadn’t told people you’d give them that)

Alex Preston(Heart Machine Games): The t-shirts were stuck in the middle of the tiers and did not "travel" up through the other tiers by default, so things got a bit messy because of it. It's been a pain to deal with that, but I don't regret offering them. Otherwise, I'm sure we will continue to find some level of difficulty or quirks when producing and distributing the remaining goods, as always happens with physical product. The KS tier/survey system could use some fine-tuning to help ease those pains.

jdodson: In an age of triple A games pushing 3D further to melt video cards many, Indie titles are made with pixel art. As someone making a modern pixel art game I am curious what you think about pixel art in the modern age of gaming? Do you think it will always have a place in modern gaming?

Alex Preston(Heart Machine Games): I think it will always have a place, just as hand drawn animation in film and television still does after 3d took the lead. It's an incredibly unique aesthetic with a massive dose of nostalgia attached, and there's plenty more to be done within it's limitations.

jdodson: Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions. Anything last thing you want to say before we wrap things up?

Alex Preston(Heart Machine Games): Thanks for the questions! Final comment: thanks to everyone that came and played the game and took the time to speak with us at PAX.

I want to thank Heart Machine Games for the interview and wish them to a speedy launch of Hyper Light Drifter!

http://www.heart-machine.com/

Some really interesting information about everyone favoriate producer of the Elder Scrolls games. I had no idea they started out making Gridiron for the Atari 2600.

"Test your skills in confined areas while fighting gravity (and walls) or brave the asteroid fields in zero gravity and experience firsthand the weirdness of the friction-less void."

Hard Lander is a really cool new co-op game by one of my Portland developer friends, Nic Blondi. I have played a few versions of Hard Lander as it has made its way through development and I am pretty excited to see it launch on Ouya. Hard Lander is a blast to play with other people and one time while playing it with Justin Baldwin(Monsters Ate My Birthday Cake) I got pretty good at ramming into him such that he would lose the match. And really, that's a ton of the appeal of Hard Lander, it's a really cool game to try anything with and watch your ship fly apart.

Because, really, blowing up a rocket ship should be fun.

After I heard about Hard Lander's Ouya debut I sent some questions over to Nic and he got back to me. I wish him well with the Ouya launch and hope people find it as fun as I have.

jdodson: Hey Nic, I am curious what the tech you used to build Hard Lander is?

Nic Blondi: I used the Unity engine in the development of Hard lander. I used the "2d toolkit" plugin to help with Sprites and the Ouya ODK plugin which allows Unity to build for the OUYA. Getting the controllers took quite a lot of time. The guy that made the game Clark (http://goldentricycle.com/) released some code that helped with this quite a bit by releasing some code to help the rest of the community out.

jdodson: Will Hard Lander be coming out on any other platforms other than the Ouya? This looks perfect for couch co-op on a Steam Machine.

Nic Blondi: My plan is to keep updating the game on OUYA to get feedback and add more content for a month or so. I think my next port will be for Fire TV since I hear it's a fairly simple port for an OUYA game. After that I want to build for steam. I really love the idea of the Steam machine. When I have friends over I often find myself awkwardly hooking my laptop up to my TV. I want to port to Steam if for the only reason that it would give me a good excuse to get myself a steam machine. Do you have any suggestions for a good, cheap option?

jdodson: Right now my suggestion is to hold out for the Alienware Steam Machine but it seems to be coming out later this year and will most likely ship for $500. That's not cheap but there will be others that might go lower in price, I am not entirely certain though. That said, I am 99% sure I will get the Alienware box when it ships.

jdodson: I've played Hard Lander and it lives up to it's name well. Curious though, if you were going to design "Easy Lander" how would it be different?

Nic Blondi: The difficulty if flying the landers is, for me, what makes the game fun to play even after hundreds of hours spent "testing" it. If I was going to make flying easier I think I would have to add other elements to the game to compensate for the joy of mastery with something like weapons, items, alternate goals etc. Maybe giving ships custom load-outs would be fun. Allowing players to amass money which they could spend on shields, weapons, devensive drones, and autoturrets would be fun to try.

jdodson: Which Star Wars prequel episode do you consider the best film?

Nic Blondi: I've never been a star wars buff. The old ones make me feel like I'm watching the cosby show in space.. too dated to draw me in. And the prequels were all pretty confusing. But If pressed I will say Episode 1 was the best because the amount of feathers ruffled by Jar Jar Binks continues to this day. I expect it to be the most enduring as a result.

jdodson: After Hard Lander is ported everywhere you care to and updated what are your plans for next?

Nic Blondi: I don't know what I will be doing when Hard lander is put to bed. I am perpetually working on prototypes so I think once I find one I can't put down, I think that will be my next game. Here is a small sample of prototypes I have worked on in the last year:

• A tactical arcade shooter featuring robocop and his domestic problems.


• A 3rd person 3d roguelike where the maincharacter is a golum who pulls pieces of his body of to spawn new tools and upgrades.


• an isometric action puzzle game where you control an ice-cube lost from his iceburg.


• An earth defense game where you manually pilot a space ship into orbit to release satellites which interface with special towers that you build to gain money, fire rockets, and otherwise defend the planet from asteroids and invading aliens.


• A submarine multiplayer game where you control the force and direction of two propellers on either side of your ship which allow you to move in very controlled manner and shoot your opponents. Kind of like the spiritual successor to hard lander.


• Another one I want to prototype but I haven't is a unicycle game where you control the speed and direction of your pedals and the weight of your rider. Basically a unicycle sym :D.

You can play Hard Lander right now on the Ouya.

Add this one to the seriously awesome rumor mill dept. It seems Silconera has found some interesting information about a possible re-launch of the classic game, "No One Lives Forever."

"Siliconera has discovered that Night Dive Studios, a company that republishes PC classics like System Shock 2, has filed trademarks for No One Lives Forever, The Operative, Contract J.A.C.K. and A Spy in H.A.R.M.’s Way, all of which are game titles connected to the franchise.

Night Dive Studios CEO Stephen Kick got back to us with the following statement: “At this time we are unable to comment on future plans. I would like to add that our team has a great fondness for these games and our hope is that they will one day be re-released."

Interesting.

http://www.siliconera.com/2014/05/01/one-lives-forever-trademark-filed-night-dive-studios/

Minecraft fans are amazing. When the game first dropped and got popular people spent lots of time building cool stuff in the game. One such thing I will never forget was The Enterprise that was featured in the Minecraft movie. Seems someone decided that the floating city of Columbia, as seen in BioShock infinite needed to be built.

Minecraft really is beautiful.

If you want to see the whole album on imgur:

http://imgur.com/a/H38m9

"You've all had it too easy for too long. Sitting there, building your prisons, not caring about deaths or insolvency. Well NO MORE! We've introduced failure conditions and now, if you f**K up it's game over.

We've also graded all prisoners on four scales: Punishment, Reform, Security and Health. You can check these out in the rap sheet and when summed over the whole prison you end up with a score. Lefty-liberal reformist paradise or super-right super-max super bad ass punishment amplifier - you go ahead and max those stats. The Punishment Inspector shall be pleased."

Really enjoy seeing this latest batch of Prison Architect updates. Introversion has added endgame failure states which are pretty interesting. Too many people die in your prison? You get in trouble for criminal negligence and become a prisoner in your own prison. Have a riot that goes on too long? The national guard will come in and take over your prison.

Introversion also added a scoring system for the chance your prisoners will reoffend. With all these new changes, it seems they are getting closer to the final game. Unsure what else they plan to add to the game but it is pretty awesome to see all they have added to it till now. I started with a pretty early alpha build but it was already loads of fun and it just keeps getting better.

You can nab Prison Architect on Steam for Linux, Mac and Windows right now for 66% off so get it now if you are interested.

In this episode of the Cheerful Ghost Roundtable we talk about what we are playing, drinking and dive right into talking about Star Wars Episode VII and the recent E.T. dig. What horrible games would you bury 50 feet under the ground to never be played again?

We talk about all of that. So yay for you.

What We are Playing & Drinking

• 0.52m Travis: Diablo III: Reaper of Souls


• 2.45m WhiteboySlim: Diablo III, Knights of Pen and Paper +1


• 5.30m Scrypt: Risk of Rain & Road Trip


• 7.19m jdodson: Wayward Souls & Age of Mythology Extended Edition

Star Wars Episode VII

• 12.45m Star Wars VII Intro.


• 14.11m What are our thoughts on the Star Wars Extended Universe? http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/2005


• 26.10m Episode VII Cast Announced: http://starwars.com/news/star-wars-episode-7-cast-announced.html

E.T. Landfill

• 36.15m Recently a dig has unearthed E.T. and other Atari games. What horrible games would we bury for all time if we could? http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/28/atari-et-video-game

You may have noticed that most shooters only enable you to play them in one way. Run and gun. Looks like the new Wolfenstein game has considered this and is designed to allow you choice in how you approach it. Not only can you run and gun, causing mad amounts of carnage and also paint the world with the blood of your Nazi foes. It seems Machine Games is also enabling people to play with a stealth mode style.

If you are the more "hang back and slit throats while taking some sniper shots at the Nazis" type of person, they seem to have you covered. All told I enjoy the "run and gun carnage" but I also really loved the stealth aspect of the recent BioShock Infinite DLC Burial At Sea Part 2.

Excited to try my hand at both styles when the game drops.