Posted in Project Updates

The Black Forest has been a project I wanted to do for a long time. However, the idea of what exactly it should be went through a number of iterations. The very first idea was to have a ghost character in a game world that was slowly destroyed by the great void like in Michael Ende’s Neverending Story. The void would expand and act like a spatial time limit. You could only stay inside the void for a couple of seconds before you die. I developed a simple prototype, but playing it was not very enjoyable since I did not put enough time into the level design.

Instead, I got side-tracked by working on my own 2D game engine called Pelikan. It was supposed to be super-flexible, easy-to-use, have a beautiful clean syntax, help you focussing on actual game design work and make prototyping so much faster. Well – I was wasting my time on building an engine for rapid prototyping, instead of actually prototype. I finally ditched Pelikan when Flixel came out, since it was doing everything I wanted my game engine to do, but in a better way.

If you really want to make your own game engine or any other framework it is worth looking at what actually worked. Adam Saltsman distilled his Flixel library from a variety of Flash games that he had worked on. David Heinemeier Hansson extracted the famous Ruby on Rails web framework out of the Basecamp source code, not the other way around. The good thing about this is that you don’t need to anticipate how you’ll use your code – instead you only implement what you really need right now and take out the useful parts later.

For the second idea I took a 180 degree turn. I would make The Black Forest a series of little game episodes, each one developed and released in a weekly circle. It soon become apparent that I was not able to develop one episode within a week. I simply had too many other obligations. We kept the idea of releasing an episode once a week, but developed them in advance and on the side, so we still had time for other projects.

With the episodic format we tried to combine some of the aspects of prototyping and episodic games. The prototyping allowed us to try out new game ideas in a quick way. The episodic structure should tie everything together into one narration of the hero’s journey – the main character experiencing different adventures in unfamiliar environments. I feel that there is a certain atmosphere in the series that comes out of this connection between the episodes. This was important to me since I wanted The Black Forest to be more personal than the other games we did before. I also wanted to explain as little as possible to the player and break through some established and learned game conventions. Figuring out what to do would be the player’s main challenge and motivation to play the game.

Finding Friends
In the first episode the player needs to figure out that the signal-red colored ghosts are not enemies, but potential friends that help him or her to find the exit. Every ghost the player touches illuminates the dark maze for a certain amount of time. The “latest friend” will follow the player, making it easier to draw the path.

Unlearn
A lot of games reward the progress of the player by constantly giving him or her new power-ups. How would it feel if you actually take something away from the player and question common game design conventions? People seemed to like this episode the most, but it suffered a bit from problems with the collision detection.

Harmony
What I like about this episode the most is that it does not reward any skills you might have attained in other computer games. This one is only about hearing. It’s the most difficult and frustrating of all episodes though and the audio-visual feedback to the player could be improved quite a bit.

Companion
The goal of the last episode is to meet the other ghost. If you touch the other ghost, a different music is triggered and stars begin to appear in the background. If the distance between you and the other ghost becomes bigger, the music slowly fades out and the stars disappear again. The level is generated procedurally, so the path is different every time you play. So are the chances of meeting the other ghost. You can not go backward, as you can’t go backward in time in real life. The idea came from tinkering about the likelihood of meeting your significant other – being at the same place at the same time.

As with previous game projects I worked together with Martin Straka, who made the soundtrack for the game and also came up with a lot of gameplay ideas. The Black Forest is our first game where the audio is probably as important for the player feedback as what you see on screen. Without the music “Finding Friends” and “Companion” would hardly offer any reward, and the puzzles in “Harmony” are completely based on sound. This was also the first time I worked together with Marek Plichta, who did the beautiful graphics and level design for “Unlearn” which added a lot to the atmosphere as well.

The Black Forest got a number of favorable reviews and mentions in blogs like Jay is Games, Game Set Watch, Play This Thing! CreativeApplications.Net and IndieGames.com.

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Oh, and the screenshot above shows the highly recommended newsreader Times from Acrylic together with a desktop wallpaper from Little Big Planet.

December is a busy month for us with lots of things going on. We just released the first two episodes of The Black Forest Finding Friends and Unlearn both here on Pixelate and on Kongregate. Episode 3 (“Harmony”) will be released December 20, followed by the last episode of the first season “Companion” on December 27. The Black Forest is the most personal, experimental and tiniest game we have done yet and so far people really seem to appreciate it.

We also pushed a big update for Mr. Bounce to the AppStore which contains five new levels, new game elements and a new music track by Martin Straka. The new track is also available at our Soundtracks store.

Here’s a gameplay trailer for our upcoming experimental game series The Black Forest. We are going to release one episode every week this December to play for free online.

We released the first small update for Mr. Bounce on the AppStore yesterday. The update includes:

• Play your own music in background: Turn music volume to zero in game options. Close the game, and start your music track in iPod. Then startup Mr. Bounce again. Your music should continue in the background.
• Better performance on iPhone 2G and iPhone 3G
• Your name is highlighted in the Hall of Fame
• Minor bug fixes

Make sure to let us know on our forums if you have a feature request.

We teamed up with the new Berlin-based company Spaces of Play to create an iPhone version of our “breakout meets controlled chaos” game Mr. Bounce. It runs super-smooth, features 5 extra levels (25 in total), has real multi-touch controls and an online hall of fame right from the start. It’s only 0.99 USD or 0.79 EUR and available today on the iTunes App Store. Don’t forget to rate the game in the App Store and give feedback in our new forums.

We launched our new forums today where you can give feedback to our games, submit bug reports and feature requests or just tell us who you are. The forums are also the place where we will give a look behind the scenes once in a while, starting with the very first screenshots of our upcoming series “The Black Forest”.

After releasing the soundtrack for Hypnotic Discotheque Fascination last month we now also offer the music for Understanding Games and Mr. Bounce on our soundtracks page. Again, you can listen to all tracks on the webpage, and name your own price for downloading. Thank you for your support!

We just released the soundtrack of our new game Hypnotic Discotheque Fascination on Bandcamp – if you liked the music and want to give us some support, go download the soundtrack and name your own price for the three tracks. You can also prelisten to all the tracks directly on the site. We are planning to add more game soundtracks in the future.

We also have a lovely new shirt in store which you can get from Spreadshirt. It features Jakob Ingvorsen’s “Black Forest” illustation from our homepage.

We are very happy to present our new game Hypnotic Discotheque Fascination that we designed together with Justin Gagne from Velle. We have been working on this over the atlantic for the last three months, and for us it has been a really cool collaboration. It features the best music score that we have had in any of our games until today, and Martin’s sound design has been the driving force for this project.

You can play the game at velle.us. We hope that you enjoy it!

For more information please read the press release.

Mr. Bounce is nominated for “Best of Casual Gameplay 2008” in the category Action and Arcade browser games by the folks at Jay is Games. If you enjoyed playing our game, we would very be happy if you vote for it here. (You can vote once a day.)

Today we published a redesigned version of our homepage, which features some very nice illustrations from Jakob Ingvorsen of Spoiled Milk. Every pixelate game now got it’s own “comic book” cover and you can also catch a glimpse of our new game “The Black Forest” that is planned to be released in 2009.

Today we released the remastered version of the complete Understanding Games series. Every episode now comes in crisp clean remastered sound. We hope you like it as much as we do.

I am happy to announce that Understanding Games is shown both at the File Festival in São Paulo, Brazil (until tomorrow) and the AveCom Festival in Arnhem, Netherlands (3.—26. October).

Our latest game Mr. Bounce is now also available on Miniclip and Whirled. Your highscore will be saved on both websites. Whirled also awards you with trophies for your achievements in the game – try to beat my personal highscore (160,950) to get the Supremacy trophy.

So, yesterday was my last day in Stockholm. After 15 months of living in Sweden I am back in Germany now. After having some vacation at my parents place I will move to Zürich at the end of August to work for the very nice folks at Spoiled Milk. I will work part-time for them, which allows me to invest more time into my own game projects. This is something I am really looking forward to. Being able to split up my time between game and web development has been a personal goal for a long time, so I’m excited to see how that works out.

Of course, leaving Sweden is a bit sad as well, and I am thankful to have met a lot of friendly and interesting people during my stay. No more long summer days …

Could there be a better day to release a video game than the Swedish National Day? We think not. Finally, after one year of long evenings and weekends, we are very happy to release our new game Mr. Bounce. (The game is also available on the Kongregate gaming site.) We hope you like it as much as we do. Thanks again to everyone who play-tested our beta version and gave us valuable feedback!

We are currently putting together the last bits and pieces of our new game Mr. Bounce – optimizing the code, mastering the music, implementing a highscore list. Expect to see the game released on Kongregate during the next weeks. Until then, have a sneak preview at the trailer!

Episode 1 of Understanding Games has a dutch translation now! The other episodes will follow soon. Wat hebben we vandaag geleerd, Bub?

Great news! Understanding Games won the second price at the Serious Games Award in the category Best realization of a Serious Game (Bestes umgesetztes Serious-Game). The award was organized by the Hessian Department of Trade and Industry to promote computer games that provide an expedient usefulness in addition to sole entertainment.